5+6 is 11 not 10.

Is this your sixth week in the game already? The odd xp from shaking seem unlikely to get to 10 otherwise.

@Bellona @MrTInce @P-47 Thunderbolt @RuusMarev @SuperWookie get 6 xp.

Well @P-47 Thunderbolt created this thread for you all to redirect our discussions to.

@Tramp Graphics and I are good friends in real life, we disagree on almost everything except that we both think star wars is cool. Arguing like an old married couple is just our thing.

As a 40 thousand foot view @P-47 Thunderbolt summaries it adequately (minus the poop in the pillows)... we're good friends who disagree on almost everything except star wars is cool, and arguing like an old married couple is just our thing.

To clarify the issue... is the premise of formulaicly converting from an a character organically grown (i.e. using an evolutionary algorithm to optimize a character) a la carte system, i.e. d6, to a not a la carte system, i.e. ffg star wars without respect to the conventions and mechanics of the ffg star wars system fundamentally ill posed. And does attempting to do it anyway strip off the evolutionary algorithm optimization result in a build that fails to live up to the espoused character concept, i.e. a character who is not good at anything (including the things the character is supposed to be good at) despite having spent (at last count 1760 xp). And if so does that imply the character should be rebuilt with the goal of fulfilling the theme and concept of the character while paying heed to the mechanics of the ffg system?

D6 obiwan in movie trilogy sourcebook (stat block pages 29-30) had Dexterity 3D Knowledge 3D+2 Mechanical 2D Perception 3D+1 Strength 3D Technical 3D Rise of separatists (page 93) obiwan has Brawn 3 Agility 3 Intellect 5 Cunning 5 Willpower 4 Presence 4 I don't know how you're getting from 3D+2 knowledge and 3D technical round down to 5 intellect, or from 3D+1 perception to 5 cunning and 4 presence using a 1 Die to 1Die conversion.

Hey now we're talking about optimization as it pertain to Korath. @Tramp Graphics. In ffg npcs are built with high attributes and low skill ranks.... look at obiwan's stat block on page 93 of rise of the separatists and tell me if your "system" even comes close to converting him (granted he's built as an npc... but I'm talking skill ranks and attributes). The problem with designing a system to linear interpolate from extreme edge cases is it doesn't capture the stuff in the middle. How does it do with Lando? He has stats in the jewel of yavin. If you're going to try to reverse engineer a linear fit... you should be doing a least squares fit to a whole lot off data in the middle and drawing the best line through the center of the cloud. However what you should really be doing is looking for the official d6 stat block, which also has an ffg stat block, which is closest to Korath's d6 stat block and deltaing away from that in ffg... because that potentially accounts for non linear effects in the "conversion" (and you don't have use just 1 character, you can find individual stats that match and just convert them) But as we've discussed in our other hotly debated topic, the "conversion" of star ships, for the most part (paraphrasing you) ffg made up stats out of "whole cloth", because ffg didn't get their stats by converting from another system... why would you expect that you could generate consistent ffg stats by converting stats? It's a fundamentally I'll posed problem.

@Tramp Graphics 2 is average for who? a typical human noncombatant minion npc has 2 for an attribute if you're trying to use that as a baseline....well you're not going to shine quite as brightly when compared to generalist starting character PCs, or when your tango with a nemesis pirate chief who is in the story as filler/a bridge to the important stuff. 3 yellow or 4 green, is the jack of all trades in an area they mostly ignore level of proficiency for experienced PCs... or a slightly specialized starting character. You're welcome for this years December birthday and Christmas gifts (rise of the separatists and collapse of the republic), not sure if your latest reworking was before our after you got them on Oct 29 this year. So to everyone out there.... we're good friends In real life and arguing like an old married couple is just our thing... don't mistake it for a flame war or ill intent towards each other. But "converting' characters between dissimilar systems is an oxymoron, if you don't rebuild with respect to the new system, then whatever adaptive design optimization achieved through organic growth in the source system is lost before you get to the new system. You're good at seeing minute difference but have trouble seeing large scale similarities. The "best" you can hope for when transitioning between dissimilar systems is to keep the major theme of the character. I agree that you could convert from d6 to genesys, you can't convert between d6 and ffg star wars. D6 is a la carte, genesys is a la carte, ffg star wars is not a la carte. That's the fundamental reason why if you try to covert from d6 into ffg star wars, the resulting ffg character won't be comparable to characters homegrown in the ffg star wars system. Your dice conversion formula don't work either... expecting there to to be a clean linear conversion formula is a fool's errand.

