Hi guys

I am planning my first real EotE campaign, after having previously played a few games to get the hang of the system. The characters got up to just over 100 xp, and we are planning to continue from there in a more structured campaign.

My question to you is simple. How many xp would you advice me to let the characters get to at the end of a good-size campaign? To follow that up, at what XP range do the characters become "unwieldy" and hard to find challenges for?

One of the great things about this system, imho, is that even highly-skilled characters can be challenged; the challenge just has to meet the characters.

For example, unless a PC has gone total combat-beast, they're maxed at somewhere between 3-5 Soak, and a moderate WT, so combat is still potentially dangerous. Even the Wookiee Marauder/Gadgeteer that plays in my group, who had Soak 8 and 25 WT, was taken down when their enemies set for stun against his 9 ST. Now, I didn't have the enemies do that immediately, because I don't want to meta-game, but after a couple encounters, or several rounds in a long battle, the enemies will try something else.

Or for social type checks: the Twi'lek Politco of the group generally throws 4 or 5 ability/proficiency dice at those sorts of challenges, yet when tasked with a very hard mission (i.e. the occasional daunting or formidable check, upgraded a time or two) - in that situation, he not only isn't guaranteed success, but if he does succeed, there are often lots of fun threat involved to make it more interesting.

(fyi, my PCs are around 350 earned xp, above their starting xp.)

One group I'm in has most of the PCs nearing the 400 XP mark (I'm the only one over that mark as I'm also the only player to have never missed a session since the campaign began), and the GM is still able to find plenty of challenges for our characters, many of whom are rolling at least 3 Proficiency dice in their key skills, or 2 Proficiency dice in a wide variety of skills. That doesn't mean we can't surprise him with unexpected bouts of high competence (just last night, my Minor Jedi pretty much destroyed a lightfoil-wielding pirate lord in a one-on-one duel thanks to having FR 2 and being able to activate both Control Upgrades), and our Saboteur/Slicer can fix just about anything and slice just about any computer system (3 ranks in Mechanics and Computers each with Intellect 4 tends to enable that).

It's possible that things will start to get tricky once your PCs have earned more than 1000 XP, since by that point the PCs are going to have at least two specializations and 4 or 5 ranks in their key/primary skills as well as a smattering of ranks in other skills, even if they're non-career skills (I think everyone in my Saturday group has at least 1 rank of Cool at this point).

Good to hear from your experiences. I was initially worried because my basic progression plan (which will not survive contact with the enemies PCs, but gives me a rough outline of the main story arc) led me to estimate that the PCs could be up to about 500 xp by the time they were close to ending the main story arc. I worried that this would be too much XP, but now I'm starting to think that is not the case.

I want to give my PCs a very rough estimate on the number of XPs the characters could conceivably get during the campaign to allow them to plan out their characters and avoid hyper-specialized characters that achieve their "target" talents and skill levels early and then find themselves with nowhere to go that fits the character concept. My hope is that the players will take it slow and possibly progress with less haste in a "wider" area. Has anyone done this?

No limits but structures based on possible lenght. For example: I have a 14 years old game where the main player's character have 2.425 XP. First game sessions XP rewards were higher. Almost every thing that he did give a decent amount of XP. Actually I only give him rewards for "big campaigns or events".

Also, about the "unwieldy problem", don't worry so much. As I tested, at advanced levels high XP heroes only have problems with high Rivals and Nemesis. Minions (as in movies) are not so much problem unless they come in more than 4 packs.

Also skill checks can beat up advanced heroes. You can always add situations where Setbacks are "always welcome". So, in my experience, don't worry about "unwieldy chars".

Backing to numbers. Study the general idea of the campaign. Will be a reaally long campaign? Will you play so often or only a few hours a month? More players will b required? What scale of power will let your players achieve? Whats your idea of final bosses that they will meet? Can they beat them or jus the typical "survive and scape from the boss"?

Considering all this fields, and always remember that are other types of rewards as info, material, credits, DP, NPC's, I suggest to you up to 25-35 XP the first sessions (players us to love to evolve "quickly" on their first games). When they general level would be about 3 Ranks (Skill) and 2 Ranks (Talents), reduce the XP to 15-25. Further from that point, no more than 15 XP can be enough. Also consider if you want to give that points only on big campaign or also in small acts inside them. Divide XP between acts will make a slow but constant progression.

Actually, we use an "agreement" XP system. When my players asks me that wants to learn X I told him "wait a bit more" or "train X hours/days/weeks/months".

I hope I helped and have a great game mate

I want to give my PCs a very rough estimate on the number of XPs the characters could conceivably get during the campaign to allow them to plan out their characters and avoid hyper-specialized characters that achieve their "target" talents and skill levels early and then find themselves with nowhere to go that fits the character concept. My hope is that the players will take it slow and possibly progress with less haste in a "wider" area. Has anyone done this?

My case is the counter-example. I started off as the hyper-specialized Wookiee Marauder, but I’ve branched out. I’ve found lots of things that meet my concept of what a Wookiee is and does. I’ve added Heavy and Doctor to my list of specializations, but I’ve only taken certain parts of the talent trees in both cases — I’ve avoided as much of the Ranged combat stuff in Heavy that I can, because we already have a Ranged Heavy, and I don’t want to infringe on his fun.

I’ve avoided some of the more obvious Doctor talents, because again we had a Two-One-Bee droid as our primary doctor, and I was happy to be his assistant but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t even as good as he was in anything. That player has since dropped out of the game, and so I’m now increasing my talents and skills in those areas, although I think we do technically still have that droid available to us as an NPC.

Next up is one of the Technician specializations, or maybe Force Sensitive Exile — I haven’t quite decided yet. Again, we already have mechanic-types in the game, but there are certain things I want to have done to my weapons that would only rightfully be done by the owner, and since I’m the owner, that means I have to do them.

