´So having played EoTE, AoR and FaD, I picked up Genesys. And the first I notice is that the top limit for characteristics has dropped to 5. There no way to increase a characteristic through dedication more than once. And to me that seems to really limit what player character can do, especially compared to star wars. And also especially since the game mentions specifically that this ONLY applies to PLAYER characters, and that NPCs can have stats higher than 5. Is it just me, or does it seem like Genesys really dropped down the power level of player characters? And with the no-talent-tree careers, you just opened up for making characters very much the same and generic, since there are only a certain amount of talents per tier, AND you need two in the previous tier before you can buy one in the next? Seems progression from rather "weak" staring characters is not going to go far at all as the rules are written.

if you don't like the rule, throw it out. The book is just a toolkit, you can customize it however you want. Genesys was put out there so you can use the rules with any setting. As for the talent pyramid, if you want to, you can make talent trees as well for your group, they are there to be customized to your liking as if and when the setting books start to come out, i am sure there will be talent trees again for the settings that are made for those settings.

Your observation isn't wrong, but remember that Genesys is not a complete game -- at least that's the overwhelming consensus from the player community. Also, Genesys characters have a lot more flexibility, at least out-of-the-box. We're all hard at work here trying to fill-in-the-blanks for our particular settings and such.

To me it feels like characters less generic and similar then Star Wars. Maybe that was just my personal feeling of horrible confinement from careers and specializations that forced characters down similar routes.

I like it because the no cap on Dedication was a power gamers delight.

The way Talents are open to purchase I know plenty of PCs that would just buy Dedication over and over.

I agree with your assessment that the power of PCs has been toned down. Adding on, the lack of an obligation/duty/morality mechanic means there isn’t 10 extra xp available at start either which cuts down on the possible starting combinations for characteristics (humans are either 4/3/2s or three 3s, loosing the options of starting with 5/2s or four 3s).

On one hand it seems like it could be limiting but on the other some SW dice pools could really outgrow the possible difficulties with Daunting or Formidable checks being passable on a regular basis. Overall I think the latter far outweighs the former and it’s way better for the game to keep things from getting out of hand.

I feel that the 1 per characteristic limit is a bit harsh, especially against characters that through species etc start with very low values in their characteristics. My main thought at the moment is adding Improved Dedication (increase by another point, for total of +2 to a single characteristic), but since Dedication is already a Tier 5 talent, well, that kind if puts an oddity with the Improved Dedication, if it has a unique requirement of having another Tier 5 talent in order to buy it.

As for the talents being tied to careers or not, I see both sides of that argument. And players who look for the "optimal talent route" will be able to do it with or without talent trees.

You could always add in the house rule that no characteristic can be improved over 3 more than once. That way ALL the characteristics could be maxed out at 4 with maybe one 5 or so. That would improve the power level of the PCs without completely going gonzo.

ArtWend: Well, that is one way to solve it without going with all characteristics straight to 5 after enough XP.

Sam Stewart's take on the limitation of dedication is that the first tier 5 talent would be costly because you'd need 5 tier 1 talents, 4 tier 2 talents, 3 tier 3 talents and 2 tier 4 talents. That's alot XP, but after that the acquisition of every tier 5 talent is only 95 XP. So actually stacking up dedications would be quite speedy after the first tier 5 talent. A take on this could be the following prereq: "You cannot enhance the ability you enhanced with your last dedication". So you'D need at least 3 dedications to enhance a single ability by +2.

That works, too.