It depends on the system or the character whether I come up with mechanics or backstory first, but you always have to have a concept. Reading on Wookiepedia about different species, such as Gand, can give you some great ideas.

My personal recomendation is to spend all your starting xp on Characteristics. I also reccommend getting as many stats to Three as you can, even if it means taking additional obligation. If you are a human or lunged gand for instance, you can have a 3 3 3 3 2 2 starting array, which is pretty nice. I generally don't recommend spending xp to take stats to 4 at character creation, as it's less effecient. You can always raise attributes later through Dedication, which costs 25 xp. Generally speaking, edge is a game where anyone might be called on to make that charm or negotiation roll, not just the guy with +20 to diplomacy. I personally don't like to have any characteristics at 1 because you're at risk to fail even simple checks (no difficulty).

Generally speaking, characteristics should determine how many green dice you roll and skill ranks should determine how many of them are yellow. The reason for this is simple: it will take less xp to raise the relevant characteristic than to raise the skill ranks of all the skills in that characteristic, as a rule. More green dice are better than smaller numbers of yellow dice (until you get into large numbers of dice where the better results on the yellow dice can even it out).

Remember you don't have to pick your favorite specialization first. Sometimes it's worthwhile to pick one that will give you better starting skills and/or offers a straight path to Dedication. Also, some talents are somewhat dependent on equipment, and you may not have that equipment yet.

Lastly: figure out how you're going to contribute to combat and space combat.

No offense, but this isn't great advice. Well, investing as much xp as possible in characteristics is, but a 3/3/3/3 stat array is garbage. The reasoning is complex and requires some dice math, but let me see if I can break it down in a reasonable length (forgive the cocktail napkin math).

The first important thing to understand is how little upgrading from a green to a yellow dice gives you. Ability dice give a 62.5% chance of success per dice while a proficiency dice gives only 83.3%. This means that, at least from a success standpoint, adding a green dice is almost 3x more beneficial than upgrading. From an advantage perspective, ability dice give a 62.5% chance of getting an advantage while prof. dice give 66.6%. So if you are looking for advantage then upgrading to a prof dice nets you only .4%.

With those numbers in mind, you can start to see that stacking characteristics with skill ranks is only superior to adding a green dice if Triumphs play a large role in skill checks (Example: Crafting, Medicine). Otherwise, the best use of your xp would be to focus some characteristics, raising them quite high, while allowing others to remain low but pumping up their skill ranks.

Under that logic, a skill array of all 3's produces a situation where the player will be investing a lot of xp bumping skills but gaining minimal benefits for most of their early careers. What is better, would be to determine which characteristic has the most skills for your archetype. Invest in that stat and allow the others to remain low. Of course your career skills have to be taken into account because you don't want to have to waste xp raising non-career skills.

Speaking in a general sense, raising Brawn, Agility or Intellect very high is good because they contain a lot of abilities that can benefit from high stats with only a few ranks. Wil, Pres and Cun all have builds that you might want to do that, but it is generally better to leave them low and buy up the 1 or 2 skills you want.

As mentioned, the exception would be crafters or doctor types were triumphs are abnormally useful. In that case, stacking dice is the way to go. Of course with crafters, maximizing boost dice is the way to go, but that's a different conversation.

Combat is tricky, because lots of combat characters care about advantage and by proxy triumphs. Since upgrading a dice does almost nothing to increase your advantage chance, you have to do some strange math to weigh the benefits of adding a dice (5/8's chance at an advantage) with upgrading (1/12 chance of Triumph). Since adding a green also have an increased chance of adding successes as well, I generally lean in that direction but its less cut and dry than something like a knowledge check.

While I enjoy specialized characters and going for a 4 (or even sometimes 5) starting characteristic, the comparison isn't quite so cut and dried. There is, of course, the fact that some characteristics have knock-on effects, such as additional strain for Willpower or wounds and soak for Brawn, but the bigger factor is that once you decide you don't care about Triumphs, a 3 characteristic can get you an acceptable level of competence without having to invest any skill ranks at all.