You can still take the spec but can't use any of the force talents (and force rating is a force talent, so it doesn't boost your force rating unless you already had a force rating)

If you want RAW I say mix armorer a d niman disciple in either order. Otherwise there's a cannon/legends force tradition homebrew universal spec thread where jensarri got covered The discussion of jensarri started with this post Edit: I see @Jegergryte already posted in this thread.

Given the overwhelming force she's decided to "rescue" rotta herself and return him to Jabba.

No.

It looks great!

@P-47 Thunderbolt The laats determine that there are at least 3 starcraft (one being a fighter), and firing into the hanger risks detonating fuel cells. The fighter is being prepped for launch. There's also some speeder bikes.

A generalist starting character can have four 3's and two 2's for attributes and 2 ranks in brawl, if a character never advances significantly beyond starting character capabilities in any area they're going to be overshadowed in every area by someone else in the party and it won't even be close. And someone who efficiently built a jack of all trades character can overshadow them in everything. This is essentially what happened with Tramp's 1800 xp signature character Korath Lorren, 4 attributes at 3, two at 2, no more than 3 ranks in any skill (and the there's were rarer), at least 1 rank in most skills, many had two, few had 3, had a wide variety of talents and force powers but didn't have the attributes or skills to make good use of almost any of them. E.g. The full throttle chain of talents was useless for him because he only had 2 cunning and he flew a sil 5 ship that couldn't punch it and only got 1 pilot only maneuver per round. He drained the destiny pool fighting what for any other master character in the game was a mook. About the only thing he had going for him was 4 force dice but he didn't have the depth in any force power tree to take advantage of it... that and he had super tricked out gear that he added to his sheet for free when converting to the system. Edit: how such a character came to be was he wasn't built/designed to fulfill the espoused character concept, he didn't even grow adaptively in response to feedback from the campaign (which by nature of being adaptive design can be considered optimization under an evolutionary algorithm), Tramp devised a formula which he used to convert the character from another system without respect to or consideration of the mechanics of this system, Korath is the only non starting character I've ever seen that couldn't be considered optimized under any definition. New players to the system might not know the developers expected players to put most of their starting xp into raising attribute (which I think is plainly stated in at least core book), tramp made that "mistake"/violation of conventions with Korath. Circling around to the point... a character who doesn't shine at anything mechanically, not even at being a jack of all trades, relative to other players does NOT mechanically generate spotlight/center stage opportunities. Maybe he did it in response, maybe he would have done it anyway, but he metagamed the narrative/story to place his character at the center of the story/spotlight virtually all of the time, which created enough friction with 3 batches of other players to kill the campaign 3 times. Twice (the second and third times) when the campaign was just about dead, I tried to step in either as GM or joining as a player to prolong the life of the campaign, both times he rebuffed my efforts to extend the life of the campaign and blamed me for the campaign dying. This is the explanation behind his grievances with me regarding the character. Maybe if he had the stats to mechanically generate the center stage opportunities (and he apparently holds a grudge against me for recommending a character build that would have generated center stage opportunities consistent with his espoused character concept), he wouldn't have killed the game by causing interplayer conflict by meta gaming the narrative. Generating center stage/spot light opportunities of the type you desire to roleplay is how optimizing stats can enhance roleplaying. Those bolded few sentences was the point I was trying to get at since the beginning of the thread.

An unoptimized character isn't good at anything... an optimized character is good at something but not usually everything, you can still choose to be bad at something have the roleplaying experience you just described, but then have a self discovery arc and find/realize what you're actually good at and pivot to it. Not being good at anything leaves roleplaying a farce as the only entertaining option... Korath Lorren is the only character I've seen who wasn't really good at anything (which is kind of impressive in a bass ackward way considering he had about 1800 xp).

If you "roleplay" as being an awesome warrior and have trouble fighting mooks.... the narrative coming out of the roles is you have trouble fighting mooks (i.e. the resulting narrative won't be that you're an awesome warrior). To get the roleplay/narrative experience of being good at something you have to stats to give you opportunity to being successful.

Jack of all trades aren't min maxed but they can be optimized... min maxed and optimized are not synonymous, min maxing is a very narrow subset of optimization. As the number of ranks increase, the per rank cost increases. Also 4 green is statistically indistinguishable from 3 yellow in terms of scoring success. And increasing an attribute affects multiple skills. So if you want to to be good at a lot of things you want to boost attributes and not spend much xp on skills. There are force powers (e.g. enhance,influence, farsight) that allow you add force dice to skills or commit force dice to boost an attribute, since there are a lot of agility stuff you can add force dice to and commit force die to boost A human could start with 3's in brawn, intellect, cunning, and willpower, with the jedi career:padawan/knight/niman-disciple (sentry master and padawan survivor works in place of niman) could have a 3 in brawn, 4's in intellect, cunning, and willpower with 4 force dice using the enhance power to compensate for low agility and a lesser extent low brawn, and influence to compensate for low presence and be able to succeed at most skill checks without having spent a lot of xp on skills, and the combo would give you a good number of ranks in parry, reflect, improved reflect, improved parry making you a decent lightsaber duelist as well. That's not the only well rounded combo but it's an easy one. And you don't have to buy much of the padawan tree to get to the force rating and dedication. So you can design a character to be good at a lot of things, a specialist will be better than you in their are of focus, but you'll actually be pretty good at a lot of things.

