Gaming: Savaging Star Wars, Part V: The Force

It's an energy field created by all living things.  It surrounds us and penetrates us, and binds the Galaxy together.

    - Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope

 

Classical gaming "magic," for lack of a better word, divides arcane systems into one or more categories - divine, arcane, psionic, et cetera - and gives these things sources.  Even in literature, we see similar concepts in, for instance, Robert Jordan's saidar and saidin.  Star Wars, as a franchise, does not take that route.  Instead, every incidence of magic in Star Wars is traced back to one of two sources, the Force, or something approximating the behavior of the Force.  Sometimes, this results in some truly dissatisfying approaches to the Force, where the Sith are shown acting more like classical wizards with artifacts, talismans, and tomes of power, or an approach that I personally find fairly egregious - the Ones.  The Ones are supposed to be the personification of the Force, which, given that the Force is supposed to penetrate literally everything, seems even more ridiculous than midichlorians (more on them in a moment).  That's like having the personification of fundamental atomic forces, and Strong Force doesn't get along with Electromagnetism.  In another setting, that makes sense, but in Star Wars, it feels like a major tone breach.

Which brings me to midichlorians.  They are, on the surface, completely ridiculous - magical Force amoebas, which give people access to the Force? - and it took, frankly, more talented setting and background writers than George Lucas to make them make any sense to me.  It isn't that midichlorians give access to the Force, it's that they have a symbiotic or indicative presence, like the bubbles in a stream where a kink in the channel cause turbulence and impurities allow a bubble to form, or like mold showing a damp patch in a wall.  Presumably they require two conditions, a living host, and a strong connection to this energy source.  As a means of showing that to some degree any complexity of life should be able to touch the Force, it's actually a surprisingly elegant solution.  It's just very badly presented in Phantom Menace.  They do introduce other questions - is Force-sensitivity exclusive to carbon-based life? Would silicon-based life be able to use the Force? - but that's the nature of science fiction in general, and franchise fiction specifically.  It's why Sanderson's Law of Magic exists: The more you can explain the rules, the less satisfactory as a story device it is, and vice versa.

However, a role-playing game, because it's a game, requires rules.  Before we get into the mechanics of it, let's try to establish some basic rules for Force-users.

1. Good and evil, or their equivalents, are real forces in the Star Wars universe.  They go by the names the Light Side and the Dark Side in most Force traditions.  Light actions are generally unselfish and lead to the growth or maintenance of living creatures, or at the very least appealing to someone's better nature rather than force or coercion.  Dark actions are generally selfish or destructive, and rely more on an appeal to force than to persuasion.  Moral nuance is a fairly modern concept in Star Wars and there are a lot of actions that are questionable or borderline cases - to use an SWTOR example, Darth Marr is unquestionably a master of the Dark Side of the Force, but is a deeply committed defender of the Sith Empire not because it brings him power but because he genuinely cares for the Empire and its people.

2. One's actions have an outer manifestation.  Calling upon the Dark Side - quicker, easier, more seductive - can channel more energy through a person than the person's frame can handle, resulting in burst capillaries around the character's eyes and mouth, and the Dark Side taints all that it touches - staving off these effects is part of why so many Dark Siders are obsessed with immortality.  Conversely, the closer a Jedi becomes to the Force, the more likely it is that, rather than dying, a character will simply become part of the Force, and even those who are not yet dead tend to have longer natural lifespans.

3. There are places of power.  Generally those are tied in some way to some past Force-user, such as the Dark Side cave on Dagobah being the death-site of a powerful Dark Jedi, the Valley of the Dark Lords on Korriban being the result of millennia of Dark Side energies being imbued there, or the Voss caves being a result of the accidental sundering of the Voss species by the Jedi.  Places of power are a concentration of Force energy - an eddy or vortex in the current, if you will - which are only required for cinematic purposes.  Unlike items of power, below, places of power retain their power regardless of whether or not they are in use.

4. There are items of power.  These are never required for Force use, but may contain some sort of secret knowledge (holocrons and tomes) or may act as a focus and channel for a Force-user (talismans or weapons).  Long enough use may imbue them with a fraction of power of their own, though the power may strictly be in the story of the item, such as the Darksaber.  This is part of why "lineage" items are so important; the item is meant partly to inspire the next generation to whom it is passed.  For all of this, items of power may be nothing but Dumbo's magic feather, in that they allow the user to reach their potential, and should not be capable of self-activation, but require player agency to activate.

One of the consequences of these rules, looking them over, is that both Jedi and Sith are both obsessed with their pasts, and are steeped so heavily in tradition that tradition can be a shackle.  Age is an indicator of power; places of power have a story of their origin; items of power are only powerful because the user believes they are; moral behavior has a visible impact on the user.

There have been three basic approaches taken to the problem of rules for the Force in RPGs.

First came the "skill" approach, which, adapted specifically to Savage Worlds, is the approach I wind up using; if you want to skip the history of Star Wars RPGs, you can skip down and read that specifically.  In WEG Star Wars, there were three skills, bought initially as if they were attributes and then improved as if they were skills, Control, Sense, and Alter.  These three skills, and combinations thereof, were meant to accommodate all the powers we see in Star Wars; for instance, Obi-Wan's mind trick was a combination of Control (control of self and internal processes), Sense (perception and seeing the world around oneself), and Alter (impacting things outside the body); Luke reaching out to Leia through the Force was Control and Sense; Palpatine's Force lightning was Control and Alter.  A Force-user would typically learn them in the order presented, with Alter being the last thing learned, because control of self, and understanding of the surrounding world, was supposed to come before impacting the surrounding world.  It was not a strict requirement that the character "know" the power to use it, but the difficulty was higher if it was an off-the-cuff move.  This is also, in the main, the approach used by the Fantasy Flight games - you acquire Force skills the same way you acquire any other skills, by spending experience on them, and you have to decide where your experience will go in order to decide whether you'd rather learn Force Lightning, or learn to be better at the skills you already know.

