Fwurg

[Brend]

In the Force Power ideas thread Pixie raised some concerns with regards to the way Virtue points and promotion requirements currently interact with getting Force Powers. As I explained there, a lot of the numbers in the proposed rules are not set in stone yet, and a bit of fiddling and discovery is necessary to get them right. This post is a write-up of the discoveries I made. It concludes with the changes I will be making to the Jedi rules to allow for a better progression through a Jedi's career.

tl;dr: Padawan start is corrected and Promotion requirements are relaxed.

A separate post on Force Powers is forthcoming. It will discuss Force Power access and structure.

Summary of Staring Knowledge

This sections lists all relevant rules information at the moment of writing. (Since I will be updating the rules, this is necessary for the post to make sense later on.)

5 Light Virtues: Benevolence, Tolerance, Righteousness, Serenity, Perseverance
5 Dark Virtues: Ferocity, Selfishness, Obsession, Vengeance, Ruthlessness

Philosophies (two major virtue / one minor virtue):

• Universal Force: Benevolence, Serenity / Righteousness
• Unifying Force: Righteousness, Perseverance / Benevolence
• Living Force: Tolerance, Benevolence / Serenity

( Virtue and Philosophy reference: http://13w.nl/test-html/fwurg2/virtues.html )

Progression:

• Start with 15 dots (2 in each light, 1 in each dark)
• Padawan start with 2 moved virtues
• You can shift at most one dot between virtues at the end of a mission

• Advancement to Padawan: Must have shifted a single virtue point
• Advancement to Knight: Major virtues at 6+ and 5+
• Advancement to Master: Major virtues at 9+ and 7+, minor at 4+
• Both promotions award +1 virtue dot to all virtues
• Promotion only with no more than 1/5 of virtue points in Dark
• Never have more than 1/3 of virtue points in Dark

Note: the words "move" and "shift" are both used in this text to indicate taking a virtue point from one virtue to another.

Analysis of Virtue Requirements for Promotion

We investigate some progressions, so we need some characters:

• Odya, a smallish green initiate of indeterminate species with a curious lack of understanding of Galactic Basic's grammar rules. Has shown great aptitude for predicting what will come of choices yet to be made.
• Kyle Natark, a human mercenary that discovered his inner strength, basically wears the same clothes all the time. Only joins the Jedi later on, but for the purposes of progression and virtues he starts out as an initiate regardless.
• Labas'in, a twi'lek became an initiate of the Jedi at the age of 2, and has been in several "purple glowy ball" incidents, as well as knowing the complete and full layout of all ventilation ducts in the temple by heart.

For the purposes of this post, let's assume that the players of these characters already know what philosophy they want their character to end up with: Odya will follow the Unifying Force, Kyle Natark will follow the Universal Force, and Labas'in will follow the Living Force.

I wrote out the progression for Odya and Kyle Natark in full, including several "mistakes" for Kyle Natark (i.e., virtue moves that did not help them reach promotion and in fact moved them away from it). Yup, we'll skipped Labas'in completely. Unless there's something really new about the way Labas'in's player would move virtues, it wouldn't help us a lot with new insights.

For brevity (hah, as if that is every going to happend in an analysis-post written be me...) I will omit the fully written out progressions for Odya and Kyle Natark. From writing out the progressions I have gleaned the following insights:

• It appears you need at least 7 missions to be eligible promotion to Knight with respect to your virtues (This also follows from basic math...)
• Making a more than one "mistake" is a problem with regards to time to promotion. The first "mistake" is not an issue since you also need to accumulate 50 training points. Correcting multiple "mistakes" will take additional missions.
• Floundering around not knowing what your character stands for will stand in the way of promotion. (E.g., first going for the Universal Force and then deciding to go for the Living Force might require you to move over points from Serenity to Tolerance.)

Note that "mistake" in this sense means a virtue move by the player that did not help them out. There is also the possibility that a player cannot shift a virtue, in which case the mission is effectively ignorable due to the requirements of training points on promotion.