In order to match (or technically, slightly exceed) the competence of someone with a 3 characteristic if yours is 2 or lower, you need to invest 3 skill ranks. Even if it's a career skill, that's 30 XP. If you left Willpower at 2 and decide you want to be reasonably good at Coercion and Vigilance, you'll have to spend 60 XP to catch up to someone who spent 30 XP at character creation. A 3 characteristic is an effective way to buy your way out of needing to invest skill ranks, saving you quite a bit of XP that would otherwise be spent chasing down skill ranks in Deception and Perception for Cunning, or Cool and Charm for Presence.

Furthermore, in the long run, the 3/3/3/3/2/2 array will be able to cap a characteristic in the same place as the 4/3/2/2/2/2 array by the third Dedication talent, but the more spread out array will still have more characteristic points in total. They will also potentially have slightly better wounds/strain thresholds, depending on how they distribute their scores, which may not sound like a big deal, but character archetypes in this game often have trouble getting one or the other. A combat-focused character will likely find that many of their spec trees are short on talents like Grit, which may lead them to regret forgoing Willpower in lieu of better Brawn/Agility, to say nothing of the failed fear checks and poor initiative rolls when ambushed. Likewise, a character that's focused on social/skill-based specs won't see many ranks of Toughened available (the Colonist gets a grand total of one rank of Toughened in each of their specs), which may leave them feeling fragile if they skimped on Brawn in lieu of Intellect/Cunning/Presence.

Well, investing as much xp as possible in characteristics is, but a 3/3/3/3 stat array is garbage.

That's a bit extreme. Depends on the group and the campaign. My players spent too much time agonizing over where to put the 4, they finally settled on 3/3/3/3/2/2 and have been happy ever since. That first Dedication is a huge boon, and yet they remain broadly capable. But then I like to pull the PCs out of their comfort zones, I think somebody with a 4/3/2/2/2/2 would be often frustrated.

Well, investing as much xp as possible in characteristics is, but a 3/3/3/3 stat array is garbage.

That's a bit extreme. Depends on the group and the campaign. My players spent too much time agonizing over where to put the 4, they finally settled on 3/3/3/3/2/2 and have been happy ever since. That first Dedication is a huge boon, and yet they remain broadly capable. But then I like to pull the PCs out of their comfort zones, I think somebody with a 4/3/2/2/2/2 would be often frustrated.

I agree.

A set-up of four 3's and two 2's gives a PC a pretty broad range of capability, allowing them to be useful in a variety of situations, even if they don't have any ranks in a given skill, since rolling 3 green dice gives you a decent chance of success against Average and Easy difficulties. And if anything, I think such a thing replicates what we see on the screen, be it movies or TV series (or even books/comics) where the heroes are broadly capable in a variety of areas, and only rarely are they very specialized (i.e. have a 4/3/2/2/2/2 spread).

Whether you go the “Jack of all Trades” route or the “Hyperspecialized” route, I think a great deal depends on the GM and the campaign.

Some GMs will be at one end of the extreme or the other, but I suspect that the majority of the GMs will probably be somewhere in the middle, and should be able to work with whatever style of CHARGEN is used by the players.

I disagree with this. If your games have a dump stat, the GM is not putting the characters through their paces.

Dump stats are still alive and well, in this game its normally intelligence (unless your playing a class the resolves around it), or brawn.

Agility is the power stat, as it is in most modern rpgs.

Tell that to my grouo. Intelligence is their single most common stat. Everyone has 3 int in the party. The demolitionist and gadgeteer are constantly leveraging technology to their advantage (usually by making it explode) while the Quartermaster uses it for knowledge skills and more mundane computer usage. The Hotshot handles astrogation and does a little maintenance on her ship on the side.