Logically second and chronologically third came a "spellbook" approach.  This is what Saga Edition did.  As you grew stronger in the Force, you gained access to more Force powers.  It wasn't quite straightforward Vancian magic, but it was close, and if you were willing to accept a class-based system to begin with (I've never liked them), it worked pretty well.  The difference between it and true Vancian magic was that it was cast from a pool, rather than cast from a fixed list of spells per day.  This is such a well-understood rules approach that I don't feel the need to discuss the specifics.

Logically third, and chronologically second, was a hybrid approach.  In d20 Star Wars, a Force-using class would acquire the Control, Sense, and Alter "skills" as feats as they advanced, though they could acquire them out of sequence by spending feats.  This was combined with a spellbook approach, where the spellbook required the "components" of Control, Sense, and Alter to learn a "spell."  The reasons for this seem obvious in retrospect: most of the writing team on d20SW were old WEG veterans, and they tried to mold what they knew, and what they liked, onto the WOTC d20 standard.  In my opinion, this introduced a layer of needless complexity to the system, because it wound up being a feat tax that didn't actually solve the linear-fighter-quadratic-wizard problem.

As a matter of fact, none of the above approaches solved the linear-fighter-quadratic-wizard problem.  To some extent that was never going to be solved.  Han was never going to be able to lift C-3PO and convince the Ewoks that they were really gods; the clone troopers were always going to be something less than the Jedi.  The problem is that this is never fun to play, or for that matter to run.  From experience, this leads to situations where either the party is all Jedi, or the Jedi are heavily restricted and forced by narrative not to be Jedi until the critical moment.  Mixed parties in high-adventure circumstances, such as the party on Endor where there's no point in pretending Luke isn't Luke, have a bad habit of becoming the Jedi Show.

Base-book Savage Worlds mostly avoids that problem.  There are, of course, things that every character is better at, but even magic is not game-breaking in its power, and, without outside intervention, everyone is built on the same experience level, and, with all else being equal, the odds of a "golden BB" shot are never so small that even the most powerful character can ignore them.  The power gap between a Legendary wizard and a Novice fighter is never so great that the Novice does not have a (potentially very narrow) path to victory in a straight mechanics-based fight at any tech level.  Its ability to avoid the linear/quadratic problem is one of the reasons I like the system. 

Savage Worlds typically breaks magic use into what are called Arcane Backgrounds, which characters can take as Edges assuming they meet some basic requirements.  The typical backgrounds are: AB (Magic), AB (Miracles), AB (Psionics), AB (Super Powers), and AB (Weird Science).  There are a couple of others that crop up in specific sub-systems, like the Fantasy Companion introduces Alchemy, Bardcraft, and Sorcery, but the basic format remains the same - meet a minimum skill and attribute threshold, and take it just as you would, say, Martial Arts.  I chose to model Force Use on Arcane Background: Psionics for the Sith and Jedi, but I might approach a tradition like the Nightsisters of Dathomir through another Arcane Background.  In all cases, the Force backgrounds key off of the skill Use Force, which is Spirit-based.

That gets us our toes dipped in, but it doesn't address how Force powers are handled, or how things like Force talismans are handled.  Force powers are actually super-simple using the Savage Worlds rules as written.  Some of them, I simply excluded, on the same grounds that I excluded some species.  "Burrow," for instance, isn't really appropriate.  "Flight" is an arguable case, but even then, we don't tend to see Jedi flying so much as we see them leaping.  Perhaps the most controversial choice in that regard is to exclude "Resurrection."  I do this because we see one canonical example of it, in the sequel trilogy, and it is both poorly executed, and executed by a special-case character.  Resurrection, were it to be allowed, would be the province of masters, and of places of power - in other words, when the story requires it, not off-the-cuff.

At this point, the '90s solution to a problem like "how do I attack you with the Force?" is to say "you learn Force Lightning, Force Choke, Telekinetic Strike..." but that runs counter to the basic design philosophy of Savage Worlds.  Instead, all of those are, or at least can be read as, manifestations of the Bolt power, with different Trappings.  A Trapping is simply the set-dressing; Force Lightning is a Bolt (or Blast, or Burst) with the Electricity and (arguably) Darkness Trappings on it.  Most characters learn a power with a set of trappings already on it, so absolutely could learn all of the powers listed above, but that's a player choice and experience says most players are unlikely to do so.  A master (or at least a character with the Wizard Edge) can change Trappings on the fly, but this is a serious character investment.  My guiding philosophy on this is that Trappings are mostly how you differentiate schools; the Jedi tend to use telekinetic attacks because they grab whatever materials are in the environment, while the Sith tend to use lightning because they are imposing their will through that which wasn't present before.  Mechanically, the differences are smaller than the similarities.

This brings me to a mechanic introduced in SWADE: Tests.  Tests are things like "hey look over there!" or attempting to grapple a character.  It's also a perfect way to simulate one of the iconic Star Wars moves, the Force shove or the Mind Trick.  Force shove is a Test against the target's Strength, Agility, or Force Use; Mind Trick is a Test against Smarts, Spirit, or Force Use.  A successful shove moves a character a square; a Raise knocks the character prone.  A Mind Trick in combat produces a Distracted or Vulnerable result and indicates a moment of uncertainty; out of combat, it means the same sort of moment of uncertainty we see Obi-Wan create in A New Hope.

Those are enough to make a character, but not all of the Force-based options available, and they don't touch the four rules I've identified as things the Force must cover.  Those will wait for another day.