I finally had a moment to sit down with my players this evening to create characters for our first Force and Destiny game in the coming days. I have three players aged 14, 17 and 18. The latter is my eldest daughter, the younger players are two of my sons. Here are the criticisms.

1. Character Concept and Background : No issues here. In fact, the players had a great time with this step.
2. Morality : My sons did not like the errata change to be given the option of -21/+21 to starting morality. The seventeen year-old mentioned that he would prefer that the rise or fall of a character would be best left to tell narratively in the game and not simply just given to a character from the start. The younger son agreed and for much the same reason. The 18 year-old was indifferent. Some of you may know my position on the matter so I feel it important to let you know that I influenced not their opinions on the matter prior to this step. I simply informed them of what the original rule was and its later update. I asked what they thought of the update and the above was the response. In the end, we had two take +10 XP and one take +5 XP and +1,000 credits options.
3. Species : My sons had no issues here. I got the feeling, however, that my daughter was not too pleased with the limited set of options. She defaulted reluctantly to playing a Human. The other chosen species were Nautolan and Togruta.
4. Careers : No issues here. In fact, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm from the group about the options available as there was an archetype which fit their preconceived ideas related to their character concepts. My daughter choose the failed Jedi student exile and tied it to the Mystic: Seer. My 17 year old son wanted to play as one of the younglings who was able to successfully escape the Jedi Temple on Coruscant following Anakin's deadly invasion. Consequently, he was forced to live on the streets as a scoundrel and chose the Sentinel: Shadow type. My 14 year old son chose the more combat-oriented type and thus chose the Sentinel: Shien Expert.
5. Specializations: See above.
6. Invest Experience Points : My biggest complaint was in only possessing one Beta book for this step especially. Without recourse to more books my players had to share the one and this really slowed down the process immensely. I had players get up from the table to go and do other things while they waited on the player actively examining the literature in order to choose just the right investment. There was also some confusion about the differences related to the expenditure of XP for career and non-career skills. This was not really a big problem until later in the process which I will go into more detail at step 10.
7. Determine Derived Attributes : No issues here.
8. Motivations : No big issues here save the fact that despite choosing a random route, two of the three players ending up hand-picking motivations more in line with their character concepts.
9. Gear and Appearance : See 5. above regarding number of copies of books to have on hand.
10. Determine Group Resource: The players got together and chose the Jedi Holocron option. I rolled on the errata chart and came up with "4" Mechanics and Ranged (Lt). While the other two players had no issue with this and were joy-filled to receive these are career skills, the third player, my 17 year old son who chose the Sentinal: Shadow and who had also invested the XP to choose the Well Rounded talent was none too pleased. Can you guess which skills he chose as career skills AND expended XP to put ranks in them? One of them was Piloting - Planetary and the other? Mechanics . In addition, for Ranged (Lt), he had spent the 10 XP needed to put a rank in this non-career skill. He had a hard time accepting that he did not necessarily have to spend that XP if only he had waited until this final step and then he would have spent far less and would not have wasted half a talent to gain these new career skills bestowed upon him by the holocron. I resolved the matter by giving him a bonus 5 XP and the option to choose another skill to benefit by his having chosen Well Rounded. It only seemed fair.

A final, general critique: Character creation, while fun, took too darn long to complete. My daughter opined that more should be done to streamline the process while excluding pre-generated characters from it. At the beginning all were pretty enthusiastic to jump right in. By the end of the first of two hours, this enthusiasm was waning considerably.

Hopefully, next weekend we shall have run our first adventure, Lost Knowledge. More to come...

I feel your pain on only sharing one copy of the book. Not sure what can be done there to help.

I'm curious about what species your daughter typically plays in the past? I love the species list in F&D myself, so I admit I am a bit biased there.

Did you go Force and Destiny material only for this game?

On the Morality, even when it was +20/-20 I didn't see a lot of players taking those options unless they really, really wanted to to be on the edge of being a Dark Sider or LS Paragon, as the +10 XP is or +5 XP/+1000 credits options are far more useful for starting characters. I think the only "starting" characters that might take the Morality score adjustment are the Knight-level PCs that are either 'saber wielders (since they get a basic lightsaber for free) or Force wizards (who aren't reliant upon gear to begin with)

As for taking so long to make the characters, that's ultimately an issue of only having one copy of the book and trying to do three characters at once. In hindsight, I think you'd have been better off working with each kid individually to build their character. Also, have they played this system before? If one or more of them is new to the system in general (i.e. never played EotE or AoR), then I've found character creation tends to take a bit longer as you also have to explain bits of the system so that they can make informed choices about their character.

About the species options, kaosae brings up a good point about possibly pulling from the EotE and AoR books for more options. As Maelora noted, the F&D species seem to be of the "leading character" type or those "pretty"/human-enough looking that if your campaign where a movie or TV series, they'd be believable by the viewing audience as the lead characters.

