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Yeah, the jedi classes really don't run the risk of being overpowered, at least not early on. Once he has enough XP to pump up his force rating and choice powers it can get a bit extreme, but by then the rest of the party has been pumping their own stuff with their likewise XP to match. The only thing that sorta stands out is lightsabers being strong weapons, but sorta push him that flashing that around publicly is going to call down a LOT of heat, and frankly, unless he pumps Brawn, melee is probably a poor idea early on anyways with how easy it is to get shot up. The morality stuff is a trash fire. Ignore it.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:31
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, the jedi classes really don't run the risk of being overpowered, at least not early on. Once he has enough XP to pump up his force rating and choice powers it can get a bit extreme, but by then the rest of the party has been pumping their own stuff with their likewise XP to match. The only thing that sorta stands out is lightsabers being strong weapons, but sorta push him that flashing that around publicly is going to call down a LOT of heat, and frankly, unless he pumps Brawn, melee is probably a poor idea early on anyways with how easy it is to get shot up. If that player insists on having a saber, give him one of the weaker/junkier ones from EotE rather than the 'proper' one from F&D. Also, I couldn't disagree more on the morality thing...although I've only used it in the scope of a Force User campaign, not a mixed group.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:33
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if you don't use Morality a Jedi will be broken. using dark side points willy nilly will definitely unbalance most force powers
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Mar 17, 2016 22:33
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jivjov posted:If that player insists on having a saber, give him one of the weaker/junkier ones from EotE rather than the 'proper' one from F&D. Even outside of a mixed group, the morality system does do one very damaging thing - pre-morality, you could spend strain to spend force chits. Now it actively taxes your morality. Basically, it widens the gap between "newbie jedi who can't even float their saber" and "goddamn force tyrannosaurus." The latter doesn't NEED to do this - the former absolutely needs to, and in turn gets punished a lot more for it. There's already a balance system for using dark side points willy nilly - there's more dark side points for the GM to gently caress you over with. And it costs plenty of strain to boot! Also, it's just kinda...boring. If you're going to have morality, have it as a side system for the jedi and ensure they still have obligations and the like.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:38
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my jedi player has Obligation, Duty, and Morality 
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Mar 17, 2016 22:42
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What's Ossus like? Is there a good amount of detail on it as an adventure location?
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Mar 17, 2016 22:42
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Maybe I need to re-read the Morality rules, but it seemed like if someone wanted to just use DSP results on Force dice, they could, until they got to 70 Morality or whatever it was that made them a dark jedi.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:44
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HidaO-Win posted:What's Ossus like? Is there a good amount of detail on it as an adventure location? Ossus gets four pages in the Worlds of the Force section, including a half page of history, a whole mess of Points of Interest, and stat blocks for Ysanna Hunters and their mounts. Then there's a two-page spread in the Vergences section with a list of a handful of different sites each with their own special feature/rule. One of the modular encounters is set in the ruins of the Jedi Library on Ossus as well.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:55
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Cheers man, my GM who is currently distracting us on our way to Ossus is tickled pink.
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Mar 17, 2016 23:01
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jivjov posted:Aleena, Bardottan, Devaronian, and Gungan What are the Devaronian stat gimmicks? jivjov posted:If that player insists on having a saber, give him one of the weaker/junkier ones from EotE rather than the 'proper' one from F&D. You have this backward, the EotE saber is way better than the basic F&D one.
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Mar 17, 2016 23:20
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Fuzz posted:You have this backward, the EotE saber is way better than the basic F&D one. For reference, the EotE saber has 10 damage, crit 1, breach, sunder, and vicious 2. F&D basic (unmodded Ilum crystal) has 6 damage, crit 2, and breach. F&D can be modded to be almost as nasty, but that takes time and credits.
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Mar 17, 2016 23:37
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Fuzz posted:What are the Devaronian stat gimmicks? 2 2 2 3 2 1 Starts with 95XP Begin with one rank in either Survival or Deception Resilient Metabolism: one automatic Success added to all Resilience checks (As an aside, I HATE how species stat blocks are formatted in these books; with new ones just kinda starting wherever they happen to fall on the page) Fuzz posted:You have this backward, the EotE saber is way better than the basic F&D one. Right you are....I was thinking of a fully kitted out F&D saber.