Whether or not you remember saying "Korath is a real ginsu with a lightsaber" you're the only person I've ever heard say "ginsu with a lightsaber" with the exception of me quoting you so yeah you said it. There were 3 batches of players you drove away, whether you want to call it 2 or 3 campaigns I only offered to GM a solo campaign for you to finish of Korath's story after you drove every other player out of that game that I wasn't part of and it was just you and the GM and you were on the third GM who you were arguing with because you were insisting against RAW that a chase scene with ties ended when you got to short range because the ties had close range sensors and that GM said he was going to quit if you didn't stop arguing, I offered to GM and that GM handed the reigns over to me because he didn't want to deal with you anymore. I never tried to force you into a no win confrontation with a star destroyer and flat out told you that you could jump to the safety of hyperspace after you cleared the atmosphere, but you refused to do so until you were on the other side of the planet from all imperials so they couldn't see you jump to hyperspace and calculate your likely destination. But seriously, you can't expect to outrun multiple groups of ties which have speed 5 and 2 pilot only maneuvers per round in a speed 3 ship with one pilot only maneuver per round especially on Kamino which is a featureless ball of water with nothing for you to hide behind. So to accommodate you I said you could fly into a hurricane to escape the ties but if you rolled a despair on your pilot check you would crash the ship and drown because those are realistic consequences. Now tying this back to the topic of this thread... i.e. the merits of optimized vs optimized characters, you turned the hurricane escape plan down and insisted that you could use the full throttle chain of talents to boost your ship's speed to 5 and thereby escape them despite having only 2 cunning so it would only last 2 rounds and you'd have spend at least one of those rounds accelerating because sil 5 ships can't punch it and only get 1 pilot only maneuver per round. You insisted (against RAW) that full throttle didn't just boost your top speed but also boosted your speed because if it didn't the talents were worthless so they couldn't work that way, I told you that you should not infer RAI from whether talents make sense for a character not optimized to take advantage of them. When I refused to let you break the RAW chase rules and the RAW full throttle talents rules, you refused to play with me as the GM, that was an, i think, 2 days span of time, and you used that as an excuse to blame me for that particular death of the campaign. I didn't get involved in round 3 until you insisted KathyKitten change her character concept and lose her ship which the GM had already approved of and said could dock with your ship and be pulled through hyperspace without a problem, becausethe GM said there was no problem. You insisted there was a problem, where there was none, so that you would have a "logical reason" for you to insist for Korath to be the only one with a ship, which by your logic means everyone has to defer to your character or be forced out of the game. Which I corrected called because you are eminently predictable, and you proved me right when you threatened to boot KathyKitten's master character out of the game for not showing Korath the proper respect IC, that IC conflict ended with her OPTIMIZED character one shotting the UNOPTIMIZED Korath dead, which the GM retconned to Korath being stunned unconscious in response to which KathyKitten quit the game. Regarding the Rei v Aris Wren fiasco 1) turnabout is fair play (you forfeited your right to complain about one of your characters being booted from the campaign IC when you did that to another player's character). 2) if you're going to claim that good roleplaying justifies d!ckish IC behavior, you've got nothing to complain about when I roleplayed how my character would respond to unprovoked verbal assault IC, because after all that was just good roleplaying. 3) I gave you the courtesy of telling you that Aris' IC response to being immediately berated by a stranger upon entering a cantina would be to leave, resulting with Rei having no connection to the party, and you still insisted that I respond in character, so I IC did exactly what you told me you wanted me to do OOC and then you got upset OOC after Rei ended up with no connection to the party when you had already been told what Aris' in character/roleplay response would be. 4) I only refused to play/round Robin GM in a game with Rei, after out of character you announced your intent to roleplay an antagonistic rivalry between Rei and Aris. That's what I refused to be a part of. You refused to give up the rivalry and I quit the game, THEN and only then did you go back and edit the, out of the blue, berating post to something that was only mildly offensive IC, in an attempt to get me to rejoin the campaign, while still insisting on being able to roleplay an antagonistic rivalry between Rei and Aris. But for me no gaming is better than bad gaming and I wasn't about to sign on for perpetual in character arguments involving a character I was emotionally invested in. And you blamed my refusal to roleplay an antagonistic rivalry between Aris and Rei for killing the campaign, without accepting responsibility for you insisting on roleplaying an antagonistic rivalry between Aris and Rei. 5) I only created Chemdat as a starting character in order for him to be Korath's padawan, and to so bear the brunt of the in character verbal abuse being dispensed by Korath, to shield the other players and extend the life of the campaign, which I could only do because I had no emotional investment in the character. But you OOC refused to have Chemdat as Korath's apprentice because violated some arbitrary campaign guideline (namely he knew/was the problem child younger brother of my master character Elias) you made up and insisted on even though you weren't the GM and despite the GM having approved Chemdat. So at your insistence (you made a big stink about it, and keep bringing up how Chemdat violated campaign guidelines as if it were a huge offense instead of being intended to help you get the rp experience you desired) I dropped Chemdat from the campaign and created Aris, a starting character I was invested in playing. So you are directly responsible for Aris being there to be a recipient of Rei's unprovoked verbal assault, which for some "unknown reason" (your later announced intent to instigate an antagonistic rivalry between Rei and Aris) you directed at Aris who had walked in the door only moments before Rei (close enough that Rei could have reasonably seen her walk in, as REI was walking down the street, and a blue skinned pantoran would have been hard to miss) instead of any other character in the cantina.

