Search Your Feelings, You Know It To Be True...

[Urban Spaceman]

How about making it a Sense roll which enables them, perhaps once per session or once per adventure, to ask the GM a single question about something they've just seen or heard?

This would be them searching their feelings and trusting the Force to provide guidance.

The answer may not be the explicit truth, but provides an insight as to the will of the Force and the direction which they should take (taking it is down to them).


So Vader couldn't ask 'Where is the Rebel base?' but once he saw the generators could then ask 'Is this where the Rebels are hiding?'.


Or perhaps this should only be left as a storytelling device by the GM to guide players when and if the GM feels it's appropriate?
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"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

[MrNexx]

[Naaman]

I tend to agree. I don't think it should be "a force power," but rather a function of the sense skill itself.

On the other hand, you run into issues when you make it a die-roll-based function:

What happens on a failure? Is no information gained? Is false information gained (you think it's true, but it isn't or vice versa)? In the latter case, the power would be rendered useless: the character would never KNOW that his "feelings" were correct because sometimes when he thinks he's right, he turns out to be wrong after all, so it effectively becomes a mystical "hunch" or "gut feeling" for no particular reason at all.

Are there scenes wherein the character "knows" the force is telling him something, but then he turns out to be wrong? I don't recall any off hand, which leads me to believe that the power should have two possible outcomes:

Either: 1) No information is gained (there is no "feeling" to search) or 2) the power is always correct when a feeling is given. But it can never be wrong (whether it should be able to indirectly reveal deception is a different question, and one that I think is also important to address).

[MrNexx]

[CRMcNeill]

The problem is that we have a system built entirely on Force powers as a subset of Force skills, so absent a different system, any Force ability a character uses must be a subset of a Force power.

I've argued elsewhere that there needs to be a system for certain powers to "instinctively" activate - for lack of a better word - and something like this would seem to at least partially fall under that heading, but in order for it to work, there needs to be some sort of structure set up for it. And that means a Force power.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Random_Axe]

[CRMcNeill]

I'm on the fence myself. I've read up on similar powers for other systems, usually something divination or augury related, where the power user gets a simple "yes/no" or "good/bad", possibly with "neither" or "unclear / good & bad" results. I did write a power called Force Intuition a while back for a Force Sensitive Gambler, where the "Force Hunch" played into his success at gambling, but looking back on it, it reads more like a concept of a Force power than an actual rule for one.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Whill]

In RAW, you can use the Con skill or base Perception to ascertain whether someone is being dishonest or not. A couple of us support a separate Perception skill that can do that, Discernment, which is some ways is like the Sense Motive mechanic from d20.

The game has a lot of powers that aren't explicitly used in the films, but a lot of them seem like they are something natural that the Force could do. Even disregarding film evidence, I feel sensing the truth or falseness of a statement is a very realistic and apropos ability that Force could provide. I feel it was an oversight not putting this in RAW in the first place.

I feel that just like detecting a con without the Force, it isn't any inherent truth of the statement itself being discerned - Even with the Force, you are still reading the speaker of the statement for honesty. Do they believe what they said was true? Or is there some motive they might have to con you?

Mechanically, I'm not sure how to handle it. Should it not be a power and instead just an inherent enhancement to discerning the truth that comes from having the Sense skill? Just add the Sense dice to attempts discern if something is a con or not? And should the speaker have the option to resist the Force aspect in some way (with and/or without the Force) if they are lying and want pull a con on the character, perhaps by adding to a secret difficulty so the character attempting to sense truth doesn't know it is being resisted?

Sorry I'm not in the right mind frame to work out the mechanics and be more helpful, but I wanted to express support for the concept of the Force being able to help in some way to sense the truth. This seems like such a basic thing the Force should be help with.
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[CRMcNeill]

I think if it were just a Force-based lie detector (i.e. detecting whether or not someone is telling the truth or a lie as they believe it), it would probably just be a subset of Receptive Telepathy. Either that or simply allow a Force Sensitive character to substitute their Sense roll for Con / Discernment on the opposed roll to spot it.

But what if it's the difference between relative truth and absolute truth? Suppose, for example, a con man tells the Jedi what he believes to be a lie, but it is actually the truth. For (admittedly far-fetched) example, if a someone were to lie to a Jedi and say "the hostages are still alive," even though that person honestly believed that the hostages had already been killed. However, the liar had himself been told a lie, and the hostages were all still alive. Which truth would the Jedi detect: the truth as the liar believed it to be, or the absolute truth of which the liar was unaware?

Or, if as with Vader upon seeing the first visuals of Echo Base on Hoth, there was no lie to detect, just an absolute truth of "that is the Rebel Base"?
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Whill]

That could still exist too but it is not the same thing as detecting a liar. That would seem to be a form of precognition/clairvoyance, so "Farseeing" maybe? I'm not sure if that necessarily warrants a new power, but maybe.
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[Random_Axe]

[Dredwulf60]

Don't forget to account for this gem in considering the mechanics of Truth;

"What I told you was true, from a certain point of view... Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."

[CRMcNeill]

[Whill]

[Naaman]