Hey guys!

My Force Users expessed interest in gaining the ability to shock the hell out of people. And, I mean, I completely understand why. So, here's my attempt at Force Lightning: The Force Power!

I took some inspiration from Donovan Morningfire's Ways of the Force supplement, but I opted to take the Lightning skill and basically make it a "Force Weapon" rather than the soak-ignoring Injure power that he had in it. I also wanted to make this a seperate power because I feel like Injure references more of internal damage, like Force Choke, Force Crush, whatever, whereas Lighting is an external zap-your-**** kind of thing.

Without further ado,

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y10racdmoxtupng/Force%20Lightning.docx

It is obviously rough, but please let me know what you guys think! And, of course, please feel free to take and modify as you wish for your own personal use! My only stipulation is that you have fun with it!

Obviously the quote is not mine, blah blah got stuff from Wookiepedia, don't own anything, obligatory don't sue me stuff. . Enjoy!

Okay, major problem is that you've got one side that's nothing but Control Upgrades. I honestly think you're trying to make one power do far too much.

Frankly, I'd make the Strength Upgrades cover two columns, and then split the Range and Multitude Upgrades into the other half of the tree. The only Control Upgrades I'd suggest keeping are Concussive 1 and Breach 1, but limit it to only a single rank in those qualities. I'd put those at Row 3 for Concussive at 20 XP and Row 5 for Breach at 30 XP.

There's also the problem that for a low-power Force-user, this power is borderline useless without sinking a bunch of XP into Strength Upgrades given the paltry base damage; anything with a Soak Value of 4 or better isn't going to have much trouble shrugging this off.

Ahh players... Welcome to the Dark Side...

Force lightning, go force lightning . . . (Sung to the tune of Greased Lightnin')

For now if I need to add Force Lightning to an NPC I will just assume it works like a blaster attack or something like that.

See, I really liked the concept of the build-your-own weapon using all of those control upgrades, and all of them do make thematic sense.

Vicious: Lightning is horribly disfiguring, and this makes plenty of sense.
Burn: Not traditionally lighting them on fire, but more from excess lightning continuing to course through their system after hitting them. Lake Palpatine's shock on Luke, where lightning still arced across his body for a few moments after the fact.
Knockdown: Lightning has knocked people down in a lot of situations as well. Again, the Emperor does that to Luke, too.
Ensnare: Luke wasn't going anywhere when he was getting shocked.
Concussive: Luke also wasn't attacking or doing any actions while he was getting shocked.
Breach: Strong lightning can very easily ignore armor, as we saw when Vader got hit on accident.

That's why I put all of those options in. It lets the lightning do whatever the user needs them to do, as long as they can pay for it.

I'm not really designing it so that it can do everything at once. I'm designing it so that a strong force user can be entirely dependent on lightning for their offensive capabilities (like many strong Dark Siders we see) and they can tailor their attacks to what they want to do with them depending on the situation and the personality of the player. A more agressive player might not even bother with the control upgrades until later, but a more control based player might want to focus on debilitating the enemy first. Force Lightning has so many different offensive uses besides just killing people that I think it would be a disservice to make it only good at dealing damage, and not at causing suffering and agony through various debilitations.

Additionally, extra successes make the attack deal bonus damage, just like a regular attack. And, you can spend an extra DS pip to add the base damage to it again. So, if they got all the Damage upgrades, and rolled three pips, they could choose to spend all three to make the base damage 9, instead of 3. I don't want to increase the base damage above 3, though, because if they got it to 5, you could make that damage just reach way too high with only a few invested pips. That could be problematic in my opinion.

Basically, I just want to make it so that when people see Force Lightning, they don't know what's going to happen. Are they going to just obliterate you, or are they going to make you suffer? We've seen both in media, and I think that I really want to keep that feeling with it.

But Force Lightning is also a pretty advanced force technique. Typically, low-level acolytes can't do a whole lot with it, but powerful users can really mess people up with it.

I am considering at least taking your suggestion at increasing the experience costs for some of the stronger controls.

And fjw70, I have Force Lightning working just like a blaster attack with this power, just using Discipline and Willpower as the attack skill. They just need to roll the right pips to do the right things.

I guess I should have looked at your document before I posted.

No problem. Let me know what you think if you do take a look!