I'm running an EotE campaign...sort of. Used Obligation to set up the character's backstories, but otherwise it doesn't really come into play. Not using Duty at all, the players are free-wheeling smugglers caught up in larger events, but not associated with any external organization.

So Talents like Positive Spin (Propagandist) are kind of useless to the player. I told the player we'd ignore them and consider them "purchased", but I'm wondering if there might be a way to reinvent their purpose in a non-Duty-driven campaign.

On a parallel note, I have a similar issue with talents like "Black Market Contacts" because they assume the campaign uses the rigid economy rules of the game, which we don't do...the players aren't really "equipment driven", except for the Engineer who really wanted a Dragon-eye Reaper. So I told the Enforcer-branching-into-Scoundrel that he could ignore those too.

Any thoughts on what I might do instead?

Could Positivie Spin not also work with obligation? Reskin it like...

You Know I'm Good For it: Whenever the character Ob goes down it goes don by an additional 1/rank.

What's you're economy look like? BMC can also seem to apply toward the trading of illegal goods. Doing so can actually kick out a few extra credits compared to running legal goods... You know, use BMC when buying a load of spice to lower it's starting Rarity, so when you get to the drop point it has a higher multiplier.

Good idea, but we don't really use Obligation either. I don't find it that useful post-chargen.

As for economy, we don't do much with counting credits, nobody is poring through the books eying equipment. It's not that they don't have cash, basically they are too busy with the story and the NPCs to bother. If there's any buying of stuff it happens between sessions and so far none of their requests have been sufficiently weird enough to warrant a dice roll or wasting precious session time to resolve the purchase.

For BMC I was considering *if it came up*, to just give a boost die/rank on a Streetwise roll to find illegal/black market goods. But I still can't see charging the player the XP for something that probably won't ever come up before the campaign is completed.

Possibly use it to improve a first impression an NPC has over the party once per session, or use it to improve negotiations rolls, ignoring 1 threat or gaining 1 auto advantage.

Both these keep within the name of the talent and are standard systems used by other talents so shouldn't be too OP or broken. Just an idea anyway.

You could use them to grant a boost die in social situations. If the characters are using Streetwise or Knowledge: Underworld to try to get some information, Black Market contacts would grant a boost to the roll, or cancel a setback. Similarly, Positive Spin could be used to grant a boost to a social interaction a'la "Have you heard about my little maneuver at the battle of Tanaab?"

You could also just have the player buy around them, since at no point is the character absolutely required to buy any ranks in Positive Spin to delve into the specialization.

But if you are going to reskin it, then perhaps RichardBuxton's suggestion of allowing the PC to remove one Threat per rank of Positive Spin from social interaction checks is the simplest method that doesn't risk the reskinned talent to overshadow talents of a similar nature.

And in a similar vein, alter Improved Positive Spin so that instead of triggering someone's Duty, it negates the mechanical effect of someone's Obligation triggering; thus instead of a boost to Wound Threshold, the party's morale is boosted enough that they're not stressed out over whichever Obligation came up and thus avoid the penalty to Strain Threshold, though any story-based effects would still occur.