I tell you what Aetrion: When you've finally gotten to this peak of potential power, please post your character to this forum. Let us know how long it took you to get there (e.g. hours played) and XP earned. I am serious. I want to know.

And just to be clear: Your +660 XP character you described above isn't there yet. Not by a long shot.

I don't really know where that number lies, and it's a little ridiculous that people are telling me I have to find that number to prove it exists at all in a thread that is primarily a question about where to set the limits to prevent hyperspecialized characters.

You are asking this forum where to set limits on something everyone has repeatedly told you is not an issue. So yes, it is up to you to figure out where that limit its (hint: its where the snipes like to play). Furthermore, you've yet to demonstrate why you even need such limits.

And what exactly is "hyperspecialization" anyway? Why is it even a concern?

I don't really know where that number lies, and it's a little ridiculous that people are telling me I have to find that number to prove it exists at all in a thread that is primarily a question about where to set the limits to prevent hyperspecialized characters.

Hahaha .... no. You've changed the point of this thread so many times dude. We've already answered the "how to set limits on hyperspecialized" question 8 pages back. You didn't accept it and continued to move the goal post further and further back. At which point we asked for a character sheet to examine to see if this is a real problem. You've denied that request saying it's unimportant, despite the fact that with an actual character sheet we could compute the actual odds of your problem occurring. We could then compare that to a mundane character see if there is a statistically significant difference between to two.

Then we could actually answer the question.

But you refuse to have the question answered.

At that point going force sensitive allows you to keep advancing in the same area of expertise.

You know if you actually built a character we could put this theory of yours to the test. It is possible to do that with a character sheet and a known XP level.

The one singular point I'm making is that if you stack force abilities on top of mundane abilities in any given area of advancement you can specialize in that area to a greater degree.

Any idea on how long this is going to remain your point before it changes again?

You know .... for planning purposes.

I mean this is primarily an issue with open games.

No .... no it's not.

On the one hand, you don't want to simply tell people "No, you can't play your character anymore!" if they get too much XP, because that sucks a lot of the fun out of making a character if every session is just a step toward forced retirement.

You can and plenty of games do. But most of us tend to game for more reasons than gaining XP.

On the other hand, you don't want people to completely break the game with hyperspecialized characters that can do things like roll 5P5F3B on a craft check and make items that simply have every single positive quality.

Most hyperspecialized characters don't live long anyway. The problem self-corrects in that their weaknesses will tend to hold them back in key ways that tend to prove fatal.

Which is why few people build hyperspeclaized characters.

I think it's important to note that "charm" doesn't necessarily mean "agreement", and there are limits to the effectiveness of social checks. For example, I'm not gay, so a guy trying to seduce me simply wouldn't work. The best level of success possible in that situation is I think the guy is hilarious and fun to hang out with, but I'm not crawling in the sack.

Stupid, vaguely related, aside - my engineer, assigned to infiltrate and blow up a imperial research station, wound up at the reception party and broke the ice with an Ice Queen Imperial lieutenant she had been traveling with. My normally puny and feeble charm skill was upgraded to two yellows - and I got a double triumph. Someone at the table threw out "She's being so mean because she's secretly got a crush on you!"

We all laughed, and I was thinking that yeah - I never really did figure out Tacetta's sexual orientation. Who knows, perhaps she is queer - or at least bi.

And then later in the game, they wound pointing guns at each other John Woo style as Tacetta was mid-sabotage, elbows deep in the reactor's guts. The relationship kind of hit a rough patch right there. . . .

Assuming your hypothesis is correct, do you know why don't buy all the force dice I can get my hands on? Because I play a CHARACTER , not an optimized spread sheet. Why don't I have the force? Because she's not force sensitive. She's a normal, mundane person who got caught up in the orbit of three Jedi. I don't do that because that's not who the character is.

*slowly raises hand* I... May be eyeballing the Sage career in my game because it has two force points... In my defense my character did grow up on a frontier farm and...

Heeeerrrrmiiiiit...

