Star Wars WEG D6 - The Force Point - "Is it a good thing?"

[Stormonu]

I can't recall having issues with force points in the WEG games we played, but I can think of possibly two ways to put more control on their use:

PALL OF THE DARK SIDE: At certain dramatic/climax points, death looms close and the light side of the force struggles to shine through. Mechanically, a player may need to spend double force points (or more) to overcome the dark side, or you may actually have named villians spend dark side points to counter the use of force points in these dramatic moments.

DESPERATION BREEDS HOPE: You mention Luke shooting his torpedoes into the the Death Star, but you neglect to realize that just before he did, he lost his best friend, Biggs Darklighter. You yourself gave the example of one character falling towards their doom and the Mando using a Force point to come to the rescue. Mechanically, before a player can spend Force points, they must suffer a disastrous setback first - someone must suffer life-threatening peril or a setback before they can draw on the Force. This could even be used to counter the Pall of the Dark Side, in certain situations.

 

[Celebrim]

DESPERATION BREEDS HOPE: You mention Luke shooting his torpedoes into the the Death Star, but you neglect to realize that just before he did, he lost his best friend, Biggs Darklighter. You yourself gave the example of one character falling towards their doom and the Mando using a Force point to come to the rescue. Mechanically, before a player can spend Force points, they must suffer a disastrous setback first - someone must suffer life-threatening peril or a setback before they can draw on the Force. This could even be used to counter the Pall of the Dark Side, in certain situations.

I kind of like this idea but it needs some refinement to make it work. I don't usually run explicit "scenes" and for your suggestion to work the expenditure of the Force Point would need to be tied to something in the meta. But exactly how you define that in a way that just isn't moving the fiat around or clunky I'm not sure.

 

[Stormonu]

I kind of like this idea but it needs some refinement to make it work. I don't usually run explicit "scenes" and for your suggestion to work the expenditure of the Force Point would need to be tied to something in the meta. But exactly how you define that in a way that just isn't moving the fiat around or clunky I'm not sure.

I suppose the wild die could come in use here - someone has to roll a complication on the Wild Die to trigger a follow-on of using a Force point.

Or perhaps a character (any character, not just the one who is going to activate the Force point) needs to fail a roll that will result in severe injury or death before using a Force point, and the resulting action must include aiding the individual in mortal peril.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Force points were very rare and required dangerous heroic acts to gain. They weren't like spell points or hit points or anything they refilled on a regular basis. When used to save your own self or beat people up they weren't regained....they had to be used in heroic and dangerous selfless ways to be replaced.

The true elegant design of D6 Star Wars was the Dark Side Point. Tempting jedi characters with such easily attained power tempted the players as much if not more!

I have never seen a game rule that tempted players down a dangerous path better than the dark side point trap.

 

[Celebrim]

Force points were very rare and required dangerous heroic acts to gain. They weren't like spell points or hit points or anything they refilled on a regular basis. When used to save your own self or beat people up they weren't regained....they had to be used in heroic and dangerous selfless ways to be replaced.

My point isn't how common they are. For the purposes of the discussion, we can assume that there is only one of them per PC and PC's typically use them heroically, and further that I have assumed such things prior to my discussion.

Last session a force point was spent to use first aid to cut a grandfather out of an alien that was in the process of assimilating him as biomass. The PC's were in danger and the PC's stood to gain nothing by helping this random stranger, but they spent resources to help him anyway. Seems plenty heroic to me.

The question is not whether I can find something in the meta to nerf the force point. The question is should it be basically easy to overcome heroic challenges just by pushing a button in the meta.

 

[Umbran]

.... it was blast and is still the most perfect example of what the mechanic is supposed to accomplish that I've encountered in 30 years of play.

And there is the rub. Most of the time Force Points do not work like that. Lately instead of being primarily used to make dramatic things happen at the dramatically appropriate time, they are being used as win buttons to overcome challenges with minimal drama, because that's the motivation of players in any TTRPG really.

So, this is true if you are approaching these games in a traditional mode. Then, metacurrency is just another resource, and you spend it to make your life easier.

If you have the narrative bug in your play, though, then their dramatic use becomes more clear. They are for the times when ou wanna have a mechanical way to say, "Screw balance, I want this to be cool!"

For those with experience with the mechanic or any metacurrency that can be used to dramatic effect - and the Force Point is probably the most powerful metacurrency in any game I know of - how do you deal with force point dumping during the climax? How do you deal with balance when it becomes a metacurrency fight...

So, I played a ton of D6 Star Wars in college, and I play games with metacurrencies all the time. There are three basic approaches to how you deal with balance here:

1) You don't. You just let the metacurrency fly as it will, and what the PCs can do, they do.

2) Recognize how the metacurrency works, and work with it.

For something like D6, where the metacurrency is potent and rare, the bulk of the time, you balance the game for play without metacurrency. Then, you build the dramatic moments with tasks, adversaries, situations, and/or goals that are nigh impossible without the metacurrency. Your descriptions should telegraph for the players when they are in which times - when you are busting out the duels over lava, and the Death Star is about to fire, that's a time to bust out the metacurrency.

