Rithuan

I would say 50 is pretty high. Personaly I won't do more than 30.

I've had characters that neared 500XP beyond starting XP. Most of them were very good in their own area and had fair capabilities outside of it. Two or three specializations was pretty normal, as were numerous skills at rank 1 or 2. Higher ranks of skills, as well as 20+ XP talents were far less common.

Actually since a couple of days ago and that other thread, I've been wondering this very question myself. I imagine that there is a shelf life to a FFG character, but I have no idea what that number may be.

A while ago, just as an experment, I adapted an old WEG character that was nearing the end of his playable life. I got to about 800 FFG points before he was getting close to where I would have liked him. Mind you, I didnt actually play him - no idea if it was a playable build or not, but it looked good on paper.

there is no cap. Would be interesting to see how much XP it would take to break the system. but I suspect you could get a couple thousand XP no problem.

By the rules there is no cap, but the logic says otherwise. As a story, you can't be an ageless adventurer living infinite adventures. As a game, at one point you will be good at everything and the stories would be boring.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one

Rithuan

By the rules there is no cap, but the logic says otherwise. As a story, you can't be an ageless adventurer living infinite adventures. As a game, at one point you will be good at everything and the stories would be boring.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one

Rithuan

Your points above cover many of the Legends tales quite well. The characters aged, but it never really mattered, and they did become good at **** near everything. Yes, many (but not all) or those stories were pretty boring to me.

As a story, you can't be an ageless adventurer living infinite adventures.

When my age you reach, look as good you will not!

-Yoda

As a story, you can't be an ageless adventurer living infinite adventures.

A lesson that Luke, Leia, and Han never bothered to learn.

But yeah I don't know. Personally I'm just giving my players 20xp each time. I have a few npcs on the player's side (like the Jedi PC's master) that I build using the character creation rules rather than NPC rules just in case I needed them for something. Even with 600xp past character creation (30 sessions worth - probably about six to nine months of play at our group's rate), there's a lot of room to grow. Like this guy has maybe a third of the Shien tree, force rating 3 dipping seer and buying only necessary talents, 4 cunning, 4 lightsaber, most of enhance, a couple other basic powers, and some other rank 1 skills. There's still a ton of room to expand non-combat skills past rank 1 and most force powers have room to grow. There are also plenty of other talent trees to get more force rating, parry, reflect, dedication, etc. It's far from a finished character.

I feel the game comfortably supports PCs with 1000-1500 XP. Beyond that characters will be total masters of their chosen specialty and will probably need to start branching out and thus probably overlapping with others.

Since our group games rather infrequently, the last few adventures were 20 or 25 points. When you do the math (like Alatar1313 suggested above), you can figure out how often you game and how quickly you will get to certain point thresholds. For example, once a week at 20pts per session is about +1,000pts in a year. Won't players be itching to try a new character or new campaign at about that time?

I also found that 15 or more points allows a character to add something between sessions. 40 or 50pts a session sounds ridiculous to me, but would maybe be more appropriate for finishing a campaign thread.

We do roughly 15 points a session, give or take depending on what happens.

I think this system is fairly robust in that you can go a long time before characters become stale, and its nearly impossible for a character to become OP. Simply because a group of minions can still do a punishing amount of damage if they get a shot off(key word: if) Sure, my guy can shoot a group of storm troopers down to a relatively harmless level, but if they get to shoot me first I'm going to be hurting too.

Only once a character has had 700-800 XP will he truly be a master of his chosen specialty. Thats not including any detouring to pick of secondary skills.

In a group of 4-5, you can easily have 2-3 specialties and focuses per character without overlap.

There are 33 general skills. Thats over 8 skills a character could use as a focus for a typical group of 4 before you had any overlap at all. Then when you consider overlap doesn't matter for many of them you get even more freedom.

Then you add in all the specs and there is tons of room to expand a character, and thus spend points. Those 3rd and 4th specs are also quite expensive to unlock. It could take several sessions of saved XP to unlock a new one.

I think someone once estimated that recreating my favorite Saga edition character would take more then 1000 XP (We had house rules allowing levels above 20 and he was level 25 after several campaigns) And I wasn't bored with him, and none of the other players who had been using one character through that campaign series seemed bored with theirs either. We'll probably return to that campaign series someday.We usually ran a couple of campaigns between each campaign in that series though.

I totally agree about the EU - I would have liked to have left those characters at their victory on Endor, remember them that way, as epic, instead of the tiresome soap operas that followed. I want 'Star Wars', not 'Thirtysomething'.

Anyway, the system seems fine at over 1000 XP. It depends on what you spend your points on. We have a 1300 XP character who could probably be outfought by a starting Marauder.

XP seems to be less of a problem than issues like Soak. A character with a max Knowledge/Education, Survival or Astrogation doesn't break the game the way high soak/armoured characters do. I don't allow any kind of armour (the stormtrooper gear isn't armour in the movies, its a communications/life-support system!) and that helps keep characters honest.

