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Note, we moved to Fridays.

This now alternates weekly with the WEG d6 game Tax Evasion and Stranger Things.

In response to the expertise comment, I do understand the issue. However, it is easy for a GM to fix outside the context of published adventures and living campaigns. I can simply add or subtract levels from the monsters to fix balance issues. I know this does not fix all of them, but adding or subtracting a level can fix many issues.

Do not look at these issues from the POV of living campaigns and published adventures.

I have seen the defense feats and those issues. By those levels, you can have a lot of very different types of characters based on powers, items and feats. You have a wide enough range of options at those levels that spending feats on defenses does not hurt nearly. Outside the context of living campaigns, your character should have a pretty good idea of what defenses they need. You can decide if you want to go high defense or act to be out of the way of enemy fire. If the GM and adventure are not always forcing character to start in a certain formation (they seem to assume that PCs never learn proper infantry tactics like point guards), the issue is further addressed. You can choose to be a scrapper, tank, artillery, etc. and choose your feats appropriately.

At low level a character may only have, say, 4 feats to work with. If you eventually want 5 feats for skills, languages and other out-of-combat considerations. A 1 feat "tax" is huge. A 1 feat tax at level 6 is larger than a 2 feat tax at level 14. People who make complex builds on synergies of many powers and feats may disagree, but that is because of how you are building your character and not anything inherent in the system.

Furthermore, at upper levels without expertise, you may be fighting enemies a level or two lower. This partly alleviates the need for defense feats.

Sounds good to me. Will you be using Essentials races and classes? For example, Eladrin could be Int/Dex or Int/Cha rather than just Int/Dex. The Essentials classes seem simplified over regular classes.

Scroll Three: The Dragonborn
Dragonborn are not children of Moradin. Humans often have more difficulty dealing with dragonborn than they would with a dwarf, orc or halfling. Dragonborn are intensely passionate people in ways that other races frequently misunderstand.

What is the ideal Dragonborn life?
To the dragonborn, the passion with which you live your life is more important than the details of your wealth, occupation, marital status and other such things that preoccupy so many other races. The dragonborn exemplar shows his neighbors that he takes his life seriously and puts his heart into everything he does. To not care about what you do and simply work to live is a great tragedy. Status among dragonborn is elevated or lowered by how full and fulfilled others see your life. Gaining status through mere wealth or political influence is seen as a serious vice that corrupts society.

Passion of the Dragonborn
Stoicism, serenity and prudery are not virtues among the dragonborn. They expect people to speak with conviction and emotion. This is an important part of communication among Dragonborn. Saying “I do not approve of that” may mean “..but I do not really care” if said calmly, “…and I will not stand for it” if said in a commanding, angry voice or “…but I know I cannot do anything about it” if said in a resentful voice.

Strangers to dragonborn are often confused by their passions. They mistakenly think dragonborn are out of control or unstable. In fact, control of emotions is of paramount importance. Dragonborn are expected to be able to conjure affection, anger, sadness, glee or any other emotion when they are appropriate and dismiss inappropriate emotions. To dragonborn cold, calculating logic and passionate action are not contradictory. Reason should dictate emotion, not the other way around. A dragonborn ruled by whatever passions surface unbidden is seen as dangerous in the same way a human ruled by his passions is dangerous and unstable in human society. This should not be mistaken for elf-like emotions, which are more fleeting. Dragonborn are expected to sustain their hyper-emotional state.
Humans often see Dragonborn as bombastic or falsely dramatic. Dragonborn often see humans as phony and insincere.

What is important in the ideal leader of the Dragonborn?
Dragonborn seek two qualities from their leaders: inspiration and a role model of fulfillment. Any leader who can call forth the correct emotions in their followers is worthy of respect. Leaders are expected to control their passions and illicit the correct ones from those around them. Leaders are expected to clearly have a fulfilled and rewarding life and to clearly love what they do or be obviously striving towards fulfillment.

Humans tend to see dragonborn leaders as patronizing and obsessed with how their followers feel rather than what their followers are actually doing. Dragonborn tend to see human leaders as uncaring and incapable of commanding respect without coercion.

How do Humans deal with Dragonborn?
There are two ways to deal with Dragonsborn. The easier way is to simply act the way they do to the best of your ability. When you speak, talk like you mean what you say. Above all, avoid the appearance of insincerity about how you feel. The second way is to simply say what you feel and tell them that, among your kind, showing emotion is not sociable. This might be difficult for some dragonborn to accept, however.

