News From the Developers of the Force and Destiny Beta

Hello Force and Destiny™ beta testers,

In this week’s update (pdf, 317 KB), we introduce more changes to some of our fearsome (and not so fearsome) adversaries. Although some of these changes are minor, a couple profiles saw some major modifications to decrease or increase their effectiveness:

• The Imperial Assassin sees his offensive potential decrease slightly. Pairing his high Agility with a disruptor rifle made for a profile that was a bit too readily tailored for killing Player Characters.
• Meanwhile, the Fallen Master is getting a bit of an upgrade; he gains the Improved Reflect talent. With his high Reflect ability – and now Improved Reflect – the Fallen Master is a dangerous ranged combatant even if he doesn’t have a ranged weapon. PCs may have to close to engage him if they want to take him on, which is just what the Fallen Master wants!
• Similarly, the Inquisitor now has the Improved Parry talent as one of his optional selections. Improved Parry makes the Inquisitor brutal in close combat, since it combines nicely with his three ranks in Adversary. However, it does leave him with one key vulnerability: the inability to protect himself from ranged attacks with Reflect. The GM should always make sure the main nemesis has a vulnerable point, after all! However, to ensure the Inquisitor wasn’t too terrifying in close combat, we toned down his Intimidating Presence ability slightly. We didn’t want him to guarantee Improved Parries for every hit he suffered.

Finally, we made a small addition to the Terrify talent. Taking this talent now gives you Conflict at the start of each session. You may be wondering why we added this new game effect, and also why we only added it to one talent in the book. The answer to the first question is that this is a concept we want to explore in the future, and we want to start establishing it as a possibility now. The answer to the second question is that we don’t want to guarantee that a specialization makes someone fall to the dark side, so we want to be judicious in the number of these talents we add, especially to a single specialization.

That’s it for this week. Let us know how these adjustments play out in your games. We look forward to hearing your feedback!

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