Has anyone experimented with a career-less character generation/progression system?

I don't mind the careers, but I would be interested to see a more flexible system where you don't have to choose a career in order to advance characters. It would make home brewing a lot easier. Specifically, I want to fun SWRPG in fantasy, and the various fantasy conversions aren't exactly what I want (*extremely* good, but does not fit the tone I want)

And here I am also trying to think of how FF will do Genesys, since creating a bunch of careers every time you want to play another genre will become a huge impediment.

The career is not strictly necessary to advance characters, it's needed mainly to get signature abilities and , in FaD, the FR 1 at chargen. If you do away with those limits i think you can do a career-less system. Especially if you also remove the distinction between career and non career skill.

You could easily do away with the Careers.

Change character generation to:

Select 8 Career Skills and place 1 rank into 4 of them.

OR

Select 6 Career Skills and place 1 rank into 3 of them. You have Force Rating 1.

Select any one Specialization at start.

Additional Specializations are purchased at non-Career costs (since you don't have a career).

Signature Abilities can be connected to any Specialization normally assigned to the appropriate Career (even if the character doesn't technically have a Career).

You could use the concepts for creating Inquisitors found in F&D. Bundle six skills together and place one rank in five skills and two ranks in one skill at character creation.

Star Wars already is fantasy

But I think I read something a few days ago, that ffg is releasing the system as a generic roleplaying system.. maybe that helps

The only problem with this is a balance issue. As certain skills like education will almost never be picked.

18 minutes ago, TheShard said:

The only problem with this is a balance issue. As certain skills like education will almost never be picked.

A spitball idea: Talents have prerequisite skills. Cheap, "useless", talents have lots of options, but more powerful ones have very specific ones.

30 minutes ago, TheShard said:

The only problem with this is a balance issue. As certain skills like education will almost never be picked.

Depends on the GM. If the GM makes it clear there are no dump skills, then it's not an issue.

Regarding the concern about PCs under a career-free system not ever taking any of the Knowledge skills, perhaps one approach would be to consolidate them? Either into a single Knowledge skill (which is how the Beginner Box pre-gens handled it), or simply compacting the list into two or three Knowledge skills, making them more appealing to players to purchase by making them broader.

Granted, you then might have to do some tweaking to the list of bonus career skills that a specialization offers for those specs that offer specific Knowledge skills, but it's a thought.

I ran a Cyberpunk-ish game using a free form creation system and it worked fairly well. No careers and no talent trees.

For stats I gave a lump of points to distribute (15, I think, ratings min 1, max 2), and skills as well (max rating 2).

I allowed up to three talents at rank 1, or one at rank 1 and one at rank 2. I dropped the stat boosting talents.

Advancement for skills and talents was new rank x5 XP up to a maximum rank 5. Stats could be raised but cost x10.

As for Knowledge skills, take a look at why the players don't think they are useful and see how you can change that. Is it just player thinking or does it have something to do with the game itself? In the games I have run knowledge is power; the more you know the more prepared you are for a given situation. I have no problems handing out boost dice or other bennies when player research or make other attempts to know or understand their situation better.