Possible rules (still thinking about):

A few of the early classes had "split" primary attributes. This has caused the classes varying degrees of problems from small (ranger) to major (cleric and paladin). So, an idea I had:

For any class with 2 primary attributes, the character may use their secondary attribute for any power or modifier for one (presumably the lower) primary attribute of that class. For example, a strength-based paladin may use their wisdom modifier for Divine Challenge damage, Enfeebling Strike attack and damage, etc.

I want to make it clear that you will not be able to use this to create, for example, an all-charisma cleric with low strength and wisdom. This could only benefit either strength or wisdom.

When a zone, aura or continuous area of effect is created or imposed on someone:
I have not read enough to see if this is balanced. However, playing a druid occasionally on Thursdays showed me a problem with "enters or starts its turn in a zone": I get double wisdom modifier AoE damage. I do the damage both when I create the zone from Fire Seed and when the target starts its turn. The rules are not clear on how to handle zones, aura's etc. being imposed on a target. Therefore, my proposed ruling:
If an effect happens when a creatures starts its turn or enters the zone, aura, etc., imposing a zone does not immediately affect the creature, but it does affect the creature if its moves out of the area before the start of its next turn. If an effect happens when a creature enters or ends its turn in a zone, etc., imposing it causes the effect to immediately happen.
This puts both kinds of zones on even footing: imposing a zone is only guaranteed to affect them once.

Any comments?

In response to the expertise comment, I do understand the issue. However, it is easy for a GM to fix outside the context of published adventures and living campaigns. I can simply add or subtract levels from the monsters to fix balance issues. I know this does not fix all of them, but adding or subtracting a level can fix many issues.

Do not look at these issues from the POV of living campaigns and published adventures.

I have seen the defense feats and those issues. By those levels, you can have a lot of very different types of characters based on powers, items and feats. You have a wide enough range of options at those levels that spending feats on defenses does not hurt nearly. Outside the context of living campaigns, your character should have a pretty good idea of what defenses they need. You can decide if you want to go high defense or act to be out of the way of enemy fire. If the GM and adventure are not always forcing character to start in a certain formation (they seem to assume that PCs never learn proper infantry tactics like point guards), the issue is further addressed. You can choose to be a scrapper, tank, artillery, etc. and choose your feats appropriately.

At low level a character may only have, say, 4 feats to work with. If you eventually want 5 feats for skills, languages and other out-of-combat considerations. A 1 feat "tax" is huge. A 1 feat tax at level 6 is larger than a 2 feat tax at level 14. People who make complex builds on synergies of many powers and feats may disagree, but that is because of how you are building your character and not anything inherent in the system.

Furthermore, at upper levels without expertise, you may be fighting enemies a level or two lower. This partly alleviates the need for defense feats.

Hello,
I have a separate comments thread for each of these rules, campaigns, etc. threads. The reason is these can get very long and it can be difficult for someone to find what they are looking for. I will respond in the comment thread.

"Weapon Expertise, Implement Expertise (and any similar feat) – I do not like these in a game for 2 reasons: one, they give an unconditional, untyped bonus nearly as great as what is designed to be a significant bonus (+2). By paragon tier, they equal a significant bonus. This inherently alters the play balance between players and monsters. Two, because of the significant unconditional bonus, it becomes unwise to not take this feat. This decreases feat diversity and character customization."

The intention of the expertise feats was to change the balance between players and monsters. While monster defense increases at each level, player attack bonuses only increase at certain points.

At level 1, a normalized ratio is set between PC attack and defense and Monster attack and defense. At level 30, for example. the monster defense is +30 above normal where a player is +25 to attack (+15 (half-level), +4 (stat bumps at 4, 8, 11, 14, 18, 21, 24, 28), and +6 enhancement bonus. The math is five off of curve. Weapon proficiency doesn't deviate from this (AC is higher than NADS). As a dwarf, for example, the hammer or axe begin to look less palatable as the math begins to breakdown. Now, changes to dwarf make them STR/CON or WIS/CON, so that helps some.

You can see the inverse of the same issue with Paragon Defense, Robust Defense, and the epic defense feats, and the issue is particularly acute if a PC has high stats in the same NAD group. A PC without using a feat with the word Defense in it will have one auto hit NAD per PC or possibly two. A STR/CON fighter using a 2h weapon will have increasing problems with Reflex and Will as level increases, by late epic these will almost be autohit.

As you allude to in your post, Expertise feats end up being a feat tax. The designers don't fix an issue, they patch it with feats. The same thing was done for Strength paladins and divine challenge (Mighty Challenge) and the same thing is done with the Defense feats. It kind of pisses me off that I have to waste feats on stupid math problems.

I don't know why they didn't just give a +1 to attack and +2 to your lowest NAD at each tier increase, if I DM a game at some point I'll probably nix the Defense and Expertise feats and do just that.