For the rest of this analysis we am mostly interested in the shortest possible route to get from Initiate all the way to Master. So we are going to assume that the players of these characters make no "mistakes", and know how to plan ahead. (For this analysis it is relevant to note that all Philosophies are the same from a mathematical point of view: they all have exactly the same requirements on their major and minor virtues. So, for determining the shortest possible route to promotion, we'll just relabel all virtues to A, B, C, D, etc., and declare a Philosophy X that has A and B as major, and C as minor virtue.)

Jedi promotion table

Note that Padawan get two virtue shifts at character creation, so a padawan's creation will put them in the situation of Mission 2 on this table!

From this analysis we learn the following:

• Once promoted to Knight, there are only 4 missions necessary to get to the situation where your virtues make you eligible for promotion again. (Note that there are several other requirements next to the virtues)
• To become a Jedi Knight, 11 of your 15 virtue dots are prescribed by your philosophy (leaving 4 free); To become a Jedi Master, 20 of your 25 virtue dots are prescribed by your philosophy (leaving 5 free)
• Should you declare for a different philosophy as a Knight (this is not prohibited by the rules, but guaranteed to be brought up by the Council during their evaluation of the promotion proposal), this will greatly impact the amount of missions you need to complete before matching the required virtue distribution.

The fact that it is quicker to align your virtues for promotion to Jedi master is to be expected: your starting situation is dictated by the requirements of promotion to Knight. (Again, note that padawan start out with 2 moved virtues, making them a little quicker.)

Conclusions

Our analysis of the current promotion rules has shown that:

• There is an inconsistency between promotion to padawan and starting as padawan. Promotion to padawan requires 1 virtue points to shift, whereas starting as padawan allows 2 virtue shifts.
• There are significantly more missions between Initiate → Knight than there are between Knight → Master.
• There is, arguably, little room for expressing additional virtues besides those prescribed by the promotion requirements.

Virtue requirements are not the only requirement on promotion. There is also a Training Point requirement. The training point requirement can (roughly) be paraphrased as "collect 50 training points"; given that you gain +5 per mission, you will need between 10 and 7 (due to apprenticeship bonusses) missions to gather enough training points.

Missions are not guaranteed to allow a virtue point move. Therefore, requiring 7 virtue shifts to get from Initiate to promotion to Knight leaves little in the way of actual development and changing one's mind.

Changes to the Virtue & Promotion Rules

Given this analysis, and the conclusions we can draw from it, I have changed the rules as follows:

• Padawan start out with only a single virtue shift.
• Knight promotion requires your major virtues at 5 and 4 (leaving 6 free)
• Master promotion requires major virtues at 8 and 6, and your minor virtue at 4 (leaving 7 free)

The padawan change removed the inconsistency of becoming padawan via the Initiate route versus starting out as a padawan. Incidentally this also moves the virtue shift that was originally free of charge to requiring a mission.

The Knight promotion change frees up 2 virtue points to be used freely. It will take 4 virtue moves to go from the padawan state to be eligible for promotion again.

Analog to the knight changes, the Master promotion change frees up 2 virtue points. It will now take 4 virtue moves to go from the just-promoted-to-knight state to be eligible for promotion again, given that you keep adhering to your declared philosophy.

I will discuss access to Force Powers in a separate post.

Note that these requirements are only there for the promotions. During your whole career as Knight you may freely shift virtues around without fear of being demoted. (The only exception being that you should not put more than 1/3 of your virtues in dark virties, that will get you booted out of the Order.)

[Pixie]

Thank you for sharing!

At first glance I think I like what I'm reading. With the changes it seems like there is more room to explore characters a bit, without it costing many, many OOC years to progress.

[Brend]

Note that some more freedom will be gained due to the upcoming tweaks for issues described in Write-up: Force Power Rules Issues!

[Pixie]

Forgot to mention this yesterday: There seems to be a problem displaying the image in the analysis...

[Brend]

Err, right. Fixed that! (Also fixed it in Write-up: Force Power Rules Issues..)

(The problem was that I added the image URL as https:// instead of http://... technical mumbo-jumbo... Well, this will have to do.)

[Brend]

For my own information; posted here so others can use it as well when thinking about things.

The new minimal requirements jedi progression table is as follows:

Jedi promotion table