Just for laughs, has anyone ever played a campaign mission where they gave the full 20 XP to all the Rebel players and the Imperial? How did it go?

If you haven't done this, how do you think it is likely to go? How do you think it would work on a finale mission? I'm pretty sure the Imperial would be slaughtered, but the idea keeps intriguing me and I wanted to see if anyone else had tried it.

I thought about this when designing an equal-rewards campaign. I was thinking about how much XP to give each side, and I had originally considered giving each side the Victory reward for every mission (this would not be as much as the full 20XP, but it's close). I ran into a few issues:

1. Not every hero benefits equally from having all their abilities. This mostly effects core set heroes, who have a lot of special actions and strain-heavy abilities. If you have 2 abilities that take special actions, then you can only do one of them each round (assuming you need to take a move action, or regular attack action, or something). While having both would let you use the most effective one for each situation, you would not benefit from having both abilities as much as a hero who has only one special action and several non-action abilities. There is a similar problem with abilities that cost a lot of strain - you can't use all of them with your limited endurance, and heroes that have abilities that don't cost strain benefit more.
2. It gets really difficult to keep track of all of your abilities. That's 8 little cards you need to keep track of, plus weapons and equipment, and reward cards, and your hero sheet... it's just a mess. You're very likely to forget to apply your abilities at the right time, and the mental load would be huge. It's bad enough toward the end of a campaign with even normal rewards.
3. Similarly, table space. Lots of little cards takes up a lot of room. It gets very cluttered
4. Part of the fun of the reward process is deciding what you want your hero to do, and deciding to not have some abilities, so you can have others. You have to decide which ones you think are the best, for your team and your playstyle. It's not as much fun (in my opinion) if you know you'll get everything eventually, and you just need to decide what order it comes in.

It might be fun to try it though, just for one mission! And maybe you wouldn't have the same issues with it that I did.

Some classes (whether hero or imperial) get much more benefit from having 20XP than some others due to having alternative build paths which do not synergize. I think around 14XP is the most you need, and I think 12XP is a good amount.

17 hours ago, a1bert said:

Some classes (whether hero or imperial) get much more benefit from having 20XP than some others due to having alternative build paths which do not synergize. I think around 14XP is the most you need, and I think 12XP is a good amount.

It's not about need. It's about giving my players something to do. My house rules tend to make the game longer than the standard 11-14 missions. I also don't see this crew as likely to replay a character just to make a new build. I'm knocking around a few ideas to either slow their character development in future campaigns, or extend it so that they don't feel like there is a stone left unturned.

I know that Jabba's Realm can give the Imperial up to 16 XP, but the Rebels only get 14, which makes me cautious. Seems like the designers signaling that playing both sides at more than 14 XP would be unbalanced for the Imperial.

I did say some classes get more benefit from extra XP than some others, so giving all class card would probably produce an imbalance. And you would have players that cannot make use of all of their class cards, which might produce feeling of unfairness.

Also don't forget the effect of credits. With a relatively small amount of extra credits (per mission or throughout the campaign) the rebels "power up" much more quickly than the imperial player, and they do not lose their purchases like the imperial player loses the single-use agenda cards. The majority of the purchased items are also equally usable when a hero is wounded. (Just increasing the threat level may not be enough or granular enough to compensate.)

(Maybe that could be prevented with some kind of upkeep cost.)

If your campaign lasts twice as long just double the cost of cards. As others have said, it's not balanced for more than 14 and different decks will end up at different power levels at 20.

7 hours ago, Union said:

If your campaign lasts twice as long just double the cost of cards. As others have said, it's not balanced for more than 14 and different decks will end up at different power levels at 20.

...well that is one solution.

I think it may be down to that, or saying that they can continue to gain XP, but can only have up to 14 points in use at any one time.

Remember that XP isn't necessarily balanced for both sides. For every XP the Empire gets, the Rebels will typically get 4. Other things like Threat increases and mission design are meant to (hopefully) balance the increased Rebel XP.

But "just for laughs", it would make for a chaotic, hilarious, and probably pretty fun finale. I'm trying to imagine a campaign with a vehicles boss that is loaded for bear with all of the Armored Onslaught vehicle upgrades. That'd be pretty interesting.