I won't say Expertise is necessary because it is subjective based upon the campaign. Some groups (probably us) can optimize our way out of it, there are situational feats that provide bonuses. I just advise keeping an eye on attack and defense and the curve increasing as level increases and considering possible solutions if needed.

Audax Sector

Audax is an Outer Rim sector in the process of colonization.  It is an "open" sector, which is to say non-human immigration to Audax is encouraged, as opposed to more Coreward worlds.  The system has very little in the way of mineral or cultural wealth to recommend it, and even deploying asteroid-harvesting forgeships, it looks to be difficult to turn it into a profitable sector.  As a result, it is largely a dumping ground both for the bureaucrats and military personnel assigned, and for the colonists who tend to choose it.  Its one great recommendation is that, as the edge of settled space, it is an acceptable base for scouting beyond its perimeter.

The Audax Sector's capital is the space station Capital, located in the center of the sector around Star R15544.

Settlements of Interaction
Bender's Folly
Capital

Basics of Star Wars d6 character creation:

Each racial template starts with a set number of dice (usually 12d, but in some cases the range goes from 9 for some near-humans up to 14 for Noghri).  This is for an average member of the species.  Player characters get an additional six dice to apply to attributes.  A typical template, in abbreviated form, looks like this:

DEX 2d/4d
KNO 2d/4d
MEC 2d/4d
PER 2d/4d
STR 2d/4d
TEC 2d/4d
Move 8/12

The left number is the lower limit for that attribute, the right number is the upper limit at creation.  Move is non-modifiable during character creation, but may be changed later by spending character points.

Each attribute die costs one die from the initial creation pool.  Additionall, the first die of any Force skill (more to follow) is an attribute die.  It is worth noting here that in all cases, a "die" can be split up into three "pips," each worth +1, to give an attribute value of, for instance, 3d+2.  Two pips may be applied to any one attribute; a third pip is the next die.

In addition to the attribute dice, starting characters have seven skill dice.  Skill dice are allocated on top of the appropriate attribute, meaning that, for instance, a character with a Dexterity of 3d+2 who invests two dice in Blasters now has a Blasters skill of 5d+2.  No more than two dice may be invested in any one skill.  Because seven skill dice do not stretch very far, a character may choose to specialize; each raw skill die is equivalent to three dice in specialized skills.  To continue the blaster example from above, if the same character had assigned two dice worth of specialization to Blasters: Heavy Blaster Pistol, he would have either a +1 of unspecialized skill to spend elsewhere, or an additional 1d of specialized skills.

Characters who wish to be Force-sensitive may do so.  However, it should be noted that d6 Star Wars is very unforgiving regarding the Dark Side; if a character is Force-sensitive an does evil either by omission or commission, a Dark Side point follows, as opposed to non-Force-sensitive characters, who will usually only gain Dark Side points by actively calling on the Dark Side.  Force-sensitive characters start with two Force points rather than the usual one.

Characters who are Force-sensitive may take Force skills, as discussed above.  There are three Force skills, Control, Sense, and Alter.  Control affects processes occurring within a character, Sense affects perceptions, and Alter affects anything outside the character.  Some powers (Affect Mind (C/S/A), Lightsaber Combat (C/S), et cetera) will require combinations of the three skills to implement successfully.  For each +1-worth in a Force skill, a character may have one Force power which requires that skill as a component; the first die in each skill counts as a +1.

In addition to Force Points, characters start with five Character Points.  These serve two purposes.  First, a Character Point may be used to buy an extra die on any roll .  Second, they are used for character advancement (more to follow as needed).

Equipment is on an as-needed basis at creation.  If you are playing a smuggler, chances are you'll have a ship.  If you're playing an on-the-run Jedi, you'll have a lightsaber.  I will most likely say yes to common-sense requests, though as with the Tuning Fork, that does not mean that there are no strings.

As of this post, we're full-up for Force-users, with one who is just barely capable of teaching the other.  A low-strength master-apprentice pair is about the largest concentration of Force-users that can escape the Empire's notice, and even then, subtlety is an important component of survival.

Crado the Kneecapper
Species: Barabel
Age: Unknown
Height: 2.3m

Description: Crado is massive even for a Barabel.  He shares his species' typical love of straightforward solutions and is not a terribly original thinker; however, when it comes to violence, there are no better choices than Crado, especially hand-to-hand.  What he lacks in subtlety, he fully compensates in brute strength.  There are no known levers to separate Crado from Sulla, his employer.

Known Connections: Crado is Sulla's chief enforcer and leg-breaker; Sulla relies on him because Crado understands the difference between battery and murder, a distinction often lost on Trandoshans, for instance.