TheSagaContinues

I actually wasn't trying to avoid getting a BaB of +7 when I went into Jedi Master.  I should have been.  I read your post carelessly and I have not played or run this game much in too long and I don't have the mastery of the rules I once did. 

What you say about sub-optimal choices is right of course.  You would have to be a bit deranged to think this exercise is about building an optimal character.

But my bonkers sounding JM/ FD is surprisingly effective.  Probably a better way of doing it is to take your scout talent as evasion, and picking up your third force talent with one of your Jedi talents with the one Jedi talent being Force Intuition.

I had a lot of trouble following your last paragraph as it is full of abreveviations I am not familiar with.  I figured it out eventually although I still don't know what CL stands for.
 

I am going to talk about playing a Hutt as a PCs.  I mostly present this as a character idea and type that is not at all obvious and is very dfferent to most PCs. 

I actually played a Hutt named Praga, who was possibly the only Hutt who was fit- he had humans sit on him while doing body curls.  Despite being hedonistic Praga was basically a nice being who championed droid rights, was elected a senator and dragged the head of one of the galaxy's worst groups of slavers to Coruscant in chains for trial. To my mind there is no reason every Hutt should be like Jabba.

Now over to my thoughts on how to build an effective Hutt character.

Obviously -6 to dex and a movement rate of 2 make this challenging.  Above all, you must take predictive defence. This makes your AC OK.  To get around you need a vehicle of some sort as with Jabba and his repulsor sled.  You take Vehicular Combat [which is an excellent feat anyway], so if you want to shoot something at range you do it from your vehicle, which isn't affected by your non existent dex. You carry a personal weapon capable of area effect attacks if you are without your vehicle.

When assigning characteristics you dump your dex, leaving it at 8-6=2.

Predictive Defence and Vehicular Combat allow you to avoid most of the negative consequences of having a useless dex and hardly being able to move. Don't get me wrong, these disadvantages will still show up at times, like when you are inside where your vehicle won't fit.

Now to the good side of being a Hutt. You get +2 to Str, Con and Int which is great. And since you are dumping Dex you can spend your remaining points on 5 attributes where you already have a total of +6.

The obvious class to start in is noble, which means you will want a good cha, say 14. You get your silver tongued re-roll on persuasion checks.

You use your +2 str to start with a 16 str making you a good melee combatant. At some point you want to get proficient with light sabers or advanced melee weapons.

How you spend your remaining points depends on what direction you want your character to go. There is nothing in the rules saying you can't be a force user, where you will want a good wisdom. If not you probably want to improve int and con.  Praga was a force user.

Your character will be an excellent "face", start with the highest number of skills as a noble, perhaps supplemented by a high int, good at melee and vehicular combat and be very resistant to some force powers.

StevenO- It seems my last post wasn't clear.  Be kind, it is my first post and we Sith lords have to stick together.

I was writing about building Darth Vader according to the rules as written [RAW] and specifically as the "best pilot in the galaxy".

Where you say, perfectly correctly:-

"I know there are people who push how "powerful" the Jedi are because they don't need trained skills as they have all of those talents available to utilize UtF with many Skills.  That can help some when you push your UtF to an extreme level and would want the same for many skills but talent slots are a little harder to come by than Trained Skills or just feats.  There's a big opportunity cost associated with dropping talents for those Skill Substitutions."

I just wanted to make him the best pilot possible by the RAW.  And I think my suggestions help that goal, even given the opportunity cost you mention.

All those talents that allow you to use UtF for most everything are another matter.

In a game where Jedi and Sith dominate the galaxy for most of it's history and the Jedi class starts with the fewest skills of all, these talents allow Jedi and Sith to get there skills and power generally up to the point where they can dominate the galaxy.  Worst of all is Insight of the Force, which is always banned in my games.

The fact force users are markedly more powerful than other PCs is great for simulating the movies but dreadful for balancing PCs against each other.