What force powers do you guys think the system needs? I am working on house rules and I am trying to decide what powers are really needed. So far I have a baseline document for creating ships on the fly and I have created a lot more Force Talents.

Here's some thoughts I'm working on:

Absorb

Conceal

Wound

I'm trying to stay within the feel set by the current Force powers: very broad-based powers, better defined by the upgrades you choose.

Before adding more Force Powers, I'd first ask "Why do I want these powers to exist in a game that's intentionally set in an era where Force-users were not at the fore-front?"

A lot of "powers," especially some of the more esoteric or advanced ones, could probably be best represented by individual talents in a Force-based specialization tree.

The only new Force Power tree I've written up is a dark side power intended to deal direct damage to the target. I could very easly have just stuck with the Move power as a means to deal damage via the Force, but I did want to mimic the rather iconic effect of Vader using a Force Grip effect such as he did throughout the Original Trilogy, particularly in ESB. Why? To provide a means of "temptation" for Force-using PCs to let them use the Force in a malicious way if they so wanted, but they'd still suffer a consequence (namely, having to spend Strain and Destiny Points).

Sure, I could homebrew a lot of other stuff, but when it comes to the question of "why?" the answer had little to do with something that I'd expect players to be able to access, and for an NPC it's something that quite frankly could be hand-waved as a special ability, since NPCs pretty clearly aren't bound by the talent trees the way the PCs are. Remember, Force-using PCs in EotE are more akin to Luke in ANH and ESB, particularly as a character can't go beyond a Force Rating of 2 at this point in time, and even that takes up a signifcant amount of XP, so you may very well wind up creating a lot of excess powers that will never see the light of day as the players focus more on the already existing powers, most of which are fairly broad in their application.

I agree with you and think the book is just right for this era and I love what they have so far but I am trying to expand it to cover more eras. I also like a less is more approach so I dont think they are lacking much.

To better fit with the houserules I am going to try I have modified the way the powers work. In some way they are stronger and in other ways they are weaker. I changed it to where experience is only used to buy the core power, additional effects or upgrades cost additional force points. Additionally to increase Force Rating you must spend 25 experience points per rank. All of my ideas will need a lot of testing I am just playing around right now.

I create 7 powers total each with a couple different uses. I have extended the base range of powers to Short. To upgrade such as extending the range you must spend an additional point per band. Any power targeting a creature other than Sense requires an opposed Discipline check.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Because there are plenty of force users in hiding in that era. At least according to the various Expanded Universe materials. Which, in no small irony, mostly seem to be based upon the expanded view created by WEG for their SW-RPG.

Sure, they're mostly not Vader/Palpatine/Yoda/Obi-wan level… but, in one of the video games alone, there are 3 Jedi, a Rogue Sith, and a couple dozen other force users. (The Force Unleased.) Sure, it's set about 5-10 years prior to the EOTE game… and that Rogue Sith is th main character… but it's as canon as any game ever gets.

Looking through casually, I find the following for the period 2-5 ABY - the primary period implied in the "crawl text" of the adventure in the beta.

Mara Jade and Joruus C'Baoth are both active in this time frame.

None, because outside of the movies the only powers we see like conceal are in video games that need player balance and such. the powers here alow you to throw a saber choke out a person and yeah its up to your imagination to use the powers as they are not the fact you need to be a god with the force.

JinFaram said:

Well, it sounds like you're more intending to completely toss out FFG's material on Force Powers and creating your own system, so any feedback or suggestions from that aspect are a moot point.

If you're trying to cover everything Force-related as aramis suggested, I'd counter with "if you want to have broad Force usage with Force-users front and center, then why are you playing EotE?" Rather than totally re-inventing the wheel, it might just be simply to pick up the D6 version or even Saga Edition, with a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of coming up with various Force powers already done for you.

As was posited elsewhere, there comes a point where you have to seriously ask yourself "am I trying to turn EotE into a d20 game?" I ran across that point with a couple of proposed expansions of what Force-sensitives could do.

That said, I do like the idea of being able to raise Force Rating without needing the Force Rating talent, but I'd probably limit it to a one-time deal and thus keeping Force-users on the lower-end of the spectrum.

ill add not many people are trying to make bonty hunters more powerfull so i can see people wanting more force powers as being a bit misguided.

Tassedar said:

That's a good point.

