The only importance of career is to select your career based skills. That being said, for your game, are you guys making up your own careers and having your players selecting from just those or the ones in the book? Or are you allowing them to select their own skills and essentially make up their own career?

I'm thinking of making a game where the players are demon/undead/monster hunters. There are two factions that produce hunters, one being solely divine focused relying on holy powers to smite evil, and the other is the arcane faction, understanding how the horrors work and using their own magic against them. I might even call arcane demonic or fel magic for some different flavor. Wasn't sure if I should make up some careers with skills for them or suggest what skills might be important and let the players pick them.

I don't think choosing one's Career Skills individually would be game breaking, if one followed a few simple guidelines:

only one Magic Skill,

not more than three Combat Skills/Magic Skills combined,

not more than three Skills linked to a single Characteristic.

For me it will depend what setting I'm going to run, but generally, I'll take the careers from the book and adapt them for the skills being used in the setting. If something comes to my mind that would fit well into the setting and isn't in the book, I'll create a career for that. And if a player wants to play something that isn't represented by the existing careers I'll sit down with them and come up with the desired career together.

One idea I had though, was running a Matrix game. In that case, I think I'll just let the players choose 8 careers skills freely, because in the Matrix, everyone can do everything anyway (or at least choose which training programs he wants to be run through).

For your setting, I think the careers from the book (including the fantasy careers) should be sufficient, but imo there's nothing speaking against letting the players choose (with guidance on what might be important).

Also, there is this Omnisphere thing floating around somewhere. I haven't read through it, but I think there's one setting in it that's also kind of demonmonsterundeadish, so that might be helpful.

42 minutes ago, Grimmerling said:

I don't think choosing one's Career Skills individually would be game breaking, if one followed a few simple guidelines:

only one Magic Skill,

not more than three Combat Skills/Magic Skills combined,

not more than three Skills linked to a single Characteristic.

That's actually crazy helpful. Ty!

46 minutes ago, Klort said:

Also, there is this Omnisphere thing floating around somewhere. I haven't read through it, but I think there's one setting in it that's also kind of demonmonsterundeadish, so that might be helpful.

I'll have to try and find that.

This one?

For me it depends on the amount of knowledge the players have of the system. But my plan is to do effectively zero work until a session zero is run. During the session zero the question will be asked “what do you want to play, what is your character good at? how do you want them to succeed in this setting we have created?”

Then just go through the list of skills and make a list. There’s enough skills in the game that it’s practically impossible to dominate every encounter with a single character

9 hours ago, Grimmerling said:

I don't think choosing one's Career Skills individually would be game breaking, if one followed a few simple guidelines:

only one Magic Skill,

not more than three Combat Skills/Magic Skills combined,

not more than three Skills linked to a single Characteristic.

Our group is basically doing this

I would made careers and let choose those one or the ones that are in the book. However what <grimmerling said is very good choice too

Careers are more important in two settings im writing up atm (one is a hyrule conversion and another is something more original) Because certain careers are locked into a certain species, and certain talents will be locked to a certain career.

Makes them function a bit more like specializations, I guess, but helps differentiate each of the settings unique species.