Hello there,

I'm currently running an Edge of the Empire Campaign and one of my player-characters ist force-sensitive.

Since we recently did a Master-Level Oneshot to get a feel for highlevel characters, we noticed that the Damage Curve of the Move Power kinda goes through the roof really quickly.

I mean silhouette < 1 deals 5 damage, silhouette 1 deals 10; that seems fine.

But when characters start throwing around speeders (silhouette 2) or even small ships (silhouette 3) which deal 20 and 30 damage respectively (only needing a bit of luck and force rating 2+)

I find that kind of a damage curve problematic when I look at my non-force-sensitive characters; the thing is, apart from gunnery weapons the damage is capped somewhere at 10-12 with the average being far lower.

Has anyone experience dealing with this in an Edge of the Empire group?

well I been in a game that has been going for some time and the move power dose good dam most of the time ie crash guy 1 into guy 2 (GM makes him to a range light to hit 2ed guy)

remember that most of the time you don't have large things to toss about and tossing about speeders is a good way to get Vader on you as he loves killing jedi

even with lightsabers the one killing everyone is the bounty hunter autofire for 11+ dam 2 or more times and dropped a rankor in one turn using the I fire every weapon thing they get

hm fair point.

To be clear, this has not come up to be a problem in our campaign, the player has been fairly cautious with his force usage.

The point about vader / inquisitorius etc. is good, yes although the damage 30 is still ALOT and atleast on city planets there are a fair amount of speeders and vehicles around.

One thing that confuses me: You GM makes him do a Ranged Light check? Isn't it supposed to be Willpower with Difficulty like a Combat check?

35 minutes ago, Oldmike1 said:

GM makes him to a range light to hit 2ed guy)

17 minutes ago, Fl1nt said:

You GM makes him do a Ranged Light check? Isn't it supposed to be Willpower with Difficulty like a Combat check?

Yeah this is wrong. Supposed to be Discipline, Willpower.

Not sure how proficiency with Light Blasters will help tossing around objects with the force, lol.

6 hours ago, Fl1nt said:

Has anyone experience dealing with this in an Edge of the Empire group?

Of all the Force powers, this question comes up the most it seems. I despised Move from the get-go, and made my own, because I wanted a flatter power curve (but I still wanted the Mace Windus of the world to blow away entire battle squadrons if they had the pips).

If you don't want to invent your own, but don't like the power curve, you just have to self-regulate. Don't allow more than one or two Strength upgrades until much later in the game, and try to role-play learning the Force a bit more holistically rather than diving to the bottom of the first tree you get. If you do that it should remain reasonably balanced (plus the subtle utility of things like Enhance and Sense are often overlooked).

Thanks for the input.
That sounds like a reasonable approach, I might tie the progression of Force Move (and if needed other Force Powers) to the Character Arc progression of the character in question and the Experience earned by the group in general.

Many says the problem in the design lies in the Game itself. When Move was released, you had the maximum of 2 Force rating (1 from force sensitive exile and 1 FR on the talent) The problems start when you go beyond that.

26 minutes ago, Rimsen said:

Many says the problem in the design lies in the Game itself. When Move was released, you had the maximum of 2 Force rating (1 from force sensitive exile and 1 FR on the talent) The problems start when you go beyond that.

Yes and no.

Given that it's entirely possible to purchase all four Strength upgrades and activate them with a single pip, it's still very possible for a PC to toss about Silhouette 4 objects with some regularity once they hit Force Rating 2. But even back when it was just EotE, Move could still be abused without that much effort (and was even worse in the EotE Beta with the original method of how Force powers worked).

Then again, telekinesis as an attack as always been a problem in Star Wars RPGs, starting with WEG and carrying through to this system, and will likely continue to be a problem with whatever rules system the next SWRPG uses. At least with FFG, it's not an abuse that's readily available right out the gate.

18 hours ago, Fl1nt said:

Hello there,

I'm currently running an Edge of the Empire Campaign and one of my player-characters ist force-sensitive.

Since we recently did a Master-Level Oneshot to get a feel for highlevel characters, we noticed that the Damage Curve of the Move Power kinda goes through the roof really quickly.

