Fwurg

[Jhovall]

Hello all,
I would like to join the game, and I only would like to create a Jedi.

I made a character using the character creation, however it seems like it does not work at all and the wiki page bugs.
http://www.fwurg.net/dokuwiki/ic:Jaicen%20Hedoss

Well, since my character concept might be unique I'd like to talk about the possibilities.

Name: Jaicen Hedoss
Age: 22
Jedi Padawan
Race: Human
concept: Drone master

Elaboration:
Character padawan since a very young age, during a training excercise on a jedi temple horribly injured. His nervous system got horribly wrecked beyond repair and is confined to an advanced hovering wheelchair. He still has a strong force connection and focused more on droid programming and using the force to connect to them. Since Jaicen is confined to a wheelchair his two battledroids do the physical work for him (and have his physical stats), Jaicen made two lightsabers for these droids and during a combat almost all his attention goes through remotely controlling them (He has to be in the vicinity to do this).

His force "powers" are force lightning and mind tricks. His skills are mostly droid repair and programming. Furthermore his droids have the lightsaber skills.

His attitude is somewhat fatalistic and patient and his view is on the world is 'gray'. He likes to play the part of a normal non-force sensitive human and if people want to see him as a helpless disabled in a wheelchair: sure, whatever.

[Chriz]

Welcome :)

I converted your character page to the new template, it looks much better now.

Your character concept is intriguing, however I feel it might be kind of hard to match with the low tech Star Wars galaxy. Droids are not intelligent in the Star Wars universe and the ones that are are clumsy. However if your character completely controls the droid it could work.

I say droid because I believe that mentally controlling one droid is already a very hard task for a Padawan, this also gives your character more room to develop. Controlling more droids at once could be part of the skills you develop in the future.

Some notes on your character stats:
Jedi Creation: "A new character starts life with three Force Powers at level 1 or with two Force Powers where one of these powers is level 1 and the other is level 2."

You should still choose your second lighsaber style.

Don't forget to add your background story on the page of your character and get him a nice avatar.

[Jhovall]

Hey,

Thanks, it would indeed be a possible enhancement if I could control more robots. I could make it that I could fight with one lightsaber robot and want to control more. (The droid has my lightsaber skills and my physical stats).

Somehow this force heal came into my character, and I don't want to use it.

[Elmer]

Lets see: Even though cybernetics are very developed in the setting, I think your idea of a wheelchair padawan is very interesting, and of course no problem to justify :) (All along the ways of 'we cannot connect to this specific part' all the way to 'no I dont want to be a cyborg'.)

Keep in mind that, like Chriz said, droids are limited. Basically they are very specialised. Meaning the better they are at a thing, the more they suck in the rest. Good combat qualities? They cannot talk or do detailed work. More importantly, although combat droids do exists, their power are in general dwarfed by the power of the Jedi.

However this does not mean that we have no options here: Your character is a jedi, this means he is awesome and breaking the laws of nature is basically his reason for existence ^^. You already said that you wanted to specialize in 'making droids skills' so there we have some leeway as well. Combat droids who can challenge padawan do exists, but are expensive. However when you make them yourself, cost is a much smaller problem.

A bigger point of discussion is that one of the main points of the force is that you cannot affect mechanics. So controlling droids is not really a thing. Or better, really not a thing. This can be combated for example by declaring that your droids have a very complex control mechanism you can control (using telekinesis), or simply by programming them very well (or with combinations and so.) The problem with controlling their switches is that if you can do that, so can somebody else (if he/she finds out that he/she can flip the switch.) The problem with programming is that as a unwritten rule the Jedi own. So basically your droids can never be as cool as the jedi, even though they are created by a jedi.

At the other hand, you get a lot of versatility out of droids. Basically you walk around with your own personal army of minions.

Since one of the points of droids is that they are that they are specialized, I think we can use this to make your character more interesting (for as far it isn't already ^^)

Maybe you can have some droids for specific tasks. So for each mission you need carefully need to select which droid(s) to take along to do your bidding. Over time the amount of droids your jedi can effectively control might grow. Allowing your jedi more options. A limited amount of available droids might be in order to prevent things from getting out of hands. Your limited amount of droids can easily be justified with the reasoning that building them and repairing them costs time. So you cannot have an unlimmited army simply because you don't have the time to build one. And no master will allow you to bring along an army of droids as long you are padawan :).

[Elmer]

What I forgot to mention is the following basic problem:
Droids are static to what they do and very limited in their skills. What you probably want is to extend your skills into your droids but currently we have no mechanics yet to support this in a satisfying way. So we need to find a way to do this without making the droids awesome instead of the Jedi who actually is the awesome guy here and without harming the setting.

[Brend]

Mmm. That sounds like an interesting character concept.

It might be a very difficult thing to do though from the Padawan level though... I think that Elmer already highlights most of the things we need to figure out.

One footnote I would like to add is the fact that if you want to control droids through the force, this will most likely have to be expressed through a force power that we still need to design. And that will come with some limitations attached. The power you sketch, for example being able to control a droid from 1 kilometer distance, is already an impressive feat and getting it to do lightsaber combat at range is extremely impressive (and that's not even taking into account all the nasty exploits I can think of :P).

