Discussion Do Force Powers feel less compelling the more grandoise they become?

[Koda Fett]

I think the issue has more to do with power escalation, which extends beyond FU characters and into NFU ones as well. Person A writes themselves at a high level, Person B wants to continue to write in the fight and has their character meet that level, now Person A and Person B are in an escalating arms race. At this point, there's nothing that can be done about it. Chaos is a high-power environment, for better or worse. Someone above said find your people and that's all you can really do, because not everyone will write something you want to engage with and that's okay.

 

[Joy]

I don't know how to tag or quote on my phone lol hopefully Alan will know this is a reply to their last post.

For me it is an affect of watching and experiencing Disney SW for the past decade. Growing up we wondered things like how would the ro2 Sith would look like before the prequel films and then they gave us the Acolyte. We wondered what a force maelstrom would be like on the big screen and then they gave us ep9.

It's fatigue basically. I am lucky enough to experience things like Andor and then unlucky enough to have seen Acolyte. In role-playing I prefer to read and interact with characters who are grounded. Someone who doesn't feel unbeatable or is written to not to be trifled with. Stuff like this.

It feeds into the entire dynamic of writing op force powers. I don't personally want to read an entire armada having to deal with a force horror amplified by a Sith meditation spare etc. I want ROTS level opera in this type of scenario. I think most people do as well.

 

[Matsu Ike]

It terms of the movies aside from bufget being a small factor it was also usually focused on a small group. Chaos has hundreds of force users at any given time and the open sandbox of it allows for just about any level of it. As the EU established most of the beings that were incredibly power were able to use the force in ways others could not. We see this with the Aing-Tii and the rift as the energy there allows for some bizarre and powerful abilities with training but also knowing how to use it. Other abilities that were powerful if you had an understanding of the physics behind them you could ease the strain of using them. Alter environment, something that could do a lot if you tried to force it would take a lot but if you know how to do the smaller manipulations you can set the storm in motion and let it build with minimal strain and effort.

Me personally, I enjoy the worldbuilding that went into some of the more obscure. the sadly unpublished tales that were going to have a movie character from New Hope be shown things from a force god to understand there are far older things and before Revenge of the Sith came out they did the comic with several shorts leading up to it. One being about the precepts, force beings from before and outside of the galaxy. Tying into the Gaimen and Moore era of the comics which saw the forces influences upon cosmic level beings grow and would all be used to become Abeloth and be seen in the clone wars even if a little truncated to cut out some of the more powerful things like sending a human form of yourself back in time to create a new body that you can use if your father destroys your current form.

But all of that said, I welcome it, I love seeing some like Ashin and Rave opening a gateway to let force eldritch creatures through that at the time several of the stronger force masters teamed up to fight back. Or Vulps who uses his real life schooling to mak his use of alter environment technically detailed and powerful. Spencer using a force meld to combine the energy from an event threads force users to fling a star destroyer into a wormhole and give the Lords of the Fringe an event star destroyer. When you write it nice and fun yes it might not be for everyone. Some people do love their grounded style and that can be fun.... but there is something to be said for the over the top. The absurdity can feel incredibly pulp style which helped inspire among other things star wars itself so the genre fits in there.

 

[Alan]

I don't know how to tag or quote on my phone lol hopefully Alan will know this is a reply to their last post.

For me it is an affect of watching and experiencing Disney SW for the past decade. Growing up we wondered things like how would the ro2 Sith would look like before the prequel films and then they gave us the Acolyte. We wondered what a force maelstrom would be like on the big screen and then they gave us ep9.

It's fatigue basically. I am lucky enough to experience things like Andor and then unlucky enough to have seen Acolyte. In role-playing I prefer to read and interact with characters who are grounded. Someone who doesn't feel unbeatable or is written to not to be trifled with. Stuff like this.

It feeds into the entire dynamic of writing op force powers. I don't personally want to read an entire armada having to deal with a force horror amplified by a Sith meditation spare etc. I want ROTS level opera in this type of scenario. I think most people do as well.

also

what happened to lightsaber duels as a way to measure jedi vs sith power? where dey go

 

[Tegan Starfall]

There was a time long ago where you had to earn rank and power in the force. Overtime i watched as this shifted to the system Chaos uses today.

Having lived through both iterations I see the pros and cons of them both.

With the og system gaining power you had to rely on others to promote you just so you could do bigger and better things. In a way it made the achievement feel special. However the biggest draw back in those days was some people didn't want others getting more ic power so would purposely deny them advancement so they could keep it for themselves.

It made gaining the power meaningful but there were always those who wanted to be top dog. No matter what so stifled others growth.

Now everyone can be as powerful as they want without people holding them back. It feels less special but there is no gatekeeping as a trade off.

I think its alot better system now.

