Star Wars for HARP Sci Fi

Brent — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:56:41 +0000

Star Wars has always been one of my favorite settings in which to run Roleplaying Games. With the playtesting I’ve been doing with the upcoming HARP Sci Fi game, I naturally started wondering what it would be like to try and run Star Wars under those rules.
I figured that the major difference between Star Wars and other Sci Fi settings is the Jedi Knights and the use of the Force. If I can handle those in HARP, adapting the rest of the setting shouldn’t be to hard.
I started by posting a question over on the ICE Forums ( http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=2301.0 ) asking people what they thought the Top 5 Force Powers were.
From that I’ve come up with a list of a dozen items that I’m going to focus on handling. And some suggestions on how to deal with them.
The next step is to look at the existing HARP Sci Fi rules, determine which items are already handled and which aren’t, some of which Nicholas Caldwell, the author of HARP Sci Fi has already pointed out for me

Suggestion – “Power over Weak Minds”
Telekinesis – for lifting/chucking objects around, and choking hapless Empire officers
Enhanced jumping/gymnastics
Precognition
Force Lightning
Projected communication
Living beyond death as a slightly blue glowing ghost mentor
Parry laser beams with your power sword – and aiming them at someone else
Deflecting Blaster Bolts without a light saber (al la Darth) and deflecting Force Lightning (al la Yoda)
Blind Fighting (Guidance by the force – in melee and space fighter piloting)
Detection of / Sensitivity to the Force – “The Force is strong in this one”, “I feel a disturbance in the Force”
Force Shield (When Qui-gon was melting the blast doors with his light saber,the heat had no affect on him)

And, a couple suggestions on how to handle some of them:
Existing Telekinetic effects: Telekinesis & Telekinetic Hand (latter as much inspired by Gil The ARM as Vader)
Telepathy – all there in Field of Telepathy
Force Lightning is Energy Bolt
Force shield (multiple flavors Cyrokinetic Field, Pyrokinetic Field, Kinetic Field, Energy Dispersal)
some of the enhanced jumping could be Psi Agility etc, but not all

Although Precognition is in the rules, you’d probably need a Precognitive Defense discipline, patterned after the Psi Defense Tiering (e.g. +1 per skill rank to DB at Tier 1, +2 per rank at Tier 2, etc.) Similarly Precognitive Piloting, giving bonuses to Piloting skill on same pattern, perhaps.

Yeah, to follow the movie, you’d have a skill “short term precog” which added a bonus to all skills involving reaction time, but likely you’d want to make it more specific skills per Nick to maintain game balance. Unless you made the bonuses tiny, and stacked them. . .

Like
Short Term Precog
Enhanced Reflexes
Spatial Location Awareness

each adding something like +1 per rank to all associated maneuvers

ICEWEBRING » Star Wars – HARP

Star Wars for HARP Sci Fi