So, we have been playing for well over 2 years now. And we love it. The thing is now the players have gone through 4 adventure modules and are around 800 xp. I am just wondering now how to keep things fresh and new. I know getting them into harder and harder scenarios but the mechanic just laughs at black dice now and even at a couple of red dice he still can make it. The same with the soldier. He eats everyone up. So to make it interesting he has taken to just being a old west type guy instead of huge gun guy. Kills everything really lol. They are taking new roles but still just wondering on how to keep everyone going. Story wise, any thoughts on this.

800 XP is a good time to retire the characters and start over. Heck, the assassin in my group was borderline unstoppable even by 200 earned XP, and was retired at less than 300 earned XP. (Granted, a 16 damage, pierce 3 weapon was part of that)

****, i know the soldier is just a killing machine. I just hope that with some of the new books out that there might be a new adventure or something that helps with higher level characters.

I think when you reach that absurd level of XP, your PCs are getting to the point where they're some of the toughest people in the galaxy. The threats and challenges they need to deal with should really reflect that; they shouldn't really be sweating the small fry jobs.

This does become an issue depending on your stance on maintaining canon integrity, though; there's only so much you can up the ante before the players are making some pretty fundamental impacts on the wider galaxy.

Another thing is writing your own adventures. FFG’s stuff can only go so far.

2 hours ago, Yaccarus said:

800 XP is a good time to retire the characters and start over.

Counterpoint: my current batch of characters is well past 800 points and still has TONS of room to grow.

At this point you're probably screwed - but earlier in the game, encourage players to be more diverse. My mechanic, who also laughs at 5 black dice, has been working on her starfighter piloting skills for a while. And there's still one more tree I picked up that needs rounding out. And I could pick up the slicer tree to really round out the character. So yeah - 1,000 points is not unreasonable for where I want to go with her.

So yes, specialized characters have a shelf life. You should do what you can to avoid this.

Define 'kills everything'. At 800xp everything should be Inquisitors, and Death Troopers, and Acklays, etc. The characters are true movie level heroes and should be facing movie level threats in each combat. The mechanic checks should be taking multiple rounds and involve trying to get 'the mains back on line' in the breached reactor room that's inflicting a high level hazardous environment penalty on them.

There are shelf lives to characters in RPGs but this system does a pretty good job of managing to keep characters glass cannons. Even with a lot of focus on being tough it is still possible to hurt them I think.

One great technique for managing high-XP characters, regardless of system, is to present them with multiple challenges in a dangerous environment with a restricted time limit.

18 minutes ago, themensch said:

One great technique for managing high-XP characters, regardless of system, is to present them with multiple challenges in a dangerous environment with a restricted time limit.

^ this. If all your players are masters in their fields, it might be because they haven't been challenged outside of it, so they keep pumping XP into that one area. When you run encounters, do the players always get to optimize how they respond? Does the techie always tech, the face always face, and the shooter always shoot? If so, you might want to shake that up a bit, in which case 800XP is only the beginning...

Personally; it depends greatly on your players ambitions. What is your character aiming to actually achieve? Some legitimate enterprise? Regain leadership of their Mandolorian clan? Become a major player in the criminal underworld or otherwise escape it and their obligations? Without ambition and compelling hooks a characters lifespan is severely limited, by the 800xp mark their own interests should be as much a driving factor as the jobs they are receiving.

Been running a group for 2 years (last session is November 5th!) I've given them xp dumps a couple times due to in-game time-skips and I slowly over time increase the amount of xp earned per session. They are ending at 1,000 earned xp (a little extra for a few of the players). In the last 2 sessions they have one-shot a Rathtar (through high crit rating due to wielding a T-7 Ion Disruptor), survived a fight in a hangar while the vacuum of space was trying to suck them out, out-hacked some career hacktivists. The group is pretty much 6 murder-hobos and 1 character trying to be heroic, who clashes with the rest of them on how things should be done.

In my personal experience with this group, it's not just xp but it's equipment that can make things get out of hand. In addition, not having a set limit on the amount of crafting that can be done (it has varied between sessions, in the future I would only limit it to a week, maybe 2 of crafting items between sessions). They tend to face every situation they get into the same way any murder-hobo would, with just pure, brutal violence, so they are met with a similar level of challenge and violence in their adventures. I haven't had much issue with challenging them when I want to, I simply build custom NPCs most of the time or overwhelm them with multiple opponents. At this point I do have to build combat monsters to face them, since they are combat monsters themselves (one of them has stats that rival a Rancor's).

It's very likely some of their characters will die in the final session but it's gonna be a ridiculous, fun time.

Update to this. So the final session was technically yesterday (1am here) but yeah November 5th. So the group gets enticed to finish one last job together (by buttloads of credits). Along the way they encounter a lot of the people they had met before, whether they were allies or enemies. The mission leads them back to where it all started on Nar Shaddaa, the Smuggler's Moon. So they decide to take out the evil corrupt droid worshipping cult run by none other than HK-47 himself. As the character in the lore is supposed to be an assassin droid built to withstand and kill Jedi Knights, he was never going to be an easy target. I believe the combat lasted 5 or 6 rounds, two of which he had 6 Nemesis level HK-60 (new model) allies with him and the subsequent rounds were just him vs 7 PCs. Had they not gotten creative in their attempts to take out his allies, the Clanka'z would have failed in their mission and all died there. Instead, in a weird twist of events, they fought valiantly, assisted their allies, healed downed teammates, rescued each other from death crits like "The End is Nigh" and used creative thinking to outsmart their enemy on the battlefield. It was fantastic, it was epic, it was hard-fought on both sides. HK-47 did manage to kill one of them along the way but surprisingly everyone else made it out alive (though very, very injured).