I mean silhouette < 1 deals 5 damage, silhouette 1 deals 10; that seems fine.

But when characters start throwing around speeders (silhouette 2) or even small ships (silhouette 3) which deal 20 and 30 damage respectively (only needing a bit of luck and force rating 2+)

I find that kind of a damage curve problematic when I look at my non-force-sensitive characters; the thing is, apart from gunnery weapons the damage is capped somewhere at 10-12 with the average being far lower.

Has anyone experience dealing with this in an Edge of the Empire group?

I have, and the easiest method of 'controlling' the damage output is for the GM to limit the availability of objects that quality as Silhouette 2 or bigger in a combat encounter.

As a player, you can very easily self-control the damage output of Move by simply not purchasing more than a single Strength upgrade, or restraining yourself from hurling the really big objects unless there's a really desperate need to do so.

One house rule that I've seen in various places is to change the damage increase past silhouette 1 to be +5 instead of +10, in effect making the math be (1+Silhouette)x5, so that silhouette 0 and 1 objects still deal appreciable damage, but tossing around anything bigger is a quickly diminishing return, as you're not getting quite as much damage for astoundingly harder difficulties. Which combined with modifying the difficulty as per the rules on ranged combat checks means that the BBEG that you'd really like to pancake with a Silhouette 3 object is probably going to have ranks of Adversary and range defense, making your Discipline check even more difficult.

Another house rule (one that I've played around with) is to just simply increase the base difficulty by 1. So hurling a silhouette 0 object is Easy instead of Simple, hurling a silhouette 1 object is Average instead of Easy, and so on. This has the perk of capping object hurling to Silhouette 4 at most, since trying to go above a Formidable difficulty becomes an impossible task, which can only be allowed if the GM approves it. Also cuts into the cheese factor of using Silhouette 0 objects with the Magnitude upgrade to autofire (which is by far a worst offender in terms of broken rules than Move given it's far easier for PCs to acquire autofire weapons) a bunch of small objects at once.

51 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Another house rule (one that I've played around with) is to just simply increase the base difficulty by 1. So hurling a silhouette 0 object is Easy instead of Simple, hurling a silhouette 1 object is Average instead of Easy, and so on. This has the perk of capping object hurling to Silhouette 4 at most, since trying to go above a Formidable difficulty becomes an impossible task, which can only be allowed if the GM approves it. Also cuts into the cheese factor of using Silhouette 0 objects with the Magnitude upgrade to autofire (which is by far a worst offender in terms of broken rules than Move given it's far easier for PCs to acquire autofire weapons) a bunch of small objects at once.

Isn't the attack difficulty only determined by range?

17 minutes ago, Rimsen said:

Isn't the attack difficulty only determined by range?

I was also under the impression that Force Move requires you to make a Discipline check base on Ranged Attack Difficulty.

@Donovan Morningfire I really like the idea of chaning the damage to 1+Silhouette x 5, I had a similar idea but wasn't sure if that was feasible.

What I house-ruled so far, is that Force Moving an Object that is able to resist being thrown (i.e. a Airspeeder in flight etc.) the Difficulty gets upgrade by an applicable modifier (like current speed of the vehicle) which works relatively well.

(I also use this house-rule for when the Force Move Power is not used to attack, to make just moving around or even holding ships or somesuch in place more difficult).

46 minutes ago, Fl1nt said:

I was also under the impression that Force Move requires you to make a Discipline check base on Ranged Attack Difficulty.

@Donovan Morningfire I really like the idea of chaning the damage to 1+Silhouette x 5, I had a similar idea but wasn't sure if that was feasible.

What I house-ruled so far, is that Force Moving an Object that is able to resist being thrown (i.e. a Airspeeder in flight etc.) the Difficulty gets upgrade by an applicable modifier (like current speed of the vehicle) which works relatively well.

(I also use this house-rule for when the Force Move Power is not used to attack, to make just moving around or even holding ships or somesuch in place more difficult).

You could extrapolate the Tractor Beam rules for this.

