This has always been sort of a thing, but with the release of Genesys, our group is thinking about swapping talents around in the talent trees a bit. For the most part, we like the trees, but it's always a bummer to run into an expensive talent that's utterly useless, but is right in the path to Force Rating or Dedication. With Genesys putting talents into tiers (and the community gathering up the many talents not listed in the core book), it seems like it would be pretty easy to swap a few talents around, so we might try doing this. Anyone out there taken a hearty stab at this? Perhaps found anything that worked well, or didn't work at all? I've almost considered adding a blank column to the side of the tree for random stuff folks would want to pick up.

The big problem with the talent pyramid is the most effective thing to doo is to load up on dedications/force ratings, genesys solved the second problem by not having force dice and the first problem by not letting you have more than 1 dedication per attribute, which also meant that they had to shrink the maximum attribute from 6 to 5. And the magic rules show how much a 6 attribute is NEEDED in geneysys. Personally I don't think those drawbacks are worth the extra flexibility you get for having a talent pyramid instead of star wars style talent trees.

I haven't tried this, but looking through the Genesys book it certainly crossed my mind. I would allow each of my players to swap out one (and only one) of the talents on their tree for something of an equal tier - provided they don't add a second Dedication or Force Rating - and it would likely have very little effect on game balance.

You might also decide to charge a tax of 5 or 10 XP for a swap. That way, they have to calculate whether it's worth it versus just taking a second spec.

I don't see this as too game breaking. To further @JRRP 's suggestion, I'd also limit certain ranked talents that could lead to stacking the deck too much. A good example is True Aim in the Mercenary Soldier tree. Two ranks is plenty so I wouldn't allow swapping for a third.

Alternative—though more limiting—idea: Modifying the Battle Scar rules. Normally a battle scar lets you take a low level, out of tree talent. What if instead, you could swap out a talent using the same guidelines we've outlined above? For most games this may be too heavy a limitation, but for combat heavy games that are tossing crits like candy, it could be a cool way to justify breaking the talent tree a bit.

Here's a query: Would you allow swapping Dedication for +Force Rating or vice versa? I can see the latter, especially if you have a non-Force user who buys a FaD spec for the other talents. But Dedication>FR may disbalance the game as your Force user could ramp up their powers faster.

9 hours ago, rogue_09 said:

Here's a query: Would you allow swapping Dedication for +Force Rating or vice versa? I can see the latter, especially if you have a non-Force user who buys a FaD spec for the other talents. But Dedication>FR may disbalance the game as your Force user could ramp up their powers faster.

I probably would not, except in a few cases. Most specs have one of each, and it's not something you should be able to double up on too easily. Some of the Lightsaber specs... maybe, since they would be sacrificing the only Dedication in the tree. For non-sensitives, I think we would probably just have to sit down and rebuild the tree a bit together before they even took it.

Before he moved out of state, my cousin and I talked about swapping out the techy talents in the Shadow Tree for Parry. There's only like 2 or 3, and it was for a character from a bronze-age type world. He called himself a Moon Mage and primarily used things/tactics like stealth, misdirection, stuff like that.

I've considered replacing Tricky Target with Barrel Roll. Especially if you switch to Genesys style setting vehicle attack difficulty by range, a 1 silhouette reduction is much less important and Barrel Roll really adds to starship combat survivability.