Not the talent tree, but the bonus career skills and points at char gen.

Ideas?

Takes some GM effort but what I intend to do when I do my space opera campaign next is to create specs minus the rigid tree. I will assign a couple few more skills as usual, and instead of a tree, the spec will have a pool of appropriate Talents that the PC can draw from in building their Talents. It will still be thematic but not as rigid, more open, but not a classless hot mess.

So the Mechanic can be the person that fixes stuff, builds stuff, has all manner of improvisational options, or is a master at damage control during ship combat, etc.

Chargen points = just give 2 more free skill ranks at chargen

Bonus career skills = add more talents like Basic Military Training. Give a free one at chargen if you want, maybe combined with the two free skill ranks from above.

That should approximate the Star Wars starting level

Nothing keeping one from utilizing Specializations in their own Settings. Genesys is generic, so Trees wouldn't work without adding a bunch of them for every Setting.

34 minutes ago, ApocalypseZero said:

Nothing keeping one from utilizing Specializations in their own Settings.

True. While I don't plan to make trees or even career-specific talents, one could easily make a couple of specs per career to choose from.

I'm surprised they didn't include Well-Rounded among the CRB's Talents. Seems a good Tier-1 talent to introduce for players who miss getting more Career skills. You could specify it can't be used for combat skills if you wanted to preserve the uniqueness of Basic Military Training.

10 hours ago, SavageBob said:

I'm surprised they didn't include Well-Rounded among the CRB's Talents.

Because, essentially, it would be free of charge for anybody even wanting only a single Rank in a Non-Career Skill.

I think with the huge flexibility to create custom careers there’s much less need for Well Rounded. If a player came to me saying they wanted a different skill selection I would just work it into a custom career.

For Avatar: The Second Age I initially copied the formatting Careers/Specializations from Star Wars, but Star Wars gives away a lot of skills. So I lowered it to the 8 [total] class skills advised by Genesys.

Each "Class" has 5 skills associated with it. Each specialization has another 5 skills associated with it. 2 of those skills are duplicates of Class skills. 3 of those skills are unique to that specialization (and do not overlap with other specializations in the same class). This provides a character with 8 unique class skills. The rules say a character can choose three Class skills and three Specialization skills in which to gain a free rank, not to go above 2 during creation.

Using archetypes, The Second Age characters will also be able to choose two skills not from overlapping categories (i.e. cannot choose two combat skills) to designate as "Class skills" irrespective of the class they actually choose. This makes for a total of up to 10 skills per character. The archetype skills are my way as a GM to let the players mechanically inform their backstories. Maybe they're a tinkerer by trade, but they grew up on in the woods and have some Nature knowledge?

Not specialization exactly, but I’m doing something similar:

1. Player chooses a career with a set of 9 skills.

2. Player chooses a region of origin to be from with its own set of 6 skills.

3. Player chooses 10 skills to be career skills from among the 15 listed.

4. Player chooses 6 career skills to gain 1 rank in.

I did it this way because star wars has 33 skills (or 34/35 depending on how you count Lightsaber and Warfare) and Edge characters usually have 11 career skills (if there’s only 1 skill overlap, which I think is true for all core specializations). So this means core edge characters have 33% of the skill list as career skills.

The base fantasy Genesys has only 26 or 29 skills (depending on if you count magic) so the default Genesys career still has close to 30% of the skill list as a career skill even though they only get 8.

Since I added some knowledges and other stuff, my skill count rose to 33. To maintain the Genesys standard of 30% I needed to add 2 career skills, and if I wanted it closer to SW I could add 3. Between assuming Genesys had a reason for cutting down on the percent and 10 being a nicer number than 11 I went with sticking to 30%. The only annoying bit was cross checking the careers and regions to make sure there were at least 10 skills after accounting for overlap.

15 minutes ago, Hinklemar said:

I did it this way because star wars has 33 skills (or 34/35 depending on how you count Lightsaber and Warfare) and Edge characters usually have 11 career skills (if there’s only 1 skill overlap, which I think is true for all core specializations). So this means core edge characters have 33% of the skill list as career skills.

So to fold the spec into the career, it looks like about 1/3 of the skills should be career skills with enough points to start with 1/5 or 1/6 of them trained.

8 hours ago, Grimmerling said:

Because, essentially, it would be free of charge for anybody even wanting only a single Rank in a Non-Career Skill.

Ah, got it. A 5-point talent that saves you 5 points on two Career Skills becomes a no-brainer for anyone looking to take even a single rank in a non-career skill.

Would there be a way to incorporate it without having it be a freebie? Even as a Tier-2 talent, it would still pay for itself if the player took a rank in both skills covered. Maybe it could be Tier 2 and grant only one new Career skill per rank? That would mean you'd have to commit to getting two ranks in the skill you chose (or three ranks if you take Well-Rounded a second time for a second skill, or four ranks if you take Well-Rounded a third time for a third skill) to make it worthwhile over just paying out-of-career costs. It's only worth it for a player who is really interested in specializing in that skill.

1 hour ago, SavageBob said:

Ah, got it. A 5-point talent that saves you 5 points on two Career Skills becomes a no-brainer for anyone looking to take even a single rank in a non-career skill.

Would there be a way to incorporate it without having it be a freebie? Even as a Tier-2 talent, it would still pay for itself if the player took a rank in both skills covered. Maybe it could be Tier 2 and grant only one new Career skill per rank? That would mean you'd have to commit to getting two ranks in the skill you chose (or three ranks if you take Well-Rounded a second time for a second skill, or four ranks if you take Well-Rounded a third time for a third skill) to make it worthwhile over just paying out-of-career costs. It's only worth it for a player who is really interested in specializing in that skill.

Take the idea of "Basic Military Training" and apply it to another set of skills. "Thief Training" could be Skulduggery, Deception, and Stealth. "Etiquette Training" could be Charm, Coercion, and Negotiation.

Not sure I'd sweat it overly much either way. I originally did until I let the math sink in. Five ranks in a non-career skill costs you 25 extra XP. If the typical XP award per 5 hour session is 20 xp, you've paid 80% of the surcharge for all that skill's training in one session.

The Dark Heresy conversion does skills in a great way: the career lists 4, and the player can custom pick another 4. If you like a 10 skill spread, go 5 and 5. That way you define something of a core representation of a career and allow the player to tailor that base with specializations that match the character's interests. I'd allow them to go a step further and rename the career as a particular "specialization" if they wish. And then if they want to pick up cello lessons on the side, that's on them.

I like Hinklemar's method above as well. It allows for regional/species variations for skills. A dwarven ranger differs from a human one. God knows they all differ from a freakin' drow ranger.