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The Senate / Re: Ask a simple question, get a simple answer
« on: February 26, 2019, 07:02:53 pm »
Thanks for the responses, guys! Glad my initial instincts bear out. As for the balance concerns, I think the main possibility I hadn't considered was using more than one force point generated by Channel Vitality in order to avoid spending the banked force points - my original thinking was that if the player wanted to spend more than one force point in an encounter, the interaction wouldn't be relevant anyway. I think I'll probably end up not allowing them to do it, especially since the two abilities are fairly powerful anyway. That said, I don't completely follow your logic here:
I get your point that allowing this interaction enables the player to bank up extra resources for a pivotal fight, but it's not without its limits. Since it takes about five encounters to level up, we're talking about five opportunities to gain and spend force points, at which point any excess force points will be reset anyway. If we assume that they're saving up all their force points for the final encounter before leveling up (presumably a boss fight or something), they've only gained 4 force points in the previous encounters (a nice boost, comparable to taking Force Boon, but not insane). In exchange, they've sacrificed their ability to use "normal" force points for all four of those encounters. The player could just as easily be spending one force point from their bank and recovering it with FPR in each of those four encounters, plus using however many force points they want from Channel Vitality, and they'd still have plenty of force points to spend one every turn in the final showdown. I neglected to mention this earlier, but they're 12th level now, meaning they're gaining 11+ force points at each levelup. Blowing all of those in one fight seems like it's probably overkill, and Destiny points enable some of the same shenanigans anyway.
Like StevenO touched on, I think that the definition of "encounter" is one of the major problems here. If I allow the interaction, suddenly every interaction the party has becomes "does that qualify as an encounter?!" which sounds unpleasant.
Yes, that would be overpowered, as you are likely accumulating more and more Force Points, so when you get into a boss fight, you can use a Force Point every turn...
I get your point that allowing this interaction enables the player to bank up extra resources for a pivotal fight, but it's not without its limits. Since it takes about five encounters to level up, we're talking about five opportunities to gain and spend force points, at which point any excess force points will be reset anyway. If we assume that they're saving up all their force points for the final encounter before leveling up (presumably a boss fight or something), they've only gained 4 force points in the previous encounters (a nice boost, comparable to taking Force Boon, but not insane). In exchange, they've sacrificed their ability to use "normal" force points for all four of those encounters. The player could just as easily be spending one force point from their bank and recovering it with FPR in each of those four encounters, plus using however many force points they want from Channel Vitality, and they'd still have plenty of force points to spend one every turn in the final showdown. I neglected to mention this earlier, but they're 12th level now, meaning they're gaining 11+ force points at each levelup. Blowing all of those in one fight seems like it's probably overkill, and Destiny points enable some of the same shenanigans anyway.
Like StevenO touched on, I think that the definition of "encounter" is one of the major problems here. If I allow the interaction, suddenly every interaction the party has becomes "does that qualify as an encounter?!" which sounds unpleasant.