I think a large part of why some folks either want Force-users in EotE to be more powerful in general (namely, making it easier to raise your Force Rating beyond a 2) or to have more powers available at the outset is because of all the attention that Force-users get in the EU; the Clone Wars TV series is largely about the Jedi protagonists, and even a relative rookie like Ahsoka was pretty **** capable in the first season compared to most EotE PCs or even most starting-level Saga Edition Jedi PCs.

A part of it also has to do with WotC's approach in trying to have their corebook be the only book you "need" and thus cover as much general material across as many eras as possible, something they did in the various d20 versions (though focus was largely split between Prequels and Rebellion Era). WEG's D6 system due to it's timeframe really only had the Rebellion era and eventually the early New Republic era to work with, and the corebook for that system didn't cover everything that a Force-user was capable of doing, partly because such material hadn't been created yet, but also because the setting didn't really cater to having parties full of Force-wielding badasses like a campaign set during the eras when Jedi were plentiful (such as the Prequels/Clone Wars era, New Jedi Order era, pre-comics Legacy Era, KOTOR era, and SW:TOR era, to name a few).

And more than a few of the alternate Force Traditions were a writer's pet idea/contribution to the Star Wars setting that barely saw mention outside of the book they debuted in, but got included by Saga Edition mostly due to Rodney Thompson (a big Star Wars fan himself) that people would want to play these oddball character types.

Now we have EotE, which is not even a month out of its Beta phase and several months away from having its final version published, which admittedly has a narrow scope. Given the drastic change that was made to the three Force powers provided in the 2nd Update after a lot of concerns with Force-users being horribly unbalanced (to the point a starting PC who focused on nothing but Move could KO a major villain with only a Force Rating of 1), I'd say it was a pretty smart move on the writer's part to keep to the very basics in regards to the Force system, namely the stuff we see in the movies (pre-cog type abilities, telekinesis, mental influence), which is the broadest reference that most people have to Star Wars. Remember, as much beloved as the EU is, there's a large chunk of the Star Wars fandom that hasn't read half this stuff, particularly regarding material that's more than a decade old. The only people we saw in the movies doing anything close to "absorbing" an energy blast was a Dark Lord of the Sith (Vader in ESB, though it's debated whether he actually absorbed the shots from Han's blaster or just deflected courtesy of his armored cybernetic hand) and a Jedi Grand Master (Yoda, and even that's limited to Force Lightning). Nowhere in the movies do we see Force-users actively "cloaking" themselves to make themselves truly undetectable by other Force-users (Vader just relied on plain old stealth in ESB, as did Luke in RotJ).

Also, in every edition of the Star Wars RPG, Jedi and Force-users in general have proven to be able to **** near break the game. It may have taken a little while longer in the D6 version than it did in the d20 versions of the game, but it always happened and far more often than not, the Force-user PC became the leading star of the story, much as Luke was for the Original Trilogy, simply because they were so much more awesome than the other heroes (even Han, who had a running head-start on the awesome department didn't have quite as big an impact on the story after ANH). FFG probably wants to avoid repeating said mistakes where the can, or at least acknowledge that it's going to wind up happening, and so want to try and make their in-house system as stable as possible before it undergoes the heavy stress that Force-users are undoubtedly going to put on it.

Donovan Morningfire said:

@Donovan

Agreed I am the only force user in my group and if it wasent for the fact the empire would hunt my ass down I don't use force powers that are visible. It pains me everytime I see a new homebrew force career because time went into it. Mostly because they are combat oriented and not based on the subtleties of force senses. Also guess which character in our group has the lead role becaus his s social skills alone are godly with boost dice form the heavens.

aramis said:

And how many of those powers were in the WEG core rulebook? I'm not talking supplments like GG9: Fragments from the Rim or the Thrawn Trilogy sourcebook or the Tales of the Jedi sourcebook, but just the core rulebook?

Frankly, not quite as many as some people seem to think. For example, no Force choke (aka Telekinetic Kill) or Force Lightning, both of which are pretty **** iconic powers, and yet they're not in the WEG corebook. Also, quite a bit of WEG's set-up for Force powers reflects the D&D mindset regarding spells, particularly with the 2nd edition version of the game, in that Force powers were broken up in to several separate effects rather than put together under a broader category.

Also, WEG was responsible for a lot of the foundations of the EU, period, simply becuase nobody else was really doing anything with Star Wars at that time. And as I said before, there's a broad chunk of the Star Wars audicence, including gamers who would play this game, for whom the EU is worth less consideration than an empty box of tissues. Hell, I know several that glad that FFG has, for the moment, deep-sixed a lot of the EU Force stuff, and a couple that regret that one day FFG is going to have to cover that material, but are at least glad that they're not trying to cover everything all at once.