Our highest XP character has 2165 XP at last count, and if anything, feels 'underpowered' in combat terms. Highest skills are in Education (5) and Negociation (4), and her Talent specs (Doctor, Entrepreneur, Scholar) are nice, but don't feel too much. She's capable of some potent moments with the Move tree maxed, but 2 Force dice mean she can't do that every time. And with 2 Brawn and no armour, she can still be one-shotted by a single minion.

On the other hand, you could build a munchkinised droid marauder at a few hundred XP that would be hopelessly overpowered.

During some of the initial sessions of my Force and Destiny game, i pretty much doubled the XP awards I handed out to allow the players to quickly grow so that we could test how the PCs operated at starting level and then at Knight level (after roughly three sessions). I was also in a Edge of Rebellion game (mix of EotE & AoR with an eventual dash of FaD) where the GM routinely handed out 20 or more XP per session, not counting Motivation bonuses.

What I saw in both instances were the characters advancing in capability very quickly. My Force and Destiny game now has two PCs that are at Force Rating 2, and the PCs in the Edge of Rebellion game were incredibly capable in their fields of expertise, in particular the Wookiee Commando who earned the nickname of "Hairy Murder Machine" given how lethal he was with either his blaster rifle or vibro-ax.

Truthfully, I'd suggest letting the PCs begin with some extra XP under their belts rather than keep handing large XP awards. Giving them that small amount of bonus XP to start with (be it 25 or 50) allows the PCs to better fill out the skills and low-ranking talents needed for their concept while still leaving them plenty of room to grow.

I totally agree about the EU - I would have liked to have left those characters at their victory on Endor, remember them that way, as epic, instead of the tiresome soap operas that followed. I want 'Star Wars', not 'Thirtysomething'.

Anyway, the system seems fine at over 1000 XP. It depends on what you spend your points on. We have a 1300 XP character who could probably be outfought by a starting Marauder.

XP seems to be less of a problem than issues like Soak. A character with a max Knowledge/Education, Survival or Astrogation doesn't break the game the way high soak/armoured characters do. I don't allow any kind of armour (the stormtrooper gear isn't armour in the movies, its a communications/life-support system!) and that helps keep characters honest.

Our highest XP character has 2165 XP at last count, and if anything, feels 'underpowered' in combat terms. Highest skills are in Education (5) and Negociation (4), and her Talent specs (Doctor, Entrepreneur, Scholar) are nice, but don't feel too much. She's capable of some potent moments with the Move tree maxed, but 2 Force dice mean she can't do that every time. And with 2 Brawn and no armour, she can still be one-shotted by a single minion.

On the other hand, you could build a munchkinised droid marauder at a few hundred XP that would be hopelessly overpowered.

Yeah the character I mentioned as a command/engineering/space combat focus. He could do ok outside of those areas but those areas were the ones he was great at.

I think I figured it down to 4 or 5 specs. Commodore, Scientist, Mechanic, undecided Jedi spec, and if there's ever a pirate or privateer spec that one. I might change the engineer specs up after the tech book, engineer book, or both are out though. His first campaign he was an anti-Imperial pirate engineer, second an Alliance Privateer, third he formally joined the rebellion and became an Alliance naval officer and his force potential was awakened early in campaign four.and by the final campaign he was a New Republic naval officer/Jedi Knight, and working on one of their ship design teams when not in the field.

In my experience, characters can become masters of a single specialty within 200 to 300 XP (after creation). XP beyond that serves to either make them rediculously overpowered in that area (Combat, Social skills, etc) or allows them to branch out to be more well rounded. At about triple that number (around 1k XP), a character can have two areas of awesomeness or be adequate at almost everything.

As I said earlier in another post, I don't truly see the point in buying the 4th and 5th rank in skills. Usually the DCs are so low and the probabilities so weighted toward success that the additional proficiency dice don't matter all that much. This is why I tend to believe that "mastery" tends to come at such low levels of XP.

Combat can really be 'won' early, if a character chooses to focus on that exclusively. There's really not all that much to spend XP on combat-wise after a certain point (especially with the low difficulties associated with most combat checks).

Force abilities and trees can serve to be excellent XP sinks, but run the risk of making every character a "Jedi" after a certain point.

The amount of XP it will take for a game to start getting "silly" or start breaking really just depends on the group. I have been in games with 1500+ xp characters that are just beginning to flesh out in terms of abilities and gear while others are just ridiculous with 6 specializations.

If the group is heavily involved in roleplaying and make decisions based on in-game character decisions/background/goals than the XP ceiling is really quite high 2000+. But if the group is only focused on gaining every mechanical bonus/advantage possible than some characters will reach that ceiling very quickly in specific areas with as little as 300-400xp.

So if your group likes to build stories, relationships, characters you do not have to worry about xp. On the other hand if your group instead only focuses on beating "levels" and building mechanical power you will probably have game breaking characters very quickly.