I just read a forum post when something struck me... Why do players choose their career anyway? Why not let them train whatever they see fit, without thinking about careers, and if they act out like a special career path let the GM grant them that career opportunity and with it the benefits of it. And same way, if they start to act in a way not feasible for the career take it away from them again.

There is a bit of an exception with magic/faith careers, but those bring their own rules and boundaries with them anyway, so perhaps they are only different in terms of startup.

Any thoughts about that?

Lucifer

I think this is a result of two things:

1. Tradition - This game has a long running tradition with the career system and people playing the typical warhammer trappings.

2. Game design - I think people would immediately choose combat skills if allowed to pick anything. You would just get variations of combat types instead of a diversity of carreers.

I agree with you on 1, but FFG broke with that many traditions, why not one more?

I don't agree on 2 though... The diversity isn't very high as it is, and at least in my parties, even if they had the chance to go for ultimate combat they wouldn't, because they know that they would fail in 80% of the adventures without other skills...

Lucifer

I think that you can try a career no career for so say, with the cost of advancing no careers skills.

Yep. There is nothing stoping them from doing this. It is just more expensive.

PrinceLucifer said:

1. Because Jay said he wanted that part of the game.

2.

I completely disagree with you. If given the choice players will take a high str (for melee) or agility (for shooting) then a high toughness. Every character would start that way and rightly so, since those are things that save your skin. If given the option of upping your choice of stats with a careerless system you would see everyone with 4-5 str or 4-5 agility, and 5 toughness. Because it more than doubles your chance of staying alive, healing, and hitting, over most starting characters under the career system.

And while I'm glad your players understand you run more than combat and they want to play something squishy for the roleplaying experience of being good at other things, if you ran for my group we'd all take the str and toughness and roleplay the rest, and if we fail, we'd just keep failing until you either made it possible to succeed or just got frustrated with us and gave up on the game. If the murder got away oh well, if the empire falls, oh well. The point is, at some point the game would get ugly because you would have to force storyline failure on us or relent and give in to our style of playing reslisent combat monkeys. Either way it would not end well and cause hurt feelings.

The career system is there to force players into other skill sets to create diversity in stat lines and skills percisely to prevent players from doing what my group would do. It forces them to play a role and accept squishy status for the sake of roleplaying and story. This forcing is a necessary rule in the game.