When I read that there were only 4 "architypes" replacing every species in Edge, Age and Destiny, I was confused. Were they going to pull a d20 modern and make it stat based? but then why wasnt it 6 architypes instead of 4?

It just occured to me that all those star wars races fall into just a handfull of categories. Arguably 4, if you squint a little.

Well Rounder- 110 xp, 2 in all stats, extra non class skills. In Edge, this is Human.

The Specialist: 175 XP, 1 in all stats, extra class skills. In Edge, this is Droids.

The Talented: 3 in 1 stat, 1 in another, 95 XP. Every species in the unofficial species compendium, and the majority of official races, too.

The Outlier: +1 to a stat, twice, can be the same stat. -1 to a stat, twice, cannot be the same stat. 80 XP. This category covers both the 3/3/1/1 races and the occasional 4/1/1 race like Drall.

There might be other customization options, a free talent your architype can buy at creation, but I feel this is probably the heart of Genesys's "4 architypes" system.

Not a bad theory

This presupposes that chargen and XP will be the same. One of the things I hope they change is chargen XP spending. In my opinion, it cuts down in the cool talents a PC can start with if it's more mechanically optimized to spend starting XP on boring characteristics. To me, it's weird that XP can be spent on characteristics during chargen but not in-play. It's an outlier in how XP works.

I'd rather have a pool of characteristic points to allocate—even if there's a baseline value for all characteristics and a small pool of points to modify things with. Let me spend XP on cool, fun, unique things that make my character different then Jane's character. Characteristics don't do that for me.

I can hope, admittedly for naught, that these architypes also include a lifepath character generation for characters, instead of point buy.

Yeah I think spending XP on characteristics feels incredibly weird in the Star Wars system. It's also a bit of a non-choice; it's almost objectively a bad idea to spend XP on anything other than characteristics at character creation, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't pour all the points into your stats. That kind of forced choice is bad game design.

9 hours ago, c__beck said:

This presupposes that chargen and XP will be the same. One of the things I hope they change is chargen XP spending. In my opinion, it cuts down in the cool talents a PC can start with if it's more mechanically optimized to spend starting XP on boring characteristics. To me, it's weird that XP can be spent on characteristics during chargen but not in-play. It's an outlier in how XP works.

If every archetype gets points that can be spent on altering their stats (and a different amount based on how much their stats are already altered), it's kind of pointless. If you're going to allow the alteration of characteristics, why not just have one archetype with 1s in everything and a pool of points to raise them. If you want to be a generalist, you can boost everything evenly to have all 2s. If you want to have a 3 and a 1 and a bunch of 2s, you can. If you want a 4 and two 1s, you can. If you want to keep all the 1s and just buy more skills or something, you can. Doing archetypes like Rakaydos described feels backwards to me. It's like starting character creation at step two: "Now that we've already spent some of your character creation points for you, decide how you'd like to spend the rest".

Archetypes should be distinct in more ways than just how they distributed their points. If a "Well Rounder" with all 2s boosts one stat to 3 and a "Talented" with a 3 and 1 boosts their 1 to a 2, they would end up identical. That's not very archetypal. I would rather have something that would still separate them even if they end up with the same stats, something that would let them use identical stats in different ways. Something like "well rounders" being less affected by boost and setback because of their generalist nature, while "talented" benefit more from boost in their specialty but suffer more setback in their area of weakness even if the well rounder and the talented have the same stats, because they just have different approaches to using those stats.

12 hours ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

I can hope, admittedly for naught, that these architypes also include a lifepath character generation for characters, instead of point buy.

I'm actually working on the math for life path as we speak. Could use some help!

10 minutes ago, CitizenKeen said:

I'm actually working on the math for life path as we speak. Could use some help!

Seeing as the game already uses d10/d100, I'd stick with that. Several of R. Talsorian Games use pretty expansive lifepaths, and would be a good place to work, and they mostly use d10 (with a few d6 rolls wedged in, though I think those can be adjusted).

This makes sense, but I hope they find a way to do it a bit differently than in the Star Wars games. As Xuc Xac and Tom Cruise pointed out above it is really something of a non choice. Sure you do not HAVE to min-max and many players don't, but even if you are not going for that 4 at char-gen, the best option is still to spend all the bonus xp on stat boosts. i would much rather it have be a number of picks all the way through.
So each of the archetypes would start with something like the base stats you describe, but then just be given a number of extra stat boosts and ways to spend them. So lets say the Well Rounder (aka "Human") would start with 2 in all stats and get +1 to two different stats and the talented would also have 2 in all stats, but he gets minus 1 to a single stat and +2 to another stat. Obvoisly the stats would need to be adjusted for balance, but not having spend more of your "character creation budget" on stats frees you up to make more interesting characters. I would also prefer to get one of more starting talents as part of choosing your career later in the character creation process.

Heck, you could even expand on the stat choices and make it have more far reaching consequences, like giving an XP discount to increase your postive stat picks and increased XP cost for your negative choices (maybe with the "Well Rounder" getting neither). This would all depend on if and how you can increase stats during play.

