So, we're at that stage in our SWRPG game that one of our player characters are taking their first step into a larger world and learn a Force Power. (For the record, they are a Force-Sensitive Emergent and we're technically playing AoR , but I intend to use F&D where appropriate; also, I'm the GM).

My questions:
1) Going into it, I just assumed that Force Powers were Universal specializations, but I now think (after reading up a little) that this is incorrect? Does Force Powers cost only 10XP to buy into no mather how many you already possess or how many specializations you might have?

2a) For campaign story reasons, we're going for the Foresee power. This, of course, is the power that Luke & Yoda use in ESB to foresee the dark future for Luke's friends. But, I specifically wanted the power to also encompass seeing into the past, as in: "Through the Force, things you will see. Other places [i.e. Farsight I guess?]. The future [i.e. Foresee ]... the past. Old friends long gone [i.e. what power is this?]." Have I overlooked a Force Power somewhere that deals with exploring the past? I was hoping to use the Foresee power as a vehicle for some exposition/info dump visions regarding past events in my campaign.

2b) If there is no separate past-seeing power, then how would you folks use/tweak Foresee for this purpose? (Note, I need the player to be able to explore decades into the past, and possibly, at a later point, centuries or even millennia).

Thanks in advance for any help 🙂

Powers aren't specializations at all. As you say, they don't interact with the increasing per-spec cost at all.

Small side note, there's at least one power where the base only costs 5 XP, but in general you're right that it's just the cost of the base power to get you started down a power tree.

Thanks for the clarification, @Stan Fresh 🙂 Making assumptions always comes with a cost, heh heh.

As I am just at the same stage you are, I have read the rules recently and with a Mentor or a holocron the GM can reduce the cost of the basic power to 5 xp instead of 10. Just my 5 cents but sometimes 5xp is nice to save 😛

3 hours ago, angelman2 said:

2a) For campaign story reasons, we're going for the Foresee power. This, of course, is the power that Luke & Yoda use in ESB to foresee the dark future for Luke's friends. But, I specifically wanted the power to also encompass seeing into the past, as in: "Through the Force, things you will see. Other places [i.e. Farsight I guess?]. The future [i.e. Foresee ]... the past. Old friends long gone [i.e. what power is this?]." Have I overlooked a Force Power somewhere that deals with exploring the past? I was hoping to use the Foresee power as a vehicle for some exposition/info dump visions regarding past events in my campaign.

There is absolutely no reason why you as the GM couldn't give a PC who doesn't have the Foresee power some Force visions.

Quote

2b) If there is no separate past-seeing power, then how would you folks use/tweak Foresee for this purpose? (Note, I need the player to be able to explore decades into the past, and possibly, at a later point, centuries or even millennia).

Why would you even want this to exist? It's bad enough as it is trying to have anything that has even a little bit of mystery to it, between Force powers and mundane detective skills. They're not going to just use it for this specific plot point, you're relinquishing your ability to ever have the PCs not know something.

They want to do archaeology? Let them do it the hard way, ranks in Research and/or a quest for a Holocron or somesuch with relevant information. Have them look for the tomb of some Sith Lord that lived 2000 years ago, and have them interrogate their spirit.

Take a look at Psychometry - http://myswrpg.com/force-power-psychometry/ and http://jedimorningfire.blogspot.com/2019/11/of-jedi-vidoe-games-and-fallen-orders.html

Nytwyng and Donavan posted this a while back to represent the Echo Location power found in Fallen Order video game. I have one character in my Old Republic game that is an investigator type and has a personal arch of searching for what happened to his parents. We originally talked about using Foresee to allow just looking into the past until we came across this. Admittedly the season ended before we had a chance to fully test it (my gaming group switches games and gms every 6 weeks to keep things different, Star Wars is picking back up Saturday so I'm sure we'll have a chance to try it out over the next few weeks.

6 hours ago, angelman2 said:

So, we're at that stage in our SWRPG game that one of our player characters are taking their first step into a larger world and learn a Force Power. (For the record, they are a Force-Sensitive Emergent and we're technically playing AoR , but I intend to use F&D where appropriate; also, I'm the GM).

