Y'all need to get with the times and start handling out more XP, 500 per hour at a minimum

Y'all need to get with the times and start handling out more XP, 500 per hour at a minimum

If you would just play 24x7x365, you could get there at standard rates in a little over 10 years.

So, obviously a character who has maxed out every spec tree and skill is a bit of absurdism, but from a practical point of view, to what the upper limits are.....

I wanted to test this out myself, so last year at Gamer Nation Con I wrote a module for F&D featuring the Jedi Council as PCs, with 1600-2200 earned XP each. Now, granted, they cut through battle droids like a lightsaber through butter, but they were not doing so well once they went up against enemies with Adversary 2-3 (Dooku, Ventress, etc). And even with the minions, it was just a matter of adjusting the size of the minion groups to be large enough to remain a threat even after they force leapt into the center of a minion group and saber swarmed or whatever else and took them out 5-6 at a time.

So overall, so long as you use adversary generously with named advesaries, and group minions into larger groups, the game scales up very nice. I think this is largely because, assuming most players are only going to even try to max out 3 spec trees and a handful of important skills, their soak and wound threshold don't really get too large to become a problem, and reflect and parry likewise can only defend against so much. So long as you pick adversaries that can deal with this sort of thing (lightsabers are nasty, your PCs will NEVER have enough parry because of breach 1), you really don't run into too many problems. I routinely killed my Kit Fisto build (who had like 1900 XP), and Yoda was very, very squishy with a wound threshold of like 8 and very little soak.

So with the feel of that in mind, I'd say 2,500 XP would probably be about time to consider hanging up those characters and letting them retire. You can only find so many Dooku-level threats to face in one campaign without things getting stale.

But if you're getting 20 XP a session, that's 125 sessions, or 2 and a half years of weekly 4 hour sessions, or 10 and a half years of monthly sessions. I mean, after that, you've gotta be in the mood for a new character/build, am I right?

Now, that's F&D, where you have the added sinks of Force Powers, and trying to find Force Rating increases along with Parry and Reflect. Take that element out, in a non-force powered AOR or Edge game? I might start feeling that same way at 1,500 XP or so, when most relevant skill checks have 4-5 yellows and a green or two, and skills they aren't that good at still have 2 yellows and a green or two. Not to mention a slew of talents and signature abilities to keep track of. But that's still 75 sessions.

Okay, I did a review to make sure I didn't miss anything, and it turns out I did: I forgot to account for the free rank in Survival that Mountain Niktos get, which adds the potential for a third double-upped skill at CharGen, and subtracts an additional 10 from the minimum-maximum. I was so focused on the fact that they get Natural Outdoorsman that I forgot they get other stuff, too !That gives us the final range of 89,265 and 90,790 xp, for the moment. I'm going to re-audit my work on species and make sure there isn't one that can discount by more than 25, but I don't think there is. I'll let you know!Cheers!EDIT: Species audit completed, nothing else missed! Carry on!

Does this include spec we dont have yet? 9 more F&D and 6 more age and 3 more edge?

Okay, I did a review to make sure I didn't miss anything, and it turns out I did: I forgot to account for the free rank in Survival that Mountain Niktos get, which adds the potential for a third double-upped skill at CharGen, and subtracts an additional 10 from the minimum-maximum. I was so focused on the fact that they get Natural Outdoorsman that I forgot they get other stuff, too !That gives us the final range of 89,265 and 90,790 xp, for the moment. I'm going to re-audit my work on species and make sure there isn't one that can discount by more than 25, but I don't think there is. I'll let you know!Cheers!EDIT: Species audit completed, nothing else missed! Carry on!

Does this include spec we dont have yet? 9 more F&D and 6 more age and 3 more edge?

Though maybe I should go see what the general Grit/Toughened distribution is. Engineer's probably will have some of the ranked tech talents. So maybe it's possible to calculate the most likely ones, but since I'm not Absol I'm not sure exactly how to do it.

I do love analyses, but I have no real talent for this kind. I'm good at analyzing narratives, not math—which mostly amounts to thinking in TVTropes language half the time. (I have provided no examples, for the usual reasons of courtesy and not discharging dangerous memetic weapons in a populated area. Though even the mention of the site may count...)

Does this include spec we dont have yet? 9 more F&D and 6 more age and 3 more edge?

Yes it does. I made the assumption that there would be no repeated specs and no repeated non-ranked talents in those unknown specializations. The first assumption is fairly safe, the second very not so. But because of that, that means the practical maximum cannot increase; the only thing that changes it is repeated non-ranked talents showing up, which would decrease it.

Can't calculate that, since we don't know the tree composition, and some talents will be duplicates.

Though maybe I should go see what the general Grit/Toughened distribution is. Engineer's probably will have some of the ranked tech talents. So maybe it's possible to calculate the most likely ones, but since I'm not Absol I'm not sure exactly how to do it.

I do love analyses, but I have no real talent for this kind. I'm good at analyzing narratives, not math—which mostly amounts to thinking in TVTropes language half the time. (I have provided no examples, for the usual reasons of courtesy and not discharging dangerous memetic weapons in a populated area. Though even the mention of the site may count...)

I already did the Grit/Toughness analysis; it's around here, somewhere. That was pre-Endless Vigil, though, so it's a little inaccurate now, but I don't intend to redo it at this moment!

And ooh! narrative analysis! I would love your opinion on my story; I know I sent it to you a while ago...

...yes, yes you did. Have I noted yet that I'm extremely scatterbrained sometimes?

I've picked up on it! Such as designing a character for a PbP, and then immediately designing another as a thought experiment, only to come up with so much backstory that you can't treat it as a thought experiment anymore? Would that be a good example ?

Something like that, yes.