Presence is probably their biggest dump stat. When the quartermaster isn't around, the group tends to rely pretty heavily pn coercion. (Wookiee and zabrak power duo can pull it off pretty well, too. "Bad cop, tear your arms off cop")

Whether you go the “Jack of all Trades” route or the “Hyperspecialized” route, I think a great deal depends on the GM and the campaign.

Some GMs will be at one end of the extreme or the other, but I suspect that the majority of the GMs will probably be somewhere in the middle, and should be able to work with whatever style of CHARGEN is used by the players.

True, but I've found that a "jack of all trades" approach generally works out better for games that run past a single adventure, as you've got more options. But then again, I like my characters to have more than one way to approach a problem, especially in systems like this and even more so in the new edition of 7th Sea.

Well, investing as much xp as possible in characteristics is, but a 3/3/3/3 stat array is garbage.

That's a bit extreme. Depends on the group and the campaign. My players spent too much time agonizing over where to put the 4, they finally settled on 3/3/3/3/2/2 and have been happy ever since. That first Dedication is a huge boon, and yet they remain broadly capable. But then I like to pull the PCs out of their comfort zones, I think somebody with a 4/3/2/2/2/2 would be often frustrated.

Is this or is this not an optimization thread. I'm not trolling here, the math is plain. A 3/3/3/3 character is going to generate fewer results across the board as a character who spends the same xp with more high lows. This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of math. It drives me crazy when I see people talking about 3/3/3/3 as a generalist stat line. The only think general about that is you will be generally not good at most everything. A 4/4/1/1 character is going to make a better generalist, after only a little xp investment, than a 3/3/3/3 because the xp they spend will immediately have more impact when added to low character skills and they can ignore most high characteristic skills.

I will conseed that a little xp is required for you to see this payoff, but after half a dozen sessions you are going to be much better off than the joe average character and will only further the gap in the mid game. In extremely high xp games (600+) this gap is going to start smooth out but by then this system starts to break down in a lot of meaningful ways and our group tend to retire our characters anyway.

Bring up dedication only added another point for a more focused stat line, namely that adding a dedicated point to a 4 or 5 is worth 10-20xp more than adding it to a 3.

I know all of this 10xp savings here or there seems fiddly, but that's what optimization is all about.

A 4/4/1/1 character is going to make a better generalist, after only a little xp investment, than a 3/3/3/3 because the xp they spend will immediately have more impact when added to low character skills and they can ignore most high characteristic skills.

That seems backwards. If you have a couple 4s it's because those attributes are key to your one-or-two trick pony build, and you will likely be also investing XP in their related skills. Why would you ignore them at the expense of skills powered by an attribute of 1? If you're a shooter you'll not only want that 4, but you'll also want the skill ranks so you can push the narrative results higher, otherwise the general outcome of your dice rolls will be success with threat. Meanwhile, your low attributes with a couple skill ranks will generally result in failure with advantage.

As for this:

Is this or is this not an optimization thread.

The word optimization seems to mean only one thing to you. If you read the OP, it's about "playability", so I interpret that as wanting a character that is optimized to be enjoyable from chargen to the end of the campaign. If the GM is scaling appropriately, early challenges will be in the Easy to Average range, and if the boosts and setbacks and DPs are flowing properly then 3s are plenty good. And if the GM is doing their job, then breadth is welcome.

Besides, this is completely wrong:

In extremely high xp games (600+) this gap is going to start smooth out but by then this system starts to break down in a lot of meaningful ways and our group tend to retire our characters anyway.

Extremely high? We're at 600+ XP now and have only just started. The system is nowhere near breaking down. Perhaps your style of optimization puts a limit on your experience.

Well, it was actually a twice dead thread but that's not the point. It might depend on whether you think "optimization" means "the ability to net a successful check" or "the character is good at something" because if it's the former your approach -may- be correct, but if it's the latter then your approach is dead wrong. Your approach to pump 1 or 2 characteristics at creation and put skill ranks in the low characteristic (to add green dice) will result in characters with lots of green dice and little yellow dice. As the game is weighted for success with threat, these character may be able to pass checks but will reliably have bad consequences on the check.

