Donovan Morningfire said:

I'm just funnin'. I'm not sure there were any sympathetic players in there really.

Anyway the point is that he's only being an a$%&0!@ because he didn't actually break the rules requiring 2 Light Side points and a level of the Range talent to call the saber.

So serious questions I've asked a few times.

Can you roll your Force die again and again if you have the time or do you have to take the first result? If so, if you have the time can you use Influence over and over until you like the result?

Do you think Engaged range is clearly defined so all the players are working under similar assumptions and your milage (or feetage in this case) won't vary too much from GM to GM? I'd allow 2 targets 10 feet apart to be affected by autofire coming from the medium range band but they are not Engaged by any stretch of the RAW. Would your GM?
 

usgrandprix said:

Fair enough.  If you don't mind, I'll reply with my thoughts on the questions you asked below, which I agree do should be at least be considered.

Can you roll your Force die again and again if you have the time or do you have to take the first result? If so, if you have the time can you use Influence over and over until you like the result?

As the rules currently stand, yes you can, unless the GM puts a hard stop either due to plot-relevant reasons or he's gotten tired of the player trying to spam their Force powers until they actually work.  For the emotion-change/mind-whammy portion of Influence and the emotion/thought-readting aspect of Sense, I think a hard limit of "once per scene" would help curtail the occurances of spamming Force powers.  I know from the D6 days that Force-users could spam their powers over and over without restriction, and the various d20 games tried to implement a restraint, though said restraint became rather pointless once Jedi and other Force-users hit the early-teens in terms of levels.  So a "once per scene" restriction is easy to implement, easy to track, and curbs the worries of power spamming where Influene and Sense are concerned.  I'm not quite so sure spamming Move is as big a concern, but that's just me.

Do you think Engaged range is clearly defined so all the players are working under similar assumptions and your milage (or feetage in this case) won't vary too much from GM to GM? I'd allow 2 targets 10 feet apart to be affected by autofire coming from the medium range band but they are not Engaged by any stretch of the RAW. Would your GM?

I won't claim to be any sort of expert on Autofire (mostly as I've not encountered it in the handful of sessions I've run or played), but with FFG having taken the appraoch of letting each individual GM define how much distance constitutes a range band, I don't think we're going to see a consensus.  Though given the amount of chatter on the subject, perhaps FFG should give at least some considration to defining Engaged, even if only for situations like this.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Thanks a lot for the perspective.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm just going to have to make calls that make sense of things even if they bend the rules. I'd rather make calls without bending the rules but I can let that go.

I think I've gotten to the heart of the matter for me. The system is abstract and open in many ways. Time of a round can vary, ranges vary, spending advantage is open and concensus, starship conflict is very abstract, etc. And I really, really dig that about this game. Had my fill of board game RPGs.

But then every once in a while they drop rules that beg strict interpretation like:

Basic Move: "The user may spend 1 LS to move one object of silhouette 0
that he is engaged with up to his power's maximum range.
The object must be unsecured and unrestrained."

For my money there's not much leeway there. It's like they trust us to come up with cool uses for advantage, threat, etc. but when it comes to the Force, which is the arena for judgement calls and rewarding original usage if anything is, they don't trust us with more abstractly defined powers.

I'd rather see

Basic Move: "The user may move one small object that is close to him a short distance."

Now I know that sounds crazy so I don't expect that change, but I think there are degrees here where the crowd wanting strict walls around the Force, and Blast, and Auto-Fire can be satisfied with rules that reflect the overall abstract nature and concesus style of the game.

I guess I need to let go like Luke in a Death Star trench run.
 

usgrandprix said:

Not knowing your specific gaming background, if the majority of what you've played are tactical-based RPGs in the vein of D&D and D20 where things were pretty rigidly defined, moving to an "indie feel" where the GM is generally given a lot more leeway can be a very difficult experience.

As a "for instance," the GM that runs Dresden Files for us had most of her gaming experience prior to that point be almost entirely d20-based games.  If you've checked out Spirit of the Century or any other FATE-based game, you'll know that distances are extremely fluid and that quite a few things rely on GM interpretation rather than spelling everything out to the extent that D&D 3rd Edition and Pathfinder have done.  It took her a while to get over that hurdle, but she did eventually, and the action sequences of our Dresden Files game are better for it.

This update takes the game much further from something I'm willing to play.

At this point, I can only see playing it if I get rid of careers entirely, and just have specializations. Cost of new specs could follow the new rules for new career spec, but cross career spec is just too steep for how narrow the careers are. There are too many characters in my star wars playing groups that can't reasonably be built in this system now.