1 hour ago, Rimsen said:

Isn't the attack difficulty only determined by range?

For Move, not at all.

Base difficulty is determined by the silhouette of the object on a one-to-one basis, and then further modified based on defensive abilities (Adversary, Dodge, Side Step, Sense Control upgrade) and any ranged defense values the target has.

I've ranted about Move a few times. Rather than fill this page with more, here's my Reddit rant. One of them, anyway.

Hope this works right

EDIT: Okay, there's one paragraph i need to post in here regarding the "inbuilt balance" of consequences that people love to point out.

A lot of people jump through a lot of hoops to "balance" the power, but they're really not solutions. "It will cause Conflict!" These guys should be taking Conflict every session. "It will attract the attention of Inquisitors!" People get hit by landspeeders all the time. Sometimes by buses and dump trucks. People standing around saying, "How did that car suddenly slide like that?" is going to attract a lot less attention than some dude shooting lightning out of his hands, or shooting a missile tube around. "The same trick can be used against the PCs," "There isn't always a car around," so on and so forth, but none of these address the actual problem. The answer to unbalanced baloney is NOT more baloney! If my players ask, "Is there a dump truck around?" I want to say "Heck yeah there is!" because I want to see where this is going. I don't want to roll my eyes and say, "No, because I know you're just going to try and smash the Inquisitor for 30 damage."

I just had an Idea regarding using Force Move Hurl against other Forceusers like Inquisitors, I will definetily counter using Force Move against such an individual with Upgrade adding Athletics (Dodge) or their own Discipline / Forcepower which is way more fun.
So no just hurling a Silhouette X Object at an Inquisitor and hitting him no matter what if you roll well, but the inquisitor trying to stop the object mid-flight and either throw it back on their turn of drop it. (If the Inquisitor succeeds to thwart the Move Power that is).

On 2/21/2020 at 7:18 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

Also cuts into the cheese factor of using Silhouette 0 objects with the Magnitude upgrade to autofire (which is by far a worst offender in terms of broken rules than Move given it's far easier for PCs to acquire autofire weapons) a bunch of small objects at once.

As this is exactly (IMHO) what Vader does to Luke in TESB it seems perfectly fine to me to, at some point, be able to do so. Random Padawan, no. Random Knight, probably not. Random Master, sure. I've never played or GMd a Force user, so I'm unclear how that logic would be translated to the game, but just saying "No" seems, to me, wrong.

On 2/21/2020 at 4:18 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

Also cuts into the cheese factor of using Silhouette 0 objects with the Magnitude upgrade to autofire (which is by far a worst offender in terms of broken rules than Move given it's far easier for PCs to acquire autofire weapons) a bunch of small objects at once.

I'm much more okay with a bunch of Sil 0 Autofired objects. If you're triggering all those Advantages, you're probably not getting a ton of successes. So you're looking at 6-7 damage per hit, each of which is reduced by Soak. Any kind of tough enemy should have at least Soak 4, so even 4 hits of 7 damage comes out to only 12 damage. Compared to a single hit with a Sil 3 object. 31 damage, right out the gate.

I really think some of the biggest goofs in this game are anywhere you have a "x 10 damage."

What about limiting these upgrades? For example the magnitude doesn not say it's +1 silhouette/magnitude, but you can spend force pips for +1 for each strength upgrade. So you would need 1 pip for a sil 0 (to activate), 2 pips and 1 strength upgrade for sil 1, 3 pips and 2 upgrades for sil 3 etc. This way the high force rating capable jedis still can do much, but the curve is not so steep. Same with the range upgrades. The game already uses this logic for certain talents, like dodge, congenial, parry.

Strength: You may spend O to increase the size of the object a character can move by 1. The number of O spent cannot exceed the character's nubmer of Strength upgrade.

Throwing a Silhouette 3 starfighter to the opponent in medium range would require 5 pips. 1 for activation, 3 for silhouette upgrade and 1 for medium range. That's at least Force Rating 3, FR 4 if you want to reach the expected value of 5 (from any pips) and FR 8 if you want to have it only from light pips (again, expected value).