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Mar 17, 2016 23:42
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Does anyone by chance have an old Edge of the Empire Beta book they wouldn't mind parting with? My insane need for completionism is making be very angry at my bookshelf for not having one, when I have the other two Beta books.
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Mar 18, 2016 01:59
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Nexus has Loth Cat stats 
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Mar 18, 2016 02:18
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Mechanics question I've been wondering about for a while: When a talent description says to upgrade the difficulty of a roll by X, am I adding difficulty dice, upgrading difficulty dice to challenge dice, or adding setback dice? I've been going with option number two, but I can see option one being the case given the way dice pools are described, with the number of difficulty dice being the direct indicators of task difficulty. Ex: quote:DODGE - When targeted by combat check. may perform a Dodge incidental to suffer a number of strain no greater than ranks of Dodge, then upgrade the difficulty of the check by that number .
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Mar 18, 2016 02:52
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PupsOfWar posted:Mechanics question I've been wondering about for a while: Upgrading a roll generally means changing an 8 sided dice into a 12 sided one, so Difficulty would upgrade to a Challenge, and Ability would upgrade to a Proficiency die. So basically you've been doing it correctly. Adding more difficulty die is raising the difficulty. Setback/Bonus die are usually specifically stated as such, including the number.
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Mar 18, 2016 02:58
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Fuzz posted:Upgrading a roll generally means changing an 8 sided dice into a 12 sided one, so Difficulty would upgrade to a Challenge, and Ability would upgrade to a Proficiency die. So basically you've been doing it correctly. Thanks for settling that. I had kind of figured it couldn't translate to just adding dice, as that would make it a bit too easy for PCs to go around throwing nigh-impossible rolls at their opponents w/ relatively cheap talents and expenditure of strain. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 03:07
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Upgrading and Downgrading dice is covered in EotE p 21, AoR p 28, and I don't have F&D, but in the other books it's under "Modifying a Dice Pool" under the larger heading "Building a Basic Dice Pool" in the first chapter, so probably there as well.jivjov posted:Does anyone by chance have an old Edge of the Empire Beta book they wouldn't mind parting with? My insane need for completionism is making be very angry at my bookshelf for not having one, when I have the other two Beta books.  
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Mar 18, 2016 03:09
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Current campaign going well. Players are on a bit of a derail, but the stuff they're doing gives me an opportunity to bring back a set of secondary antagonists I'd thought I would have to abandon after a stretch of messy sessions early in the campaign. Said antagonists killed off one PC, so it would have felt awkward if there had never been a reckoning. FISHMANPET posted:Upgrading and Downgrading dice is covered in EotE p 21, AoR p 28, and I don't have F&D, but in the other books it's under "Modifying a Dice Pool" under the larger heading "Building a Basic Dice Pool" in the first chapter, so probably there as well. Yeah I've read through that section. It was just a language issue where I was uncertain whether "Upgrade the difficulty of the roll by X amount" meant "Upgrade X number of difficulty dice to challenge dice" or "Increase the base difficulty of the task by X difficulty dice".
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Mar 18, 2016 03:19
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I have literally all the releases for this line other than that beta 
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Mar 18, 2016 03:20
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Speaking of which, I have a chance at a FaD beta book for p. cheap but am really just interested in the rules. How serious are the rules differences between the printed beta book and the final version? How much trouble would I have trying to use the beta book?
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Mar 18, 2016 03:37
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Corbeau posted:Speaking of which, I have a chance at a FaD beta book for p. cheap but am really just interested in the rules. How serious are the rules differences between the printed beta book and the final version? How much trouble would I have trying to use the beta book? Combine the beta with the last errata document, and I think you'd be okay.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:38
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Finster Dexter posted:Maybe I need to re-read the Morality rules, but it seemed like if someone wanted to just use DSP results on Force dice, they could, until they got to 70 Morality or whatever it was that made them a dark jedi. I don't get why Cirno's making such a big deal out of the whole mechanic. It doesn't do anything, unless you go out of your way to cook babies for dinner with lightning. For every dark side point you use you take a point of conflict which might or might not convert into a morality loss, which might or might not eventually push you down to 30 after a month of gaming. Unless your GM is really into making the game about the dark side, you'll have to put in effort to avoid shining blue from all the morality points you gain. Siivola fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 14:10
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Yeah, I don't really see the problem with Morality. Falling to the Dark Side should makes you a bit more powerful, early on. That's kind of the whole point of its temptation. The mechanical consequences shouldn't be too severe, because it takes a long time using it to start looking like good old Palpy. No, the true consequences should be in narrative: the consequence of Anakin's fall was that he made a lot of bad, self destructing, as well as plain destructive, decisions under the influence of hatred, fear, and anger, not that he had yellow eyes. Even ending up a broken shell of a cyborg comes from his decisions, not using the Dark Side.
