Personally, I don't have any problem with changing the name of the Universal specs or restrictions. Maelora game has its own set of restriction, far more tights than one universal spec.

Now, for a spec called Retired Clone Trooper, I would not only request a human male. You have to be a clone in your backstory! Probably you're old depending on when you're playing. Probably you committed war crimes or killed your general during the last day of the war.

Let's take another example. A droid PC choose a Jedi spec, or even a career: Would I restrict that choice? no. Would be this droid a Jedi? of course not. And no, Skippy is not an argument in favor.

I agree with Donovan on the point of balance. I don't have a problem with 2 additional career skills counterbalanced with some story elements.

10 hours ago, Vek Baustrade said:

I'm inclined to use Padawan Survivor as a generic "trained by Jedi" tree. More than a few people have posted Padawan trees on the FaD board, but generally they are overpowered.

Two things to consider.

One, a fair chunk of those "Padawan" trees were intentionally written as "goodie grab bags" by folks that wanted a munchkin spec that give them all the cool talents (namely more ranks of Parry and Reflect plus an easily-obtainable Force Rating), so I wouldn't call them a good measure of a home-brewed spec, as said trees were never meant to be balanced for actual play and instead thrown together in a power-gaming exercise.

Two, I'd say "trained by Jedi since a young age" would fall more into the realm of the various Lightsaber Form specs, given they provide Lightsaber as a career skill (a key trait of the Jedi is their prowess with a lightsaber), and that as I cited above Padawan Survivor is more someone that "dropped out" of Jedi training and went on to do other things, and several of their talents are "remembering" the old training that they've long since put aside, gradually adding Lightsaber and Discipline as career skills along with some other neat tricks.

2 hours ago, Absol197 said:

One thing I wanted to note: it appears that a lot of people are under the impression that the Imperial Military Academy Cadet is a piloting tree (I definitely thought so), which is fairly understandable: the iconic character representing it is Wedge, after all.

But rereading through the talents, only three of the twenty talents in the tree (Vehicle Combat Training, Defensive Driving, and Full Throttle) have anything to do with piloting. The other major talents ((Improved) Formation Tactics, By the Book, and Targeted Firepower), along with some of the "filler" talents (Tactical Combat Training, Conditioned, Command, Know the Enemy) are all useable both on personal scale and vehicle scale.

I think it's more of an additional (or alternative) "Officer Training" specialization, as opposed to the "Basic Training" of the Recruit, and the "Four Tours of Duty Training" of the Retired Clone Trooper War Veteran. If that makes sense?

The fluff text implies that Academy Cadet is also for Stormtroopers. Hence the non-pilot talents like Tactical Combat Training.

On 24/02/2018 at 11:40 AM, HappyDaze said:

Does a restriction on being human and male somehow mechanically disadvantage a character in some way that needs to be offset by two extra career skills? I think not, and feel that it would have been far better had they stuck with four career skills and used one of the talents that adds a pair of career skills in place of something.

From a roleplaying perspective, they stick out like a sore thumb to anybody who was around during the Clone Wars or is part of the Empire. Considering just about every game is themed around being on the Empire's bad side, that's a pretty glaring issue if you ever get sussed out. Granted, that's a purely narrative downside but seeing as it's a narrative-driven game- well.

3 hours ago, Arbitrator said:

From a roleplaying perspective, they stick out like a sore thumb to anybody who was around during the Clone Wars or is part of the Empire. Considering just about every game is themed around being on the Empire's bad side, that's a pretty glaring issue if you ever get sussed out. Granted, that's a purely narrative downside but seeing as it's a narrative-driven game- well.

Having played a former Clone Trooper (this was back during the EotE Beta) during a short campaign, I can vouch for the fact that if the GM is doing their job, having a face the Empire is generally quite familiar with actively fighting against them is going to cause issues. Granted, the campaign ended before the hammer could really fall, but I had to take extra precautions to avoid being spotted by Imperial officers after a bar incident ended with an uppity junior officer sprawled out on the floor with a broken jaw (man, rolling a Triumph on a Brawl combat check never felt so good!)

Just my two credits, didn't read the thread - Re-skin everything, tweak as much as you want, to fit to your table and setting!

For example, I want some of my players to take a signature ability, but they like the one not fitting to their tree and don't want to take the appropriate tree. PUFF! Now you can, because I said so. Why? For fun!

Ooh, I had another idea regarding the Retired Clone Trooper. If you wanted to remove the restriction but were iffy on the two extra skills...why not just make the spec cost +10 xp when purchased if the character in question does not have the "Clone" background? Just like a form of out-of-career upcharge for buying a specialization outside your career. Either fluff it as needing to find a clone to learn from, and not having experienced the war directly, or an extra charge because of the higher number of skills.

It's a mechanic that's already in the game, simple to implement and remember, and you don't need to alter the tree as it exists at all. I think it's a solid option . Assuming you don't just ignore the issue entirely, which is probably what I'll do. But if you wanted to require something for those extra skills...