Angelicdoctor why didn't you offer your daughter to choose a species from the other 2 rulebooks? Except droids everyone else can be Force Sensitive

As for the skills, i would suggest to simply change them and pick a couple of skills that aren't career skills for any of the characters insted of giving 5 xp as abonus to your son. That could be particualrly useful as the group is small and they'll likely have some areas not covered.

Another good suggestion i read when dealing with smaller groups is to give them an astromech droid as an npc to deal with stuff like astrogations and repairs, and give stats to aid the charcters with their rolls.

Was this an effort to evaluate the book as a stand alone product? Because that's the only reason I could see the limted species being an issue, barring it being the only book you have. As to Morality, since they are all options it really shouldn't matter to people that light side and dark side are options. As to the group resource, personally I would have chosen the skills given if I wanted to avoid overlap, if it would even be possible with a groip who's skills are across the spectrum. There's bound to be some overlap in many cases. Having a lone book has ever been the bane of many a group.

Thank you all for your questions and suggestions. They are valuable to me. I hope to answer some of these as follows. Thanks for your time and attention.

Q. Why only the species from the Force and Destiny Beta book?

A. First and foremost, I wanted to have a strict test of this system in order to give as fair as possible results related to the game as a 'standalone' effort as mouthymerc put it. To answer kaosoe, my daughter has a habit of playing felinoid-like (Trianii and Fuchsbau, ftw!) characters be it for Star Wars, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, After the Bomb, etc. As such, even with all available official core books for this game, this was a non starter anyway. Finally, I no longer possess either the Edge of the Empire or Age of Rebellion core rule books though I do still have access to the Edge of the Empire Beta book.

Q. Have they played this system before?

A. All but the 17 year-old have played Edge of the Empire previously. Even so, it was the 18 year old who was loudest in her criticism of the length of the character creation process and has been ever since the Edge of the Empire days. In fact, she still has yet to complete step 9 for Force and Destiny.

Q. Consider using multiple core rule books to speed up character creation?

A. That would be great if I could afford it. I would argue that I am not alone in this. In return, I would like to ask how others on this forum would 'square this circle' for those like myself who simply do not have the funds to purchase multiple copies of the same rule book for this process? As admitted here, "Having a lone book has ever been the bane of many a group." One other thing to consider is that the price tag only increases with the upcoming release of the core rule book.

Q. Consider working with each individually?

A. I would have loved to have done that, however, it seems to me that character creation in this game implies a certain level of necessary participation from all members of the group especially regarding step 10 but even also step one wherein the ties to each character are formed in order to create a more cohesive party. We could also opine that when choosing careers and specializations, input from all group members is vital in order to form a more well rounded set of adventuring heroes. Outside of game reasons, I wished that we had the time to devote to one on one sessions. The activity level in my family for every day life makes devoting an hour or two to one individual a near impossibility.

Again, thank you everyone for your input!

I didn't want to comment on your feedback (because I figured it was just that; whether or not I agreed with it) but since you asked:

I have never had a problem with the length of character creation. The primary time sink with character creation in this system is the same as in any other; concept. This is usually best accomplished before sitting down at the table and often without exterior input. Once you have the concept, finding the best approximate becomes easier.

Outside of that, if you print out character sheets, character creation is dead simple. Have them pass around the books and mark down which skills are career skills and which can be "double dipped". Once they have that, they can assign the starting points at their leisure. Once that's done, both stat and skill purchases are easily memorized. For most character concepts the vast majority (save out 10-20 points) should go into stats. Then use those 10-20 points to buy at least one relevant Talent and some extra skill points (or Talents). Pick the "story hook" mechanics that fit your game and concept most. Done.

Obviously F&D characters get a bit more complicated if you expect to be a Force User at the start but again, unless you've got a solid concept that requires otherwise, you should pretty much follow the same formula; maybe saving out a tiny bit extra to buy the first level power.

You can do other things at character creation. I did an Explorer(Archeologist)/FSExile using this formula in about 15 minutes. But really, the more you try to spend on skills or Talents (or extra specs) at character creation, the longer its going to take you to truly be on par with other characters.

Thanks for sharing.

IMO for a Star Wars game the species should be just fluff. During my basic version of the game I am playing around with all characters would use the human crunch and flavor their species as they see fit (even making up new species).

One thing my group did to speed up character creation was to make a copy of all the specialization pages. The vast majority of the career/specialization information needed for character creation is included on that one page, so players should be able to work largely off that.

Plus it makes book keeping a little easier since you can just check off that talents you have.

One thing my group did to speed up character creation was to make a copy of all the specialization pages. The vast majority of the career/specialization information needed for character creation is included on that one page, so players should be able to work largely off that.

Plus it makes book keeping a little easier since you can just check off that talents you have.

If you did this and brought the Edge book to the table as a second reference for skills...If you have Age you have a third reference for skills since they are the same. Poof you now have three copies of the stuff they are fighting over the book for.

The other thing I do is use Oggdudes character creator. I can make a character in 10 minutes using his tool.