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Mar 18, 2016 14:47
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Siivola posted:I don't get why Cirno's making such a big deal out of the whole mechanic. It doesn't do anything
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Mar 18, 2016 15:14
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Making a conflict roll and changing morality at the end of the session is really no more crunchy (at least to me) than tracking obligation changes, rolling obligation at the start of the session, and tailoring the session based on that roll. My biggest issue with Morality was with a couple of my players refusing to take on even a single point of conflict without making it feel like I was punishing them. I kept trying to explain that just because you take a point of conflict does not mean you did something /evil/...you just did something potentially conflictive; you didn't make the absolute 100% "right" choice.
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Mar 18, 2016 15:44
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What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers?
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Mar 18, 2016 17:17
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RaceyBucket posted:What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers? Hyperspace anomaly, another non-rival smuggler SOS call, completely unrelated imperial blockade, freak weather events on the planet
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Mar 18, 2016 17:26
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RaceyBucket posted:What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers? Bounty Hunters track the party. It turns out that what they were smuggling was volatile, and it explodes in their hull while they're in hyperspace. Oh poo poo. They get a much larger offer from a rival crime lord for what they're smuggling. They're in the middle of a time sensitive smuggling run, when a friend/family member/ally/business partner phones in that they need help now! They try to land on a planet to make a dead drop of the smuggled goods, only to get pinned in system by an unrelated imperial fleet movement. Halfway through the run, the original requester calls in and says they're too slow, and they already got what they needed from someone else [I did this after my party got a despair and no successes on an astrogation check.] Now they have a hull full of illegal goods, and no easy way to offload them.
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Mar 18, 2016 17:38
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Beyond the rim book adventure suggestions. Final chapter. The whole thing with the interceptions and stuff heading down to raxus seems kind of contrived. I've also got every living member of the cholganna survivors on the ships of the party and the yiyar clan, who were convinced to join the party for a cut of the profits if they worked together by supplying smuggling ships for the vast sums of cybernetics that would surely be being smuggled if the plan went ahead without their interference. Having the yiyar clan betray the group and do the jawa thing from the book seems a bit unlikely given what's shaking out so far, which leaves me at a bit of a loss to make the adventure interesting this week. Any ideas for fun final act twists?
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Mar 18, 2016 19:07
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RaceyBucket posted:What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers? Pirates also work, as does some form of betrayal/double-cross. Maybe the buyer decided he'd rather not pay, and sent out goons to take the goods by force. Maybe the whole thing was a sting and either the buyer or the seller is handing them over to the Imperials to save their own hides. Maybe they've hosed up a few too many times in the past and the seller is just trying to get rid of them. Another option is that they arrive only to discover that their destination is now a hot zone. Depending on how you want to scale this, it could be anything from "skirmish between planetary forces" to "not just an Imperial blockade, an all-out Imperial invasion."
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Mar 18, 2016 19:58
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This is now my canon:
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Mar 18, 2016 21:23
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RaceyBucket posted:What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers? While smuggling a live thing, said thing breaks out and causes chaos on board the ship. Systems failure causes the ship to be stranded, and an Imperial patrol swings by to assist. Go to the wrong location, make the drop with the wrong people, get paid by the wrong people, only find out when the buyer gives them an angry call demanding to know where they are and where his poo poo is. Being paid in mystical maps, wacky rare items and other poo poo that is hard to liquidize. Going to to drop location, and being forced to scan around and find where the buyer is hiding. The goods turn out to be toxic to the pilot or navigator, forcing the party to have to play nursemaid to an integral party member.