This does not strike me as a character who is good at something. If I'm playing an "optimized" character, I would expect to not only pass the checks I'm good at, but also have great things happen while doing it. A character who barely scrapes by all the time isn't what I'd consider powerful. Starting with a 4 in a characteristic, you'd want to put -more- xp into the dependent skills so great things can happen when you roll them.

I think the part you underestimate, IMO, is that there are only a handful of checks in which a Triumph is important. A triumph result on any check is important. A possibly unquantifiable property is Triumphs have unique effects which only they can achieve and these are often important extra bits which would either take a whole other check to do or have some other significant effect on the game. A more quantifiable property is they can be used to do anything any number of advantage can achieve. On most checks the suggestions stop at 3 advantage, but some Triumphs could be worth 5+ advantage if it is used to crit with a high crit rating weapon. Assuming a Triumph is "only" worth 3 advantage yields .917 advantage per side on the Proficiency die compared to the .625 advantage per side of an Ability, a difference of .291 advantage per side (a significant improvement over your claimed .04 number).

This all being said, why I wanted to post was to say optimization can also be considered for the whole of the campaign. The good GM advice seen on this board and others is to make sure characters see action on all their characteristics every now and again. A character with 4 3s is much more likely to be able to handle these off-focus checks much better than a 4/3/2s or your 4/4/1/1/2s. As you said, the number of green dice is the best predictor of success and 4 3s has 16 green dice total, 1 more than 4/3/2s and 2 more than 4/4/1/1/2s.

Personally, in the past I've been happy with 4 3s and putting 3 ranks into key skills as fast as possible. Then, if I face a greater than Hard check (or even an important Hard check) I can flip a Destiny point to add another Ability die and feel good about my chances.

Character optimization doesn't always have to mean "what provides the best mechanical advantage?"

Personally, I prefer optimizing my characters so that I'll get the maximum amount of fun out of playing them. For instance, in a 7th Sea 2e campaign, I'm playing a Castillian (Not!Spain) Duelist that isn't quite as mechanically optimized to be a swordsman as he could be, but is instead "optimized" to be a charming knave that can dance/sing/play guitar, routinely pull off action-movie hero feats of athleticism, and bedazzle most any senorita with a few words and a flash of his wolfish grin, all with nearly the same aplomb and prowess he has for swordplay.

I've also been playing a Sentinel/Shien Expert that didn't hyperfocus on Cunning, and instead went for a 3/3/3/2/2/2 spread, and even went the non-mechanically optimized route of buying ranks in non-career skills that he really didn't need, simply because they fit the character or made sense to take based upon things that had occurred over the course of the adventure.

I find that people on this board vastly underestimate the power of talents when doing the cost benefit analysis of raising skills.

Most power gamers I play with keep skills around level 2 and stats around 4-6 with the exception of deadly accuracy (weapon skill), mechanics, medicine and computers.

Lets say you wanted to make a very powerful and versitile character

You start out as a pantoran (the most broken race) with a stat spread of 2 2 2 3 3 4

You use cybernetics biofeedback regulator agi arms and legs and an int implant to get 2 4 3 3 3 4

You start at a 75xp to dedication spec my favorite is gadgeteer and go +1 int for 2 4 4 3 3 4

You wear a suit of armor with a +1 brawn attachment for stats of 3 4 4 3 3 4

Does this cost a lot of credits sure, might it take you a while yes but the end result is you have spent 75xp to roll 3 dice with 3 stats and 4 dice with 3 other stats.

You also have a balance of a 4 in physical mental and social type of stats and 3's in the other.

Just in terms of xp you will have to spend a ton to get a skill to 4 or 5 in order to add dice to this spread.

Lets say you have this spread and want to be a great pilot say you have pilot space and land at 2 and agi at 4. You could spend 100xp to get a die increase in piloting or you could take anothe spec and start working towards dedication get some useful talents and have 5 dice with all agi skills.