     With all the increased costs, I think they should increase the XP rewards.  The previous costs seemed okay to me with the current 10-15 XP per well played session.  That way the players were able to get a little something each session in the lower tiered areas, and had to save a for a few sessions to get the the higher skills, or to dabble in other specializations.  These new costs make player progression and custimization take far longer with the currently low XP rewards.  How many sessions will you have to wait to get that third specialization, just to wait a few more sessions to get the talent you really want from it.  Just imagine the delays for someone looking to get access to a fifth or sixth talent tree.  The open nature of not limiting players to only three specs is great, but the wait to get what a player wants to help flesh out their PC may be a bit much.  I believe that with my group, I would need to scale up the rewards as we move along or risk them getting frustrated and wanting to move on to a different game.

Bren_Waynero said:

+1 for Bren_Waynero 's post. I agree that gains, later down the line, should not take months of weekly play to gain one new ability. Especially if your group can't meet weekly.

But more xp, in my view, just re-sets the problem back to square one. I would like to see a lower cost for non-career skills/specs, maybe just a flat +5/+10 on each non-career, not a cumulative + per each previous purchase.

Gamerunner said:

I agree on this completely, and am not sure why the change was made, given as to how the prior method wasn't exactly broken (at least not anywhere as badly as the Force Powers were).

Actually, I'd be really curious to hear the discussion that lead to this decision.  Was it due to dropping the three spec max and a fear of having would-be power-gamers simply buy up as many specializations as they can?  With the end result being a choice to go extreme and scale back if need be?

I was working on a few characters over the weekend and came across a line of thought:

When taking a non-starting career specialization, would it make the other two specializations career as well or would they be non-career?

(EX:  My character took Technician as his Career and selected Outlaw Tech as his specialization.  After a few sessions I decide that I need to get some combat skills and went Gadgeteer (a non-career specialization) from the Bounty Hunter career path.  Being that I took Gadgeteer, would I be paying non-career specialization costs to go into Survivalist or is it considered to be a career specialization?  I'm thinking no, but would like this clarified.)

Sarone said:

Nope. The only thing that makes a specialisation a "career specialisation" is your career (that sounds like a bit of a mouthful when I read it back…). You never gain a second career in the game, just one at character creation.

I'm not fond of the Spec change either.  There are diminishing returns for buying more specializations as the new career skills will dry up almost immediately.  I much rather just a flat fee of 20 xp for each non-career specialization and 10 xp each for career specializations.  The redunancy will take care going overboard with spec trees just as well as extra XP cost will.

I'm jumping back a few pages, but on Autofire I would be for a change that makes it less deadly but adds fire suppression to the target(s). Full automatic weapons, especially of the larger sized seen in EotE, would often be used to suppress targets while others close and kill the targets assuming the modern world is used as a model. These full auto weapons should have some chance of being harmful (innacurate, but lots of bullets) while forcing the target(s) to keep their head down (removes a Maneuver? Forces them to take only the last initiative in the round?).

My biggest issue with the way specilizations are totalled now is when I am trying to check a characters point total. The way it is now I have to make sure I know the order in which I tooke specializations and I think that's unneeded.  It would be just as easy to make it 5 per career and 10 per non-career without needing to know the order.

The specialty change is actually one of the things that I'm disheartened about.   I started a thread about just how I feel the game loses something based on this change.  To sum up that thread, I feel that FFG was on to something really unique and had great potential when it came to building a character.   Having a limited choice when it came to specializations meant that not everyone would end up being great at everything.  You had to really choose which to focus on, and thus, made the choices your character made throughout their career more poignant.   As it stands, the game feels like "oh just another level"  rather than as example, Luke's epic Journey from farmboy to Jedi Knight. 

Basically, I see Luke as having to give something up, each time his character entered a new story arc.  Farmboy to Soldier and leader of Rogue Squadron, to Jedi Knight.   When Luke changed his specialties, he gave up something else really, whether the choice was his or not.  Leaving Tattoine to become a fighter pilot.  Becoming Rogue Leader and training Rogue Squadron, and when he focused on being a Jedi, he put the Rogue Squad life behind him.

All in all, I feel an opportunity has been lost that brings this game from being, "absolutely phenomenal" to "really good".

That Blasted Samophlange said:

I actually agree. Choices are important, and deciding whether to stick with current specs or drop one to make room for another was a real selling point. Heck, the limited number of specs coupled with the talent trees brought to mind the good ol' days of SW Galaxies.

While the bookkeeping of permanent vs non-permanent talents might be a bit of a hassle to keep in mind, it's not like everyone is going to be swapping out specs left and right. Most of the permanent talents are more on the passive side: +1 Wound Threshold, +1 damage at engaged/short range, etc. The more active talents that "define" a spec are the non-permanent ones.

Most people seem to think that changing specs makes you "forget" what you learned, but you really don't. One of the passive benefits of a spec is the cheaper cost of class skills. Swapping out your Doctor spec doesn't make you lose any ranks in medicine, just the finer applications, like stim application.

-EF