Never met a game that couldn't be broken.

Toon. I think you would be very hard pressed to break Toon. The worst breaking of Toon you could do is not be funny.

Never met a game that couldn't be broken.

Toon. I think you would be very hard pressed to break Toon. The worst breaking of Toon you could do is not be funny.

It's probably happened, especially given how long the game's been around. Most of the min-max power gamers I've had the misfortune of encountering were sorely lacking in the sense of humor needed to play a game of Toon.

Never met a game that couldn't be broken.

Toon. I think you would be very hard pressed to break Toon. The worst breaking of Toon you could do is not be funny.

Or TFOS

While I have Teenagers from Outer Space (for those who are going "TOFS?!? Wha?"), I've never actually played it - so I'm not qualified to say. But yeah, from my reading it looks like a hard engine to powergame and break.

While I have Teenagers from Outer Space (for those who are going "TOFS?!? Wha?"), I've never actually played it - so I'm not qualified to say. But yeah, from my reading it looks like a hard engine to powergame and break.

If you can be sufficiently creative in TFOS, you can break the GM — if not the game.

I’m proud to say that I have been there, and I have done that!

While I have Teenagers from Outer Space (for those who are going "TOFS?!? Wha?"), I've never actually played it - so I'm not qualified to say. But yeah, from my reading it looks like a hard engine to powergame and break.

If you can be sufficiently creative in TFOS, you can break the GM — if not the game.

I’m proud to say that I have been there, and I have done that!

Then you've been playing the game 100% correctly. The whole point of that game is to be utterly silly almost to the point of insanity.

Another stupid aside: The one time I nearly broke the GM in Toon.

I was playing Philbert J Toaster, a psychotic toaster with a baseball bat, and we were in a shopping mall on a scavenger hunt, having to bring back 5 really bizarre items - a cross-dressing moose, something from a parallel universe, crazy stuff like that. The last item on the list was "Something red" - and everyone is scrambling around the mall desperately trying unsuccessfully to find something red.

The GM had a bandanna on. You can probably see where this is going. . . .

When my turn came around, I calmly stopped and told her "I reach off the artists easel, and grab the animator's bandanna" while leaning across the table and snatching the red bandanna off her head. Everyone in the room just died laughing as I won the scavenger hunt. . . and then the GM dropped a 500 ton anvil on my Toaster to end the cartoon.

Goddamned epic shattering of the fourth wall.

Brilliant!!!!

Then you've been playing the game 100% correctly. The whole point of that game is to be utterly silly almost to the point of insanity.

Keep in mind this is all from my hazy memory of a game I played many, many years ago.

In the particular case I’m thinking of, my character was a human size evolved frog, who could stand and walk and talk like other humans, but he could also do all the things you’d expect of a really large and strong frog.

There was an alien attack on the high school. We found out that water on Earth was like acid to the aliens. My frog was able to easily convince them to run behind and follow him and try to catch him — I think I screamed “Last one in is a rotten Egg!” as I ran past, and they couldn’t resist. As my character ran into the indoor pool area, he jumped over the pool, and the aliens couldn't do that and so they fell in — and they promptly all dissolved and died.

That adventure was supposed to take us hours to work out, and we solved it in something like fifteen minutes. As I recall, the GM couldn’t figure out what to do with us afterwards.

But TFOS and “Paranoia!” are games that I could only play once every month or so. They were so intense and required such insane levels of creativity that I couldn’t do that any more often.

Assuming your hypothesis is correct, do you know why don't buy all the force dice I can get my hands on? Because I play a CHARACTER , not an optimized spread sheet. Why don't I have the force? Because she's not force sensitive. She's a normal, mundane person who got caught up in the orbit of three Jedi. I don't do that because that's not who the character is.

*slowly raises hand* I... May be eyeballing the Sage career in my game because it has two force points... In my defense my character did grow up on a frontier farm and...

Damnit, Seer, not Sage. Seer is way more wilderness man-ey.

...Can I come back in yet?