In a recent swing back toward old school styles of doing things in my games, I realized that in the old 1st Gen games random loot was the rule. This was a great way to do it IMO because items appeared often in a manner that kept the players anticipating treasure hoards. The hope that something they would like and that would be a factor for their character was an axis of motivation for adventuring.

When I first started playing this game I took it as a narrative game to be used to recreate the movie-type action of PCs. In doing that I was always confronted with a loot system that seemed to have been inspired by D&D and video games. The way it was designed was cool and fun to use, but it stuck out a bit against the narrative design and the usual dictum of "Star Wars isn't about gearing up."

But there are key characters who have Signature Gear, and seem to not be surrounded by clones (except of course when they are clones lol) so that they retained some uniqueness. The Rarity system as enforced and used can help the players have some rather unique gear if the GM keeps the probability upheld by using it as well as much as possible. If your PC has an EE-3 and loves it, then having everyone and his brother have one too makes it less special. Or something like Starlord's rocket boots and out of thin air helmet which he has and you don't really see on other characters. I assume someone else could have the technology to make those things, but the optic is that they are special as a part of his gear.

If the GM works completely off of fiat where gear is concerned the pattern will be something that the players could pick up on and realize that the treasure type is always W for whim.

If you are an emergent GM it can be a little bit harder, but for those of you who use pre-made stuff that is custom, you can simply roll or decide how many items an enemy or location has, and then make that number of Rarity rolls to see what kind of stuff is found. If there is a Story Item (or Quest Item to use the Video Game term) in the items then that of course can be placed by fiat, but other treasure for the sale or use of the PCs should be generated. Let the players know that you do it this way, and whenever they want to buy something I urge you to absolutely make them roll Negotiation or whatever other skill to see if they can find and buy the item.

I devoted time in my last two game sessions for shopping using the rolls, and they turned into fun encounters with NPCs in which I was able to lay out some hooks and background info. Because they were on an Outer Rim planet they had trouble finding items that they normally consider a given, and it was actually pretty cool for all of us when the items were not available and time forced them to leave. I will be unlikely to be wheedled into hand-waving availability ever again, and I feel like adopting a disciplined approach to this kind of combines the best of TTRPG and Computer controlled RPG world loot. The game world having some level of stable physics where item acquisition is concerned can only add to the desire to get those better items.

I am currently working on a set of rules that will have the tables to roll up and stat items based on cost/rarity. A Blaster Carbine that has a range of Long instead of Medium can be given a value for what that performance increase brings in terms of extra rarity and cost for the item. If there are better versions of these base items out there then they would be desired and may or may not have been distributed in large volume so they may be hard to come by and expensive. To me the prices for the better items in the splat books are usually nowhere near where they need to be to be effective CR sinks for characters.

THE CHARACTER GENERATOR ?

All of my players use the 3rd party character generator that I imagine most people use. The filter is great and to me is mandatory. It has every item in all of the Cores and the Splat Books in them. Some of the splat book items are of such superior quality without much of a difference in Rarity that the Base Item of each type becomes an option only if the player has a money problem in getting it. In addition, I notice that the ability to look through what is the SWRPG Magic Item list leads to too much knowledge of every thing ever built, and an unfavorable attitude toward base items. After all, who is going to have a sword when you can have a Corellian sword that has two qualities on it. I like the idea of cool loot to be had out there in the galaxy, but not if the explanation is: cause Ewoks. Some of the stuff has kind of weak reasons that it has qualities or other performance/stat advantages, and I feel like it's such a big galaxy that you and I can come up with reasons that may fit our games a bit better, and explain the performance difference form base items.

BUT NARRATIVE AND DISCRETION

Yes, and right there in the Rarity section in the book it says to just use Fiat if for any reason you don't like the result or if people get anxious. I have to disagree though, and for me at least letting the dice say No, and having them focus a bit on their gear has been really fun. I never would have thought, but doing something gamey has actually made the game a bit more fun.

Thanks for any ideas or play experiences concerning this

Ok nobody seems to like this subject and I understand because loot is handled narratively in the game and XP is moderated more closely while in SWRPG loot is kind of a 3rd rail. The designers meant for it to be a thing where you can have wild oscillations and no real schedule for it because its not supposed to be a factor. This is one of the contradictions of the system though, as they put in this brilliant Rarity and Mod system but then don't want to go near the true nature of how loot affects the game.

But anyway, I was wondering if I can ask you all for some help on this project. Could you tell me the number of PCs and NPCs in your current or last group? Thanks for any replies.

Most of my players are very character and story focused and aren't really all that concerned about gear. In fact, I just recently gave them a chance to stop at a crossroads world on the Hydian Way and specifically told them that it would be a good place to do some shopping, and they were all like "nah, I'm good". So, that's why I had nothing useful to contribute to your original topic.

2 hours ago, Archlyte said:

But anyway, I was wondering if I can ask you all for some help on this project. Could you tell me the number of PCs and NPCs in your current or last group? Thanks for any replies.

At this time we have 7 PCs and 4 NPCs (two droids, a holocron, and psychotic 11-year-old force-sensitive girl whom they're doing a very mediocre job of straightening out).

3 hours ago, Vorzakk said:

Most of my players are very character and story focused and aren't really all that concerned about gear. In fact, I just recently gave them a chance to stop at a crossroads world on the Hydian Way and specifically told them that it would be a good place to do some shopping, and they were all like "nah, I'm good". So, that's why I had nothing useful to contribute to your original topic.

At this time we have 7 PCs and 4 NPCs (two droids, a holocron, and psychotic 11