So, it might be that the actual droid-controlling comes into play at the Jedi Knight. We have a few powers that are somewhat comparable in 'control' functions, but none offer the 'assuming direct control' ability. Life Energy Manipulation might do so with a fourth rank power designed by a Jedi master, but that's the only one that I see working on living beings.

I'm interested in seeing how we can accomodate your ideas, but I feel that it will require some thinking and designing of new powers.

I would be more than happy to get on teamspeak sometime and discuss -- I'll drop you a PM about that!

PS. Your thread and wiki page are titled 'Jaicen Hedoss', but that page name and the Full Name say 'Jaicen Hadar'... Is that intentional? If not, I can probably help getting all names aligned to the one, or the other.

[Jhovall]

There seems to be an error, I first made it Hadar, untill I noticed the similarity with another character from another setting. And Hedoss seems better. I send you a PM about the rest.

[Brend]

I aligned the character forum account and the wiki page id with the name 'Jaicen Hedoss'.

[Gerben]

Very cool concept!

We should be able to figure this out within the current limitis of the setting :P

[Mercury]

I think this is an original and welcome take on a Jedi character! There is definite precedence for droids using lightsabers (amongst others during the training mission) and I can see a remote controlled droid being used by your Jedi.

If you were controlling a droid instead of a regular body (keyword "instead"), I believe that would be perfectly balanced within the current game context. A second droid body being controlled at the same time might require some working of the rules, which we can facilitate for you.

I am wondering how you see your control of these droids and hope you can perhaps elaborate, because I think this is a very interesting concept and I hope we can make it work in a way that most closely represents what you are looking for.

For example, do you think your Jedi would inhabit the droids like a ghost inhabiting an inanimate object, or are you seeing it more as a remote control situation, where you remotely control the droid as you would an electric wheelchair for example? What limitations would apply in terms of senses and abilities? I could imagine, for example, a limitation where Jaicen would have to actually see the droids to be able to control them.

How does your droid affect your use of force powers? Would you be able to make the droid manifest force lightning, or would this originate from you? I would argue the latter makes more sense, but perhaps you have a different view?

Can you control only these specific two droids, which are configured and built by your character, closely connected on a metaphysical level as well as a technical one, or could this control extend to any droid or machine?

Could you elaborate a bit on the powers that you want and what limitations you believe should apply to it, so we have a better idea of what you wish?

[Jhovall]

Hey, I will have a talk with bernd about this (hopefully tonight), but will elaborate about this here too.

I see my control of the droids mainly for the physical tasks, tasks which require the force, or anything else can not be performed by the droid. (I can't use force lightning out of the droid, nor can I do a mind trick, I could however talk through the droid with a monotonic voice). The droid has a lot of blocking, to defend me :P. The droid has to be in be in a certain range of Jaicen, or it will go on autopilot. It will still continue it's previous 'assignment', but far less effective. If the drone is under attack, it will keep on trying to destroy the enemy if the connection is severed, but after that (or if the enemy is not visible anymore), it will try to come back into jaicen's range.

While controlling the droid I can do very basic tasks, like commaning to wheelchair to go somewhere on autopilot, or sending a message, but not very intensive tasks like maintaining a conversation while fighting a Sith.
I think it is more like very advanced remote control in which I can control a lot of aspects of the droid.

I will be able to only control one robot at a time. And my advancements will be to build more droids which I can control.

I would like to have several droids in available, which are identical in build and could be ordered around with basic instructions during a mission. (Basically they are strong extra's, think superbattledroid strength) however, I only have one lightsaber and only one droid can be more directly controlled since the attunement to the droid takes some time, The droid is more like a magnaguard strength.

[Brend]

I have checked the character, and I officialy declar Jaicen Hedoss approved!

Force powers will be added later on, after the necessary design and discussion.

[Mercury]

For the projection power, we realised this is already covered by Force Vision, so there will be no separate proposal for this.

[Brend]

We have also made a Force power proprosal: Control Machine.

The power shifted a little in how it applies, but we think this approximately covers what Jhovall wants to do. (As well as being interesting for other Jedi)

[Brend]

I realized that while Mercury and me were designing the Control Machine power, we came to a conclusion that we ought to share with the rest of the players, and Jhovall and STs in particular:


Since Jaicen is a twin-unity of creature and machine we view the physical attributes of Jaicen as representing those of the twin-unity. This means that his dedicated droid uses the Strength, Vision, and Fitness listed on the character page of Jaicen.

This has some semblence to other characters, since we use the same way of representation for other characters that have mechanical parts: Nathan and Trigiel also use their character's Strength as representing the strength of their mechanical bodies. In Jaicen's case the situation is simply that the character consists of (a droid + a body in a hover chair).


If you have a question about how this would work, do not hesitate to ask, I'll try to answer within a day.

I would understand if Jhovall, in light of this (belated) notice wants to shift one or two dots around. His character will need a reapproval after the force powers are adjusted anyway. I would suggest that the character becomes final after that approval, allowing for minor tweaks based on these insights.