Hello,

Are there any house rules or "real" rules about getting more xp to start in this era?

Thank you,

LE

I'm sure there are plenty of house rules, real rules no.

On to the questions: what age are your players starting? any specific area of TOR?

Statement: Consider using a more rapid progression depending on age or pick an amount of XP to give starting. The 'Knight Level' (don't laugh too hard) does a decent job of reflecting a youngling or recently promoted padawan. My suggestion is to tell your PCs to use their racial starting XP all on stats use whatever is left over from that plus the Knight Level 150 for skills and tech tree stuff. From there decide what you want to give them. Were I to do a new game where my PCs start as recently promoted padawans I'd give them a couple ranks in light saber plus their light saber tree for free. In the end the result is two tech trees plus one or two ranks in light saber before that 150 XP is touched. Follow RAW for skills and ability scores.

By doing this your PCs can easily get a few 3's (generally around 90 XP 30 + 30 + 30 =90) or a 4 and possibly two 3's (generally 70 + 30 =100 or 40 + 30 + 30 =100), or maybe one 5 (if starting with a 3: 40 + 50 = 5 @90xp )

about 27 years old and the just before the Republic Dark ages of the old republic era about 1102 bby

8 hours ago, LordEnforcer said:

Are there any house rules or "real" rules about getting more xp to start in this era?

Real rules: Knight Level is covered in the core and gm kit. It gives you an additional 150 earned XP at start and 9,000 credits or a lightsaber.

With a but: Jedi have a... Reputation... So while you totally can make Knight Level work at representing a proper Jedi, not everyone will agree that's enough. Some will say it's solid, some say it's Padawan at most, some say it's not even enough to get a youngling. It's all a point of view thing, and how you think it should all translate to the mechanics.

So if you want to give the players more XP you can and as long as everyone is of the same opinion and on the same page. The trouble starts brewing when they don't all agree. Then you end up with Characters that try to cover too much ground and end up underpowered, or that hyperfocus and can overcome most situations with ease, even if it's a one-trick pony solution...

So the big question is: what is a "Jedi" to you?

In theory by 27 they'd be Knights which based off the general shot in the dark around the forum puts them around 300 - 500 XP.

The only suggestion in books for alternative start xp is for "knight level play" which allows you to start with skill rank 3 , a lightsaber or 9000credits, and an 150 earned experience to start with a developed character , which is enough to get you a few ralents and/or a few skills or some force abilities, effectively a "fledgling" jedi knight or slightly more advanced padawan.

It was (likely) included in Force and Destiny as to alllow jedi style characters to have a reasonable start as entry level arent able to do much force wise, and lightsabers are insanely effective for beginning level PCs as you either have to stack too powerful opponents against them , or you have them walk all over the NPCs in combat. Although to be honest I dont feel that it is that big a deal, as it doesn't take long to get to that level anyway, unless your GM throttles back the xp (not a bad thing in my mind nowadays, but then our GM started us at +50xp and after about a year and a half w/ 3-4 months doing beta for L5R, we are now at approx 460 earned xp.).

Just start normal or Knight level, regardless of era a Jedi still has to start somewhere...

The thing with this system is that you can advance pretty fast so starting with a lot of EXP doesn't really need to happen, however if you want more established PCs you can always pre-load EXP. Basically if you want the PCs to have a FR of 2 and some developed Powers, Skills, and Talents go with giving and extra 100 EXP (*or whatever) on top of Knight Level but the first 100* EXP the PC earns is used to pay this back. This way the PCs start more powerful but don't just shoot up to really powerful too fast.

I’m running an Old Republic game set between the events of KOTOR 2 and the TOR mmo. I gave all players 1 full tree and an extra 150 xp (over their species xp). We’re getting close to 1000 xp. It isn’t that hard to challenge a group like this (5 players). They all specialized by default so everyone had at least one type of pool that’s low (soak, defense, resilience, disicipline, damage, attack). So there’s always a way to challenge them. Especially with environment. I would worry about “too much xp” especially considering how much gets spent just on getting a new specialization.

Double post

I almost run games exclusively out of the Canon content timelines. Most of my games end up in Old Republic eras. I normally just do the following:

Starting XP: +150
Starting Credits: +9000
If playing as a Jedi/Sith group to start - Allow lightsaber styles, Deny access to those styles if not.
If playing as Force sensitives: Allow them to take any 1 basic force power for free that they can use with their force rating. Grant some amount of bonus XP to non-force sensitives to compensate.

--------------
After character creation I do the following with XP per session:
15 - 30 (Avg. 25) base XP for a 3-4 hour session. Reward scales with events during session.
+5 Player Awarded Bonus XP for the Best RP of the evening
+5 XP for player session notes (think character journals) based on previous session.
+X bonus GM Awarded XP based on good RP / Good table etiquette / any thing else I feel contributed to a good session

My advice is...

Design the badguys of your campaign who your pcs have a good chance to run into. Don't worry about exp or whatever just give them what makes them feel accurate.

Then decide what kind of level your pcs are at. Again don't worry about exp. And compare them against whatever your bads are.

In mine Darth jadus was who I considered to be the most powerful being in galaxy. Then I went from him down to a regular dark council member and from them I went to a member of the imperial guard who I felt we had a realistic chance of meeting in the scenario. Our characters were all relatively average force users so I didn't want any of us to be able to take on a member on our own. So I figured out what they were worth after (the guards) and scaled us down appropriately.

On 3/3/2018 at 5:33 AM, LordEnforcer said:

Hello,

Are there any house rules or "real" rules about getting more xp to start in this era?

Thank you,

LE

Our house rule is 225 earned xp for starting/knightlevel (padawans not quite ready to take the trials)