For something like Fate, or Daggerheart, Savage Worlds, or several other more recent games with metacurrency, the currency is less potent, and they have an explicit metacurrency economy, where points are supposed to flow back and forth pretty regularly. These will have their own balanace that you have to learn, but you end up with a hybrid of the first and second cases - a few points get spent early, but mostly the players save them for when they are screwed if they don't use them.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

My point isn't how common they are. For the purposes of the discussion, we can assume that there is only one of them per PC and PC's typically use them heroically, and further that I have assumed such things prior to my discussion.

Last session a force point was spent to use first aid to cut a grandfather out of an alien that was in the process of assimilating him as biomass. The PC's were in danger and the PC's stood to gain nothing by helping this random stranger, but they spent resources to help him anyway. Seems plenty heroic to me.

The question is not whether I can find something in the meta to nerf the force point. The question is should it be basically easy to overcome heroic challenges just by pushing a button in the meta.

I guess I'm missing out on a portion of your disconnect with the force point.

Did Luke use a force point when he turned off his targeting computer and made his one in a million shot to blow up the Death Star?

Did Han use a force point to trivialize the dangerous asteroid field encounter?

Did Wedge use a force point to fly out of an exploding Death Star II without crashing?

I'd say yes to all of these ...and that's because Star Wars isn't a gritty universe of getting teeth kicked in but instead a big damn heros space opera.

I can't think of anything more fitting than using a force point at the climax of a movie to get that big win against the bad guys.

If feels like you find the players being able to choose their own spotlight moment as a negative...because you crave a sense of danger. I'm not sure that Star Wars is that sort of narrative structure.

Gamer Story: I played an alcoholic washed up jedi character. He was good with a saber but didn't really have force powers worth mentioning. I was being hunted by Vader on whatever mission planet we were staying on. I answered a knock at the door and it slid open to reveal 4 bounty hunters with blaster rifles pointed at the ready.

I used a force point to pull and if it's my saber to reflect all 4 shots back at all 4 of the bounty hunters, hitting and KO or killing all of them. It was this absolutely epic scene that I can visualize to this day....and this was a game from 1989 or 90. It let me just....win....an encounter I was meant to lose....but in that moment my character was as cool as Luke and Han and Obi Wan.

I think a Star Wars game needs to let the players be Obi Wan in their moment.

 

[Celebrim]

So, this is true if you are approaching these games in a traditional mode. Then, metacurrency is just another resource, and you spend it to make your life easier.

If you have the narrative bug in your play, though, then their dramatic use becomes more clear. They are for the times when ou wanna have a mechanical way to say, "Screw balance, I want this to be cool!"

So Star Wars D6 wasn't designed as a nar game, and at the time it was written the concept didn't really exist and only was showing up as a mechanic in fairly obscure places like Toon, Amber, and arguably Paranoia. Furthermore, my players all come from traditional gaming and have less interest in nar as a concept than I do. Nonetheless, I do have one player who has a clear part of his unstated aesthetic of play, "I want to play a character that does big cool impressive things." (The aesthetic I refer to as "Fantasy".)

So, I played a ton of D6 Star Wars in college, and I play games with metacurrencies all the time. There are three basic approaches to how you deal with balance here:

And again, you are missing my point. I'm not really worried about balance. I do have issues with the problem of balance in D6 and the force point tangentially effects those, but I have a satisfactory house rule in place for the issue that the force point would raise, namely that a aside from the adjustment to scale, you can't have more than 12D in a single action. So if a character doubles his 7D blaster pool to 14D, he can't dump all those points into a single shot, but must for example, make 3 12D shots. Likewise, you can't dodge with more than 12D. That part is working fine and this thread has not once (from my perspective) addressed balance.

In fact, my concern is entirely "nar" if you well, that is addressing the aesthetic of "narrative". The problem with the force point is not that it is unbalancing, which I really don't care about. The problem is that as used it is typically anti-climatic, turning a lengthy struggle and contention at the climax of the story into a single nigh impossible to fail roll.

Think of this in terms of say "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers", though many other things fit the trope if perhaps not so comedically. In many stories, the hero has some unbeatable win button that they can use to - say transforming into Megazord, or Voltron or He-Man or whatever. But in stories of this sort, the heroes invariably try every other solution and power and struggle before turning to the win button when all else has failed and hope is almost lost. In Star Wars D6, that button is the Force Point. And when they are deployed inefficiently like that, as a desperation move because things are going badly, they work just fine. The hero does something as you put it "cool!" and the dramatic fight finishes with a dramatic finish.

But my players are getting much more savvy and they aren't waiting until things get desperate. They can recognize the big climatic battle and generally speaking they just go nova, burning the force points to do the heroic thing and take down the terrorist (or whatever danger to the peace they are going after) in round one. It would be as if Luke "used the force" before 85% of good guys died attacking the Death Star, one shotted the Death Star before Vader got into space, and the rebels after an easy victory headed back to Yavin with a closing line like, "See, Wedge, I told you it would be as easy as bullseyeing womp rats back home." It's in some sense the same outcome, but without the drama.