Force Magic

force lightning — © 1983 Disney/LucasFilm Ltd.

I’ve generally been lukewarm on the way the Star Wars system treated Force Powers. For most things in the game you can try anything you want. You’ll probably fail if you’re not skilled in it or it’s a ridiculously stupid idea. But you could try it. Not so with Force Powers. Want to try and Mind Trick that Stormtrooper? Need Influence. Want to retrieve your lightsaber? Need Move. Want to Force jump onto that ledge? Need Enhance. And then there were different skill boxes for moving vertically vs horizontally. You’re locked out of doing many Jedi things by a lack of purchased abilities. The granularity of it made the whole thing feel worse.

When Genesys came out I was intrigued by its magic system. Like the narrative system itself, what you could do was up to your imagination and the fate of the dice. You could try to do any magic you wanted. It came with a built in cost in terms of strain which limited how often you could do things. The more outrageous the harder it would be to achieve.

The last SW campaign I started running, one of my players wanted to be a Force Sensitive. I decided to import Genesys’ magic system in place of the Force powers. Since then, I’ve had some time playing as a Jedi in a Clone Wars campaign using the Force RAW so feel I can compare the two. RAW wins in the dark side aspect as it does a good job tempting you to draw on the dark side. As it’s primarily an Age of Rebellion game, we weren’t using Morality in my other campaign and my player is great RPer so he would clearly draw on the dark side at appropriate times and RP the consequences. But mechanically, RAW wins for tempting players.

Using the magic system wins in sheer creativity. In the AOR campaign, the Jedi player is making fun attempts at things with his Force powers. He fails as often as he succeeds but all results are hilarious. In the Clone Wars campaign, my Jedi uses and abuses Move because he’s invested heavily in it. I feel required to make use of that XP sink so I’m Force pushing and throwing everything. But that’s really about it. There’s some Enhance but haven’t taken the 40xp dive to really make use of Leap.

Both ways of doing the Force lead to different ways of playing. I’ve enjoyed both. So if you’ve looking to try using the Force in a new way, here’s the Force Magic system:

The Force is broken up into four skills, outlined below. Your Force Rating serves as your ability score. So if you are Force Rating 1, your base skill level is one green die. All skills are non-career skills. To use a power costs two strain and the difficulty is built based on how crazy you want to be.