But on just power scaling I would say nfu have some crazy stuff to stop fu for tech. I mean back in my day void stones didn't exist, people just carried around Ysalamiri. Also beskar couldnt deflect nukes in my day. Jokes aside everything has gotten stronger and so has the force.

Also I wouldn't say fu are even stronger then when I first started rp star wars almost 30 years ago. I remember when first started a jedi Kamehamehaed a sith planet. I saw a jedi build a superweapon that targeted the darkside the force and could wipe out all darksiders. I saw thought bombs being thrown around left and right.

i think now the force is powerful but more restrained by the writers. More i could kill everyone but I won't.

 

[Alan]

i think now the force is powerful but more restrained by the writers.

Yeah but now every single invasion is guaranteed to have some massive force storm/Sith Ritual/Battle Meditation. Guaranteed. Without fail. Is that not a little.... much?

 

[Tegan Starfall]

Yeah but now every single invasion is guaranteed to have some massive force storm/Sith Ritual/Battle Meditation. Guaranteed. Without fail. Is that not a little.... much?

Every invasion is guaranteed crotosis, void stones, indestructible armor, and other antiforce/lightsaber tech/materials. To the point it negates the force basics.

To make it clear im not saying these shouldn't exist, they absolutely can and should.

Im saying one thing leads to another. A FU has to now think around these obstacles which in turn creates new obstacles for nfu. It's not just a one sided thing.

 

[Alan]

I think all the anti-FU stuff and tech and factory spamming is kinda lame now too.

 

[Aurelian of Vandemar]

I think it was said before: that's what invasions are for. They are to enable the most epic clashes and effects. They are the way of Chaos to show the great battles, the grand achievements, the epic performances.

There are plenty of opportunities for PvP to avoid having to read those grand impacts.

But seriously, if this is lame, that is overdone - do you want to find mutual mindsets or simply vent your frustrations? Because whatever some people will write, it will always go in a circle then.

 

[Darth Avida]

To me it depends on the circumstances. If a group of writers has spent months building up to a story where some use of the force would cause a cataclysmic event on a planet (i.e; an annihilation) and it is done mostly well then even a ridiculously grandiose ability can be compelling as it is proportional to the narrative.

But if you open a wormhole and unleash a force storm through it on a taungsday on Coruscant in the middle of an otherwise mundane thread, fighting happening or not, it invites everyone else to do the same thing and cheapens whatever it was the person (or people) were trying to do. So, in this case, yes. Even if this happens during an invasion, unless there was a ton of build up and it is believably (or actually reasonably, because there's plenty of unbelievable things that have happened that were also reasonable and didn't ruin whatever tension was in place before because it was manageable and something all writers could reasonably respond to) handled, for a lot of people it's going to have the same eye-roll response you'd get from dropping a wormhole in a random public thread.

it isn't the prefix of the thread that matters, it is the handling of the series of events (or lack thereof) that led to whatever grandiose display of power is taking place.

of course that's just my opinion, there's certainly people who view force abilities that are more powerful than the stuff shown in the original trilogy to be too much and there's people who view applications of the force like in SWTOR or TFU and other similar media to be the baseline average. I fall somewhere in between, not quite in the middle but close enough to it that seeing a big showy move done doesn't really ruin the mood for me either.

 

[Vren Rook]

As a normal NFU enjoyer, I hate the power escalation and the main character syndromes running around, ngl. Most (not all) are trying to "win" the big pvp thread by themselves. From personal experience: how many times do you want to overcharge a Force Storm? Isn't once enough? I'm all for AOE powers in play, but there comes a point where it just becomes another Tuesday in the battle instead of "oh that's cool".

And it's not just the Force sometimes. Like Koda said: it's the power creep. NFUs and their lizard cradles and voidstone armour are just not-wow tbh. Whatever happened to good ol "I use my jetpack and shoot at you from range"?

I use the fight between Obi-Wan and Jango on Kamino as example: Obi-Wan was a Jedi Master at that point - defs not useless in a fight. Buf Jango kept him busy for a hot minute WITHOUT lizards and voidstones. Just good ol range fighting. Obi-Wan didn't use grandiose powers to bring him down.

Similarly, Jango vs Mace on Geonosis. Mace didn't use grandiose powers to behead the mando. Just a well-placed lightsaber slice with his well-known aggressive lightsaber form.

I have noticed an increase in the power creep on the board and I have to say folks are starting to toe the line of the site rule to not be gods - FU and NFU. It would be nice to just have NORMAL fights for a change where there's just one or two big powers in play and where it's not necessary for an NFU to drop a seismic charge on someone to even the playing field.

It boils down to: just take damage folks. We live in a universe where you can get a cybernetic arm or leg. You don't have to die if you don't want to, but just imagine the story that can come from you losing a fight this round? Having to contend with the loss of a limb or something.