Tassedar said:

Well, having developed a couple Force-Sensitive specializations of my own, I can mildly plead guilty as charged where it comes to the Jedi, but then again the thing that helps set a Jedi apart from other Force-Sensitives is their prowess with a lightsaber, so combat ability is kind of a part-and-parcel of said specialization; it's not the only thing, as I did incorporate a few other talents from the Force-Sensitive Exile (namely the Force senses talents), but at the end of the day, most homebrew Jedi talent trees are going probably going to about half combat-related stuff. A lot of the social stuff can be handled quite well by existing non-Force specializations, particularly the Politico. Besides, you can be a social savvy character based on just skills alone without ever picking up a social-based specialization; I doubt Obi-Wan ever took a specialization outisde of the Jedi ones in spite of his reputation as "The Negotiator" during the Clone Wars.

And light sabers are a bit op to begin with but bringing one out in public attracts a lot of attention

awayputurwpn said:

Wouldn't conceal basically be a subset of influence? Making them not notice something?

yes this was the thinking with what you have comes into play. Influence is about making people see or not see whats going on "these are not the droids we are looking for"

Vonpenguin said:

It could be, but I'm thinking more about actually concealing yourself…Force-Stealth; not the kind that affects minds necessarily but the actual bending of light, blending into shadows or overloading senses with a bright flash (or even overloading cameras…like the Force Flash technique popular in more recent EU novels). It's not really a core Jedi ability; more of an esoteric set of techniques I'm sure, but known perhaps to Jedi Shadows, the Jensaarai, the Disciples of Twilight, etc. Also worth noting is that the ability would work against droids and other machines.

It would work on a bigger audience than Influence, and would be for the express purpose of being undetected, rather than for "getting people to think what you want them to think."

The three powers in the book are all you need unless you maybe want to delve into a dark branch. The original SWRPG had three force powers…and they're these same three.

What can a Jedi do that couldn't be defined as Sense, Influence or Move?

You want him to jump really high? Great…he does that with move…want to be able to know your daddy is waiting to ambush you on that Death Star? Sense has that covered…

The only "new" powers I've seen listed here are…

Conceal…obviously should be done as Influence…a Jedi literally turning invisible is totally outside the feel of how the force works…If any examples of this exist in canon I'd be surprised…and also wary of giving that source any credence.

Lightning, Force Choke, etc….clearly Dark Side…obviously the game will eventually have a "Damage" power, but since access to this would automatically make a Jedi Dark it should be relegated to GM territory…anyone wanting to play bad guys is missing the whole point of Star Wars and its inherant herosim. Sure a Light Jedi might be tempted to use a damage power and then come back without slipping totally over…but then he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of learning the power and that sort of thing would be more appropriate as maybe a Despair result on an offensively used power.

Absorb…not sure what thats supposed to be…a damage shield maybe? If so it has the same problem as Conceal…not really canon…you don't mitigate damage…you use move to keep the attack from ever hitting you!

I understand the desire to think up new stuff…but the need just isn't there. In fact I really can't see what they're going to add to the game when the actual Jedi game comes out…yea some new Lightsabre stuff and rules on going Dark…but other than that, the powers are pretty well covered.

mjprogue1 said:

Alter Chemistry - Healing oneself, healing another, detoxifying poison, avoid age (tho' that's not muh use in a game without aging rules). The novelizaiton implied that Ben used this in Ep IV on the unconscious Luke. Also, could be used for a force trance (which ISTR is seen in one of the comics).

You mentioned Damage… I agree, it should be there.

Absorb/dissipate energy - it's quite canon - Vader uses it in Eps V and VI… Ep V vs Solo's blaster, Ep VI vs the emperor's force lightning.
I've house ruled it to be self at base, and each dot is +1 soak vs energy weapons, one time per round. Somewere, the magnitude upgrade switches to +2 per dot. The focus upgrade to add an extra time per round. Another, bypassable, upgrade is resist heat/fire. Haven't figured where to put them all in th table, yet. Range upgrades increase the range at which you can do it, and lead to additional magnitude upgrades allowing defending more others. A final line of magnitude upgrade allows increasing a ship's armor…

i personaly think that once the influence tree later will include this removal of strain and heal but thats speculation on my part.

Tassedar said:

Well, at this point anything about Force Powers to come is speculation.

For all we know, FFG has no plans to expand the list of basic powers beyond Move, Influence, and Sense, but will instead simply tack on additional progression columns to cover additional powers/effects.