I'm not so sure about a separation of characteristic increases from the rest of char gen, like through some kind of characteristic point pool. It seems to me that we would just be trading a soft wall in for a hard one with regard to player choice. Players that would want to spend more points on talents than what they are given wouldn't be able, without house rules, to take points from the characteristic pool in order to do so. Sure, it wouldn't be the optimal thing to do, but a lot of players don't always care about that, myself included. Player's have plenty of opportunity in the current system to start with a bunch of bells and whistles that make them feel different, though it comes at an efficiency cost. I don't really see much benefit to be gained from segmenting char gen points like this because it only limits player choice and would likely force characters to start out within a certain characteristic range of each other. We would simply have the division of our starting points between characteristics and talents predetermined for us.

Then there's the potential problem of overflow. FFG seems to think that higher characteristics should continually get more expensive in the interest of balance. This makes sense to me, characteristics in EotE seem to have much more impact than attributes in something like D&D. This would make it seem unlikely that improved characteristics would always cost 1 point from the characteristic pool. The only way that I could see a 1 to 1 system implemented is if they give very few points in the pool to keep people from raising a couple characteristics too high at char gen, but i feel like this would lead to characteristics between characters being fairly similar, itself creating a problem with character individuality. It would probably be something like it is now, but scaled down to single digits. Any system, however, that calls for increasing costs could lead to a problem. This creates risk that players will find themselves in situations where they can't spend remaining points to increase anything, because everything is too expensive. What, then, happens to that remainder? If it can't be spent anywhere else, then it goes to waste and is pretty annoying. This would also lead to a similar non-choice situation where players use points in a way to best avoid remainder, causing characters to start with more similar characteristics. If there is some conversion for overflow so that it can be used elsewhere, then we are essentially back where we started, except that there is a hard wall placed in the rules between characteristics and the rest of char gen that doesn't really mean anything.

Of course, the best thing would be for them to provide guidelines for both options, so that people that want generalized points for everything don't have to come up with their own conversion rate (although we know what that would be for SW, numbers like that may be tweaked for this new book) and players that want some kind of separation in order to encourage more individualistic purchases aren't left to determine what would be a fair distribution. Who knows, maybe they'll come up with some other option that deals with most of the problems on each side.

3 hours ago, Blackbird888 said:

Seeing as the game already uses d10/d100, I'd stick with that. Several of R. Talsorian Games use pretty expansive lifepaths, and would be a good place to work, and they mostly use d10 (with a few d6 rolls wedged in, though I think those can be adjusted).

Not that math. Rather, what should a starting character with no career and no xp look like?

Seems reasonable

11 hours ago, CitizenKeen said:

I'm actually working on the math for life path as we speak. Could use some help!

While time, and personal lifepath, permitting I would offer ideas, but, I would like to see what FFG have done. Without knowing what or if they have changed anything, it is hard to plan anything. Certain conjecture is probably going to be correct, as I doubt the powers that be will change the game too much from what we see in Star Wars, but they may.

If a lifepath system is designed, would it be generic, or take into account setting? Perhaps patience is necessary? If everything ends up being redesigned, it creates more work.

That being said, if you are fine with that possibility, and having fun, then continue.

1 hour ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

While time, and personal lifepath, permitting I would offer ideas, but, I would like to see what FFG have done. Without knowing what or if they have changed anything, it is hard to plan anything. Certain conjecture is probably going to be correct, as I doubt the powers that be will change the game too much from what we see in Star Wars, but they may.

If a lifepath system is designed, would it be generic, or take into account setting? Perhaps patience is necessary? If everything ends up being redesigned, it creates more work.

That being said, if you are fine with that possibility, and having fun, then continue.

Oh! You're actually hoping that FFG will make a lifepath system. Yeah, I highly doubt that happens in the first few books. Definitely going to keep hacking. Easy enough to change when they make it.

On 7/4/2017 at 5:58 AM, c__beck said:

This presupposes that chargen and XP will be the same. One of the things I hope they change is chargen XP spending. In my opinion, it cuts down in the cool talents a PC can start with if it's more mechanically optimized to spend starting XP on boring characteristics. To me, it's weird that XP can be spent on characteristics during chargen but not in-play. It's an outlier in how XP works.

I'd rather have a pool of characteristic points to allocate—even if there's a baseline value for all characteristics and a small pool of points to modify things with. Let me spend XP on cool, fun, unique things that make my character different then Jane's character. Characteristics don't do that for me.

The trade off here is that limiting how to raise Characteristics after character creation keeps game play tense and makes things easier for a GM to balance at high levels of XP play. I do hope for a life path system that ties life paths to Characteristic increases, Career Skills and free ranks, as well as unique Talents in varying combinations. Eschewing XP entirely at character creation in favor of a Burning Wheel style life path system would make it much easier to create interesting, 'alive' characters and solve the max-min Characteristics-only bottleneck of character creation in SWRPG. But I would still not open up direct XP spending on Characteristics during game play. The SWRPG Core Rulebooks specify that Characteristics represent those broad aspects of your character that change very little over time. I would leave it as Talents purchasable at the bottom of Talent Trees, whether they come as a part of Archetypes or something else entirely.