Because I read it before midnight.

"Ginsu with a lightsaber" is not wording *I* would use to describe a character, it is an exact quote which you have used repeatedly over the years to describe Korath. The first time I heard you use it back I think in 2005 when you were describing Korath to me for the first time the sentence was "He's a real ginsu with a lightsaber". Earlier in this thread you expressed the same idea in different vernacular From page 2Elias is referring to my signature character, Elias is referring to my signature character, Korath, who was never even brought up, nor is he the subject of this thread. That character was a D6 character, converted to D20 RCRB, and again to F&D. He started out as a focused lightsaber jockey, and, indeed, a lot of his XP in D6 went into that skill, but a lot more went into many other, more diverse skills as time went on playing him in an actual campaign In all three failed play by posts on this forum the campaign was centered around the jedi star (Korath's ship), in the last one you tried coerce KathyKitten away from playing a star fighter ace with here own sil 3 ship into being a gunner on your ship with her junior character, and when after much antagonism her master character didn't give you what you felt was the proper respect you announced your intent to drop off the character at the next port, thereby forcing the character out of the campaign. The GM had to retcon her one shotting Korath dead to stunning Korath unconscious and KathyKitten quit the campaign shortly thereafter. That is perhaps the clearest example of what you do, metagame power playing... saying it's my way or the highway after trying to make sure there is no other option to stay in the game. As for Rei... and Korath... who you professed to a drill sergeant of a jedi master... when your idea of roleplaying a character is berating of the players in character, that violates rule zero don't be a d!ck, good roll playing never justifies d!ckish behavior. right after I had compromised at your insistence what my "millennial female pantoran force sensitive smuggler" starting character would have in character said (i.e. I compromised my good roleplaying) to let you have the "big reveal" moment that was already obvious to everyone else in the campaign, you turned around and berated me in character, refused to alter it when I asked, insisted that I respond in character to resolve it... I did... my millennial female character left the cantina after being insulted after having just walked into it and not having seen how the fight started. The in character good roleplaying that you insisted on left your starting character without a connection to the party. At that time the mediation started and you announced for the first time that you wanted to roleplay an ongoing antagonistic rivalry between our characters which I was not down for, you refused to give up, then I quit the campaign, then you went back and edited the initial post that triggered it but still refused to give up on the antagonistic rivalry between our characters, but that was too little too late because I had already left the campaign.

This is the definition of min maxed for combat, which is a very specific choice of objective function... min max means to be awesome at one thing or a small set of things and suck at everything else... you have further restricted min maxing to the one thing you're good at being combat but you could also minmax to being a good face and suck at everything else. Maximizing utility, a.k.a. max meaning, is to try to have the highest AVERAGE ability across a very broad set of skills, these are the characters that can pull their weight in any situation without being the best at anything, they are typically better at everything that a specialized character hasn't specialized in, so frequently end up being the second best character in the group at everything... this let's them fill holes when a specialized PC misses the session or when the players split the party.

This is someone who understands optimization... I commend you sir. I will extend this slightly to being optimized for utility (jack of all trades) characters who can at least make do in any situation even if they aren't the best at any task in the group, these are the characters who are second best in the group at everything, that's my most frequent target.