Hi All,

Im going to be making my first FaD character this week. I think I have the basics down, but wanted to get some input from vets about spending my exp points. Im not looking to min\max, but I dont want to ruin my game experience by making an uninformed mistake. I am not above turing a character in to the empire\an inquisitor and starting over.

So as a force using Mirilan, I have 4 different areas I can spend my 105 precious exp on:

Characteristics, specializations, skills, force powers.

How do you recommend dividing those up?

Assuming I dont want a 1 cunning - buying another point is gonna cost me 20... (85)

The first row of specializations (Sentinel\Shein Expert) is another 20 (65)

I have written down that I'd buy a point of : Computers, Stealth, Lightsaber, and Perception, costing me 40 (25)

I put the rest in move and move upgrades... (0)

Am I trying to cover too many bases and spreading the points around too much? Would increasing a key characteristic be more beneficial than investing in skills? Would a new character be better off diversifying force powers instead of purchasing upgrades for one?

Thanks for reading guys.

At creation, you'll get the most bang for your buck spending on Characteristics. Whichever ones your primary skills run on should probably be 3. If you're super focused on a particular one (say, if you were going to focus primarily on Mechanics, Computers, Astrogation, etc) you could even bump one to 4. It's really pricey to raise them later since you have to buy a Dedication talent and the early ranks of skills are super cheap, so one or two sessions of XP will make up for whatever you couldn't buy in skill ranks at creation.

How soon you should spend on Talents varies by career/spec. In your case, since I assume you're starting with a Training Lightsaber, Shien Technique is a good one to get early, but a lot of others you can hold off on until your skills rolls are at a comfortable place.

Force Powers also kind of vary, but you're not going to be using the upgrades for them very often (if at all, frankly) when you only have a Force Rating of 1. I'd probably recommend avoiding them all together for a while if you're starting with a Lightsaber tree, but it won't really hold you back if your heart is set on having them.

Yep, what the hand eating wolf said above. Since the only time you can spend XP directly on boosting Characteristics is at character creation, it's an almost universally agreed upon strategy to spend as much, if not all, of your XP on Characteristics. Even FFG developers have suggested this at times. As you will never be able to do it as easily again. As to the other stuff, since most game sessions will probably average at least 10xp a session, if not more based on your GM, you can very quickly buy up your starting bag of tricks without much effort.

I run a game where we usually play 3 hours a week, and I use the rule of "5xp per hour of play" that has been suggested. But I also give out extra XP for doing fun stuff, my players staying in character, saying/doing cool things, or simply just amusing me with their antics over the course of the session. So they average about 20 a session most weeks. You can very quickly buy up stuff with 15-20 xp a session.

So, my advice, and this really isn't min/maxing really, is to buy up your characteristics to where you will be happy with your dice pools going forward, and then spend the rest on other stuff. I wouldn't put any points into skills, as you get several free ranks in skills simply for creating a character. Use them on either talents or force powers, and just use your career/spec skill ranks starting out. You can buy them up later very cheaply.

The game designers have all but out and out said that the best place to spend your starting XP is in characteristics, with something of an "ideal spread" being your three primary characteristics at a 3 and the rest at a 2 so that you're not glaringly weak in any area. About the only times you can get away with a 1 in a characteristic is if it's something that goes completely contrary to what your build is, such as a Zabark Seeker/Hunter having a Presence of 1. And in the long run, having a decent array of characteristics will pay off much better than focusing too much on talents or skill ranks, since you can very easily buy those after character creation.

You'll probably also want to set at least 10 XP aside for a Force power, which will generally leave you 10 to 20 XP for things like skills and talents (depending on which Morality option you took).

My suggestion is to only purchase a couple of first row talents from your starting spec, and spend the rest on buying a rank in a couple more of your career skills. After all, your first session is going to earn you anywhere from 10 to 20 XP, which will easily enable you to buy up some more of those first row talents and maybe even start delving into the second row of the spec.

Now, as a contrast to my above posts, I've got players in the Friday night Star Wars Skype games I'm in that opted to only buy two of their characteristics up to a 3 (one of which was Willpower, since they're both Force users), and then spend the rest on Force powers, talents, and skill ranks (in about that order). This has made things a bit tough for them when circumstances crop up that require checks for skills they're not trained in and only have a 2 in that particular characteristic. But they've had a lot of fun playing their characters, so while their approach was not optimized in the least, it works, so long as you accept that the road ahead for your PC will be a little tougher than for characters that focused more on boosting up their characteristics.

Now, as a contrast to my above posts, I've got players in the Friday night Star Wars Skype games I'm in that opted to only buy two of their characteristics up to a 3 (one of which was Willpower, since they're both Force users), and then spend the rest on Force powers, talents, and skill ranks (in about that order). This has made things a bit tough for them when circumstances crop up that require checks for skills they're not trained in and only have a 2 in that particular characteristic. But they've had a lot of fun playing their characters, so while their approach was not optimized in the least, it works, so long as you accept that the road ahead for your PC will be a little tougher than for characters that focused more on boosting up their characteristics.

From experience, the most important thing is that all your players are aware of how the others build their characters. If everyone only spends 1/2 XP on stats it should be fine. Our first campaign had 1 character with a most XP on stats, and everyone else split between stats and talents. It did not take long for that character to outshine everyone else, and everyone commented that they should have built their character different from the beginning. So when we rebooted, everyone built up as much XP into stats as they could.

Ugh! Took so long getting moderator approval that I forgot about this post and thought it had fallen into that great bitbucket in the sky...

Thank you all for your responses. I took a reeaaaall middle of the road approach. Swapped Mirilan for Torguta, and have two stats @3. I may readjust things with our GM approval since its our first go at it.

I guess it's a bit of a moot point now, but I guess someone ran the dice statistics (I did not care to check their work) and adding a green die increases chances of success/advantage much more than upping a green to a yellow. So, not only is it smart to spend starting XP on characteristics, which you can't do later, it's theoretically more effective (ignoring the power of triumph and other stuff not reflected in stats).

The difference between adding and upgrading isn't huge. The biggest difference is that a single Characteristic affects multiple skills, while skill ranks only effect 1.