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Mar 18, 2016 21:29
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Siivola posted:I don't get why Cirno's making such a big deal out of the whole mechanic. It doesn't do anything, unless you go out of your way to cook babies for dinner with lightning. For every dark side point you use you take a point of conflict which might or might not convert into a morality loss, which might or might not eventually push you down to 30 after a month of gaming. Unless your GM is really into making the game about the dark side, you'll have to put in effort to avoid shining blue from all the morality points you gain. Basically: a) It's boring. Compared to the similar mechanics in the previous two books which were basically plot hooks served on a silver platter that your players could choose from to give you all kinds of levers to pull with them, morality just doesn't offer the same. Like, ok, my jedi is Greedy, but Compassionate. Sure. My scoundrel owed a heavy debt to a rebel sympathizer who helped him out earlier in his life, but I likewise needs a whole lot of credits to help pay off debt collectors coming for his family. Oh, and he's also greedy but compassionate. Morality is just a way to describe your character rather then talk about the things that shape them. b) It makes using the force weaker at early levels (where it's already weak), and more powerful at higher levels (where it's already extremely powerful). Pre-F&D, when you made a roll to use the force, you rolled your Force Rating in force dice and counted the light side chits. Now, the dice are structured so that it is more common for you to roll dark side pips then light side. You could spend strain and flip over a Destiny Point from light side to dark side to use the dark side pips as if they were light side ones. And that's great! Turning to the dark side briefly actually and literally increases the adversity you'll face later. You are literally powering the "enemy" when you do that, and making the world just a little bit shittier. But now doing that adds to your ~*~dark side score~*~. It basically puts up a road block there. It stops interesting things from happening, and to be frank, it does punish jedi for doing that, because of the awards you get at having a high light side score. You have to choose between "do a cool thing now" or "be stronger later on in the game," which is a stupid decision to make players make. And of course, once you DO have a high enough light side score, you don't have to worry about this as much. There's wiggle room at the top. So now that you already have a super rad kicking Force Rating, you can make it extra powerful by turning over to the dark side (but only a little) when needed. c) It feels way too "Star Wars Video Game" as opposed to "Star Wars Movie." FFG Star Wars was super, super good at capturing the feel of the movies, but morality actively hampers that. You can't as easily have Luke being taunted by Vader and convinced to turn to the dark side to lash out against him. You absolutely can't have Luke turning Vader away from the dark side in one dramatic scene to redeem him. It's very Bioware-esque. It removes those spaces inbetween "ultimate good guy" and "puppy-kicker villain." it adds a metagame that pushes you away from, well, interesting things happening. Because now you absolutely have a mechanic that tells you whether or not you did a good thing. d) I feel it honestly just adds a level of gamification to something that didn't need it. Again, it Biowares up this poo poo. Having a literal point value for how Not An rear end in a top hat you are plays havoc to a lot of things. It adds in the Paladin Problem. Suddenly jedi are stepping on eggshells at all times to ensure they don't take ~*~dark side points~*~. It adds an argument where there previously wasn't one. Instead of letting actions and consequences play out naturally, you have to consider this ungainly new mechanic to see if you have to personally go after the jedi. Jedi should be conflicted, but in-character, not in-mechanics. They should always want to do what's right, and have THAT be the stepping stone to turning to evil. Anakin wasn't trying to score up sick nasty dark side points to get that sweet bonus. I'm not going to claim FFG Star Wars was "rules light," but it focused on the narrative in it's rules. Morality doesn't do that. In fact, it actively hurts that! Basically, ALL mechanics encourage certain types of play. The kind of play the morality mechanic encourages is stuff I don't want anywhere near my Star Wars game.