From there, the surviving members narrated what they did with themselves afterwards and I had them resolve any conflicts with one-check resolution to wrap up the loose ends. Overall it was a fun, exciting, hilarious, frustrating and tiresome 2-year campaign. Glad I ran the game for them but in so many ways I am glad it has concluded.

As far as the difficulty of the final combat, it felt pretty rough. The baddies were all packing 3 Yellow 3 Green 2 blue minus 1 black disruptor rifles and the deadly accuracy talent. on average they were doing around 19-20 damage per hit.

HK-47 rocked 5 yellow 1 green 2 blue minus 1 black usually dealt over 20 damage and dealt some massive crits. He was rocking probably the dumbest setup ever. 11 soak, cortosis weave & ion shielding, 4 defense, 4 adversary ranks, coordination dodge with 5 ranks (I've since dubbed that talent the "You Miss" talent), Durable 4, Supreme Armor Master talent & Unstoppable talent.

So basically it went like this:

they target him

flip dark destiny for Coordination Dodge which adds 5 auto-failures to the results

they roll against 3 red 4 black (most were either blasting at medium range or lightsaber fighting at engaged range)

utter failure

Then there was this

first crit of the round, use armor master supreme, reduce crit by 150 and because of unstoppable, if it's at 1 or lowered to 1, don't take the crit

That happened only once, they went for damage instead of crits and took him over wounds.

They learned to bleed it out and let me expend all the Dark Side destiny so I had none left for Coordination Dodge and then began dealing damage.

My dad's character dealt the finishing blow dealing what would have been 72 damage (12 base damage Lightsaber from upgrades & Deadly Accuracy + 6 successes + Saber Swarm & Hawkbat Swoop combo to gain advantages off Force Points & spend them to hit additional times with the Linked 4 Quality since he had 4 Force Rating) which was reduced to 28 damage from HK's soak, still more than enough to exceed HK-47's wounds with the damage he had already taken.

Epic final battle to a long and crazy campaign.

Personally I don't feel 800 xp is all that high if the characters are taken out of their comfort zone. For example my 1k xp shien expert got a beating when he was not able to break out his lightsaber or use force powers when pretending to be a easy mark for a darkside cult to kidnap. In fact during the same session my wife's bounty hunter who also has 1k or so xp got a verbal beat down from a couple "mean girl" socialites that she could not just shoot when attempting to get help from there CEO father. As others have said or alluded to, you got to mix things up a bit.

This is something that I had to address in my games. The XP system is not my favorite. I opted to not have a reward by session, and just go with XP as it makes sense for the development of the PCs. I now give out XP based on what the Player wants to do with the character and not just like money that they can spend in any old way. If a character is moving along the path of Force Sensitivity I will give them XP in the time and place that fits the ebb and flow of the story. If the story calls for constant slow learning for a particular character I will do that, if the character goes off in down time and comes back a while later they might have significant new abilities. I work closely with the player to help them feel like they are moving along their arc but I don't use mechanical progression for the sake of it.

One of the worst things in MMORPGs in y opinion is the gear and power treadmill. I don't like forced advancement for it's own sake because the game always has to increase in power on both sides for a zero sum game where moderation is the casualty.

1 hour ago, Archlyte said:

One of the worst things in MMORPGs in y opinion is the gear and power treadmill. I don't like forced advancement for it's own sake because the game always has to increase in power on both sides for a zero sum game where moderation is the casualty.

Agree, but you have causality backwards, as this came to computer RPGs from tabletop ones.

16 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Agree, but you have causality backwards, as this came to computer RPGs from tabletop ones.

Ah yes lol I messed that up. With younger players I have been seeing them come from MMOs more than TTRPG so I am now used to explaining things from that frame of reference. You're right, D&D had that first. I remember the original game where 9th or 10th level was max and Demi-Humans couldn't go that high in levels for some reason .

depends on what kind of game you play.

if it is combat heavy I agree that you can run out of interesting encounters and enemnies quickly and may just want to start over (or look for a new system perpahs?).

even starting stats let the PCs invest XP in a way to let them be rock stars in their specialty areas (combat, piloting, etc).

the beauty of this system is that it is more story driven. you can have 700xp PC and starting level PC feel just fine adventuring together.

In my group, none of the PCs picked the same characteristic twice when using dedication talent. They've all went for diversifying their skill set and trying something new. This was both a good signal to me to keep on diversfying the encounters I throw at them and allow for more role-playing, less mechanical combat.

I've been itching to play an epic uber xp game. I want to be a jedi fighting sith abominations and waves of storm troopers!

Give me a 1000xp to start please!

I've found (and been given the advice of) put them in situations that a die roll or killing someone won't fix. Give them time limits. Make combat a roadblock and not the main point (they have to disable the hyperdrive core by x and the more encounters the less time they have). Make them inclined not to kill. (the more people they kill on a mission the less cooperative the person at the core of the mission is)

Also when are you doing this?

1 hour ago, TheShard said:

I've been itching to play an epic uber xp game. I want to be a jedi fighting sith abominations and waves of storm troopers!

Give me a 1000xp to start please!

Cause Sign me up!

I'm trying to hook a gm

My 2 cents on a 1000 xp game is that balanced characters make it work. That is each member of the party being able to contribute to just about every encounter in a meaningful way. I find characters who are good at a few things more fun to play and you get more chances to impact the story. Taking the balanced approach to character advancement means that when reaching a 1000 xp you will be good at a few things, ok at most things and great at something. Keep in mind that a squad of stormtroopers can still drop you if you decide to fight when you should run.