My questions:
1) Going into it, I just assumed that Force Powers were Universal specializations, but I now think (after reading up a little) that this is incorrect? Does Force Powers cost only 10XP to buy into no mather how many you already possess or how many specializations you might have?

2a) For campaign story reasons, we're going for the Foresee power. This, of course, is the power that Luke & Yoda use in ESB to foresee the dark future for Luke's friends. But, I specifically wanted the power to also encompass seeing into the past, as in: "Through the Force, things you will see. Other places [i.e. Farsight I guess?]. The future [i.e. Foresee ]... the past. Old friends long gone [i.e. what power is this?]." Have I overlooked a Force Power somewhere that deals with exploring the past? I was hoping to use the Foresee power as a vehicle for some exposition/info dump visions regarding past events in my campaign.

2b) If there is no separate past-seeing power, then how would you folks use/tweak Foresee for this purpose? (Note, I need the player to be able to explore decades into the past, and possibly, at a later point, centuries or even millennia).

Thanks in advance for any help 🙂

As others have said, you just pay the listed XP cost for the base Force power in order to acquire it. The powers may work akin to specializations, but you don't have to pay additional XP costs like you would for purchasing additional specs.

For looking into the past, there's two routes available. One is go the homebrew route such as what Varlie suggested, using the Psychometry power that either Nytwyng or myself posted. Mine's queued a bit more off what we see Cal Kestis do in Jedi: Fallen Order, while I think Nytwyng's is based more on what we see of Quinlan Vos doing in the pre-Disney comic books.

The other is to adapt an existing power, and I'd actually suggest NOT using Foresee to look into the past, as that power is already extremely good as written without adding even more to it. If you're going to stick with tweaking an official power to allow looking into the past, I'd instead suggest using the Seek power. The power doesn't get enough love, and it's thematically appropriate in "finding things."

Thaks guys. Some great suggestions here. I like the Psychometry power; it's not exactly what I'm looking for (i.e. it is more limited and specific), but that might actually be a good thing. And besides, more story-driven visions are better resolved in narative mode rather than leaving it do die rolls

Expanding Seek is also quite interesting; I need to do a think on it, but it is definitelly a cool idea. So yeah, I might just go with the do-info-dump-visions-as-GM-narratives version of either Foress, Seek, or Psychometry, or possibly as a separate thing entirely.

Shoutout to @Rosco74 for clarifying the points cost. I will probably not be having a holocron in my game ('cause I honestly think they are a bit easy and WAY to common in SW lore at the moment) and neither will there be a mentor available, at least for a good while (although I do have some interesting plans for that... possibly, our Force-Sensitive Emergent will end up learning some trick from an exiled Nightwitch-mother-figure down the line, or possibly from some other non-Jedi source). What we do have, however, is an old Jedi training manual dead-wood book, which is how the character will be able to piece together their first Force Power (i.e. Faresee or Psychometry or Seek or whatever), so perhaps the XP discount should come in there too. We'll see 🙂

Great stuff, folks!

A thing to bear in mind with any sort of Psychometry type of effect is what micheldebruyn cautioned about, and that is letting a "view the past" type of effect completely undercut any sort of mystery plot that you might want to run. Being able to do a blanket reveal of past events pretty much at will is ensured to ruin any measure of suspense or interest; for a classic example see the Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Data and Geordi take on the roles of Holmes and Watson on the holodeck, and Data (not getting the point) "solves" the mystery presented by the simulation in under a minute, simply because the program was based off an existing Sherlock Holmes story (which Data had ready access to courtesy of his android nature).

I specifically wrote my take on Psychometry so that the GM had some degree of control over what was revealed, thus preventing the "I solve the mystery with a single roll!" scenario that so frequently ruins mystery plots. The plots that handle such an ability (to view the past around a place, person, or object) well are those that keep what information the psychic receives fairly limited, be it terms of only getting snippets of information, or getting a jumble of information with little (if any) context, and thus requiring the psychic to work in putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

To quote Harry himself from the Dresden Files series of novels in regards to his day job of being a private investigator, "having magic doesn't instantly solve the problem for you, it just gives you an extra set of tools to work with."

18 hours ago, angelman2 said:

Have I overlooked a Force Power somewhere that deals with exploring the past?

I've allowed Strength upgrade pips to be spent on seeing a detail from the objects past. It's worked well.