Yes the skill specialist will roll more yellow dice in that one specific skill but overall in terms of both success and bang for your buck increasing stats through talents like is more effective.

Well, it was actually a twice dead thread but that's not the point. It might depend on whether you think "optimization" means "the ability to net a successful check" or "the character is good at something" because if it's the former your approach -may- be correct, but if it's the latter then your approach is dead wrong. Your approach to pump 1 or 2 characteristics at creation and put skill ranks in the low characteristic (to add green dice) will result in characters with lots of green dice and little yellow dice. As the game is weighted for success with threat, these character may be able to pass checks but will reliably have bad consequences on the check.

This statement would make sense if a yellow dice provide a significant increase in your chance of an advantage over a green. It does not. You have a 2/3 (66.6%) chance of generating an advantage on an ability dice and a 5/8 (62.5%) chance on a proficiency dice. That's only a 4.1% increase in your chance of an advantage. That means 5 greens only gets about 1/5th of an advantage less than 5 yellows. Or to look at it another way, about a third of a boost dice worth of advantage.

Now of course a Triumph can be used as some amount of advantage so it should be factored in. In my experience, a triumph usually amounts to about 2.5 advantage in combat, since I usually split them between triggering weapon abilities and criticals. Now, given the 1/12 chance of a triumph on 5 yellow dice, your are looking at (.083*5*2.5) ~1.042 virtual advantage gained due to triumphs and .204 due to actual improved odds for a net increase in advantage of about 1.25 advantage. Upgrading 5 dice gives you a little over 1 advantage.

Now, I will concede that for some skills, Triumphs are disproportionately good. Medicine and Crafting, for example, get a whole lot more out of a Triumph than 2.5 advantage, and there might be a couple more. Gunnery, maybe, since you are often looking to crit large ships to death rather than outright damage them out. But those skills are very much exceptions to the rule.

As for your 3x4 characters being able to handle off focus checks, that is 100% true in the early game. If you want to play a generalist for a one shot under 100xp game, by all means, go with a lot of 3's. Once you get enough xp to rank up your skills, this become increasing less good. Right around knight level you're going to see the 3x4 character start falling behind and they will become much less optimal after that. There are sacrifices of course. A 4/4/1/1 will have skills they never level up and you will always be able to point and say "see, they aren't a true generalist because they have a G dice pool for perform checks". At that point, I guess it's just a matter of opinion.

Improved Stunning Blow, Bola, Knowledge Specialization, Smooth Talker, Vigilance, Heavy Hitter, lotsa stuff for wanting to max Triumphs. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting and more to come.

As for your 3x4 characters being able to handle off focus checks, that is 100% true in the early game. If you want to play a generalist for a one shot under 100xp game, by all means, go with a lot of 3's. Once you get enough xp to rank up your skills, this become increasing less good. Right around knight level you're going to see the 3x4 character start falling behind and they will become much less optimal after that. There are sacrifices of course. A 4/4/1/1 will have skills they never level up and you will always be able to point and say "see, they aren't a true generalist because they have a G dice pool for perform checks". At that point, I guess it's just a matter of opinion.

I think it takes a bit longer than Knight level XP for the 4/4/1/1 to outpace the 3x4. Let's say that there's two skills associated with each of those "1" characteristics the character wants to be decent to good at. Even for characteristics that have few associated skills, that's not unlikely (Willpower has Vigilance for half your initiative checks and Discipline for fear and resisting social effects, Brawn has the close combat skills plus Athletics, etc.). Getting 4 career skills to rank 3 costs 120 XP. That's most of your Knight Level XP, and you haven't bought any talents yet. Now, obviously filling in those skills is not going to be a character's top priority, but you're going to be feeling those holes until you sink that XP, and that's more than enough XP for the 3x4 character to grab a second/third tree and another rank of Dedication (depending on the specific tree).