I am contemplating breaking the system.

Careers and Specializations have always sat uneasily with me. I love the game, and the system, but I've long since been over with class based systems.

I am wondering how broken the system would become if I assigned the lowest cost experience points to individual talents and allowed them to be purchased freeform.

Has anyone done something like this or have any thoughts on it?

Yes, there are a few people working on this independently of each other.

I don't think it "breaks the system", others start frothing about "power gamers" and "munchkins".

Though, I'm not sure about "assigning lowest cost" to Talents. There should definitely (IMO) be a scaling up in how much Ranked Talents cost as having more than one is of great benefit, and some Talents need to be limited (True Aim for instance) in the number of Ranks purchasable.

Again taking True Aim into account, it appear in 3 Trees, twice at 10 EXP (Gunner and Sharpshooter), once at 15 EXp (Sharpshooter), and 3 times for 25 (twice in Mercenary Soldier, once for Gunner). Clearly it's not meant for characters to be snatching up multiple Ranks at 10 EXP, that would be a tremendous bargain!

What I'm Doing:

Going through and figuring out the average cost for UnRanked Talents and allowing those to bought for that price. Figuring out the average starting cost for Ranked Talents, how many can be bought if the Players were to eventually get 3 Trees*, the highest cost, the average overall cost for every instance of the Talent, etc. It's slow work and not only because it bores me and after 30 minutes I go and do something else most days...

Basically I'll be allowing all Ranked Talents to be bought 3 times. Most will start at 10-15 EXP and go up for each Rank purchased thereafter. Right now only two Talents start for a lower cost, Grit and Toughened, and will unlimited in the number purchasable (at the top out price of 25 EXP/Rank I doubt it will be a problem).

Some Talents I'm reworking because limiting them to only three Ranks is pretty harsh (so far only Parry and Reflect are needing a reworking).

So far I'm about half way through making a master list of every Talent, the Trees they're in, and what page they're on in the Core 3 books. Once the Master List is done the process should speed up a bit.

Argh. I just spent several minutes trying to find a thread started by someone making a "Blank Talent Tree", his idea being the Players chose talents of the that cost/location in another Tree and can slot it into the Blank Tree.

Honestly, that looks like a huge waste of time for very little result.* The game is essentially classless if you spend enough XP, and if you lower the cost of entry into each tree you'll achieve the same thing. Instead of having ever increasing costs for each tree, just fix it at a flat rate of 20XP and be done.

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* unless, of course, you just like doing it for the puzzle challenge, and you think your players are going to appreciate all the extra reading they have to do...

As I tend to view the Careers and Specializations are archetypal anyway, I've never really been interested in trying to strip them out and replace them (or not).

That said, I'd be interested in what you come up with.