FSE is the only wildcard here, since we don’t have any Force users in the game, although we have met some in the past. And yes, we do have multiple copies of the F&D book, and we are looking forward to using it, so I’m certain that if I go this route then I won’t be the only Force-user in the group.

My group's only hovering around 140-150 earned XP right now, but I know that at least my nephew has planned what he wants to do with his character out to about 600-700 XP

We also have an interesting mix of XP-spending habits in the group. The min-maxed bounty hunter has managed to get his Ranged Heavy up to 4 ranks, which can throw combat off a bit, but hasn't done much else. A few others are concentrating on their areas of expertise, which is typical. The Force-sensitive smuggler has ignored her scoundrel tree and only added points to FSE and her Move power. I may just allow her to be re-speced using FaD, since the player has never had any real interest in being a smuggler. And there's my nephew who very quickly bought into a second tree, and then into a third tree (FS Exile, we had a Jedi-involved adventure, and decided to go Force), so at this point, his character has a lot of future potential, but for now she's still the group's Mechanic/Computer guy.

Good to hear from your experiences. I was initially worried because my basic progression plan (which will not survive contact with the enemies PCs, but gives me a rough outline of the main story arc) led me to estimate that the PCs could be up to about 500 xp by the time they were close to ending the main story arc. I worried that this would be too much XP, but now I'm starting to think that is not the case.

The key here is to have the challenges ramp up as the PCs gain XP, so that the final battle has that climactic feel to it, where the players both need to have and can show off their hard-earned skills and talents. The mooks of the first skirmishes should either be coming at the heroes in droves (especially fun for someone with Last One Standing to show off), or the baddies should be the dreadfully powerful Nemesis and his Elite Guard (which would have slaughtered the characters at any point earlier in the game, but are now an exciting and still somewhat-dangerous challenge). I think you get the idea.

Btw, the last few pages of the adventure in the GM kit have suggestions for handling Nemeses and keeping them up with the PCs.

I am only partially worried about challenging the players, I am also thinking about when they have so much stuff to remember (talents from multiple trees) that it gets confusing.

Thanks for the insights all. I might aim at having the campaign story arc end with the PCs at about 600 xp or so.

My group is currently roughly around 300 XP and I see no sign of the game ceasing to be a challenge.

I'm thinking the game probably works till a least 1000 XP.

Our GM averages 10-15 XP a session(5xp an hour) with bonus XP given if we do cool stuff.

Some examples of bonus XP that we have done are(each gave 1 bonus XP)

-hacked a barkeep protocol droid to sell Ryll for us.

-used the force to toss a stun grenade into a shot glass and roll the glass down the bar.

-used a thermal detonator to intimidate a Hutt into forking over all his dough(he literally barfed)

-hacked a turbolift's controls to drop a trio of stormtroopers to the bottom right when the door opened to them catching us by surprise.

-used a triumph to make a proton torpedo we'd previously dropped down an air shaft to explode on the cruiser we were captured on.

If it helps, I have my group on an accelerated track right now with regards to XP. I hand out 10-15 for each session (we hit the 10XP mark ONCE because two guys were an hour late, we ended early, and they trudged along), bonuses for good roleplaying and then I give awards based on party actions (buzzing an orbital defense satellite just "because I can" netted the party 5XP, while capturing a minion alive to question him as it's the second time they've run into him nets the party another 5XP).

They are just about at 100XP right now, and I'm not having too many problems challenging them, honestly. The Corellian pilot may have Pilot 4 and Agility 4, but hasn't taken a single combat ability yet nor has he put much into his tree beyond the few ranks of Skilled Jockey he needed to offset the penalties of the Ghtroc. The heavy hitters also aren't godlike either, and if anything, anything larger than a tough rival takes them a while to take out. Last game they went up against a Gomorrean Rival with three minions. Gamorrean nearly dropped the Aggressor and the Marauder was a bit bruised up before he finished off the minions (Pirate Crew, if that helps).

Even with high XP totals, it's easy enough to slide the scale around, and all it takes is a bad roll to wreck someone's day. Wounds don't go up like D&D, and soak values are relatively stagnant for a while, so it's honestly pretty easy to work with everyone regardless of XP levels.

While we haven't played EotE all that long, my experience has been that asking this question is like asking how high is up. Play your character until they have no more story to tell, that all their goals (the ones set down at the beginning and the ones that cropped up along the way) have been fulfilled, that the players can sit back and go "Yeah, I think I'm done."

This might take a year, this might take many years (my Old Republic game started in 1999 with the premiere of Phantom Menace and ran until 2006, just after Sith hit DVD). But when the end is near, find a couple of plot threads that haven't been worked out yet, one last personal nemesis that needs dealing with and come up with a capper. One last hurray before they ride off into the sunset.

The Rule of thumb Jay Little suggests is 5 XP an hour of active role playing. basically take you session and tally up how many hours the game was minus any side tracking that happens(discussing movies etc.)

however many hours you want your campaign to run times 5 would be endgame xp. But really you don't have to stop really. there is a lot of room for growth in this system.

I ran a bi-weekly group for a year and they ended up in the 400 xp range... 10 to 15 per session, sometimes 20 if things were really saucy.

Now, I understand that this is due to the particular makeup of my group, but I was really not impressed with what happened between 300-400 xp. It became a nightmare to prep for. I will probably be running smaller, more episodic campaigns in the future. I had originally envisioned this huge, sprawling 1200 xp thing that spanned all 3 cores but based on what I've seen so far I'm not sure if the system is completely designed to handle that unless the group is built free of combat monsters. Variable mileage and all that.