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Mar 18, 2016 21:46
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lol morality is a mechanical bonus/penalty for making consistently light/dark choices that's literally all it does everything else is rp it's the players fault if they care so much about their "score", just fuckin rp your character
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Mar 18, 2016 22:53
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I sincerely have to ask if you're arguing from experience, or just making up a hypothetical Joanne Jedi who gives a bigger poo poo about getting conflict (which is not your actual morality score!) than flipping the destiny point. Which is still a thing that happens under F&D rules. The odds are such that unless you get half a dozen conflict in a session, you can expect a positive shift in your morality. Not taking the dark side pips because you might get a smaller shift up is just poor play, gaming-the-system-wise. And I'd like to point out it you can just flat-out start at morality 71 (or, for that matter, 29) at chargen. You don't have to play a single minute to get there. In fact, if you actually wanted to game the system, you should absolutely always start there instead of taking the XP/credits, because you get XP and money at faster a rate than your morality score can possibly increase to paragon levels. And if you're a paragon, yes, you are actually incentivized to gamble your paragon status by dabbling in the dark side, as the bonuses from being a saint offset the penalties for doing that. But this is not a problem because it's early in the game and your Force Rating sucks, and maybe, if your GM is on the ball and really intent on making the game All About Morality, if you keep playing like that your score is eventually going to take a dip and the training feels fall right off. And if you happen to get a player that takes the XP at chargen and then torches an orphanage for those sick nasty dark side pips, the system's just exposed a person you can kick out of the group with no qualms. Extra bonus! I accept that having a descriptive alignment system is not your thing and certainly not appropriate for every Star Wars story. However, I honestly think that for a fairly specific kind of campaign (namely, one that takes everything Jon Ostrander's ever written and tries to Get It Right for once) it actually creates exactly the right kind of play. Edit: And for clarity's sake, I mean a campaign where the central theme is the struggle to be a decent person while the whole universe is at war with itself and you have superhuman powers. In a game like that, morality functions as a fine meter of how poorly you're doing. But if your game is about shipping contraband and trying to not die before your debts are paid? Yeah, the morality system can bugger off because obligation is already doing the exact same job of being the measure of how deep in the poo poo you are. Edit edit: By which I mean that just like the point of an EotE campaign is not actually to pay off your debts, the point of my ideal F&D game is not to infallibly remain a decent person. The real actual point is to first fail at either of those and see how you then have to scramble to make up for it. Siivola fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 23:15
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Siivola posted:Edit edit: By which I mean that just like the point of an EotE campaign is not actually to pay off your debts, the point of my ideal F&D game is not to infallibly remain a decent person. The real actual point is to first fail at either of those and see how you then have to scramble to make up for it. You don't get rewarded for paying off the debt. You absolutely get rewarded for maintaining your perfect paragon status. Like, morality does not have an actual conflict. Flat out, mechanically, being a perfect paragon - or the most sinister of villains - is the Best Choice. It is mechanically encouraged. Staying in moral grey areas and trying to actually figure out how to act isn't what the morality system encourages, it does the opposite. Mechanics mean something, and if the response is "then get rid of the mechanic" then well yeah, that's what I'm saying. I WANT F&D to be a game where th goal is not to infallibly remain the most perfect boy scout, to fail at things and try to figure out how to manage that, to make hard decisions and have consequences flow naturally out of that. The morality system does not do that. It tells you after your action that You Are A Bad Guy. There's no room for depth there! Again - it Bioware's the gently caress out of a game that very thankfully didn't have that problem. It removes ambiguity and turns the GM into the Roleplay Police.
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Mar 19, 2016 02:57
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RaceyBucket posted:What are some reasonable things to happen to a ship on a smuggling run other than like customs or rival smugglers? Strike at the port: nobody's leaving until it gets resolved. The cargo turns out to be something really nasty, like torture droids. The crew arrives at the drop-off point only to find their contacts murdered. How do they get rid of the hot merchandise while avoiding the murder rap? The cargo is perfectly legal (for once), but the Sector Rangers are dogging the crew every step of the way. Wonder why?
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Mar 19, 2016 07:29
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ProfessorCirno posted:You don't get rewarded for paying off the debt. You absolutely get rewarded for maintaining your perfect paragon status. Comparing this to Bioware games is dumb and lazy, because Bioware games don't actually tempt you at any point. You just kill dudes and every now and then there's a popup asking "hey, are you a decent person or a massive shitlord?" At no point does it make being a decent person difficult, because the games are piss-easy. Luckily, F&D has a GM who can do just that, using the exact same tricks they might use to keep an EotE party in constant poverty. It's just an alignment system, for pete's sake. It doesn't remove ambiguity (hell, it sort of even adds to it because converting conflict into a morality shift is random), it's just there to keep track of how often the players have taken the easy way out. If you don't like alignment systems, fine, but calling morality a ~thrash fire~ just because it's an alignment system is kind of unfair.
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Mar 19, 2016 08:52
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ProfessorCirno posted:You don't get rewarded for paying off the debt. You absolutely get rewarded for maintaining your perfect paragon status. Except being a Parangon is not supposed to be a permanent state. You are supposed to try and possibly fail to keep it, like you are supposed to try to stay clear of the Dark Side. And I'm echoing the other guy who said lol if you try to keep it at parangonhood without getting a bit of conflict. I mean, getting out of situations without incurring conflict should always have another price, that's the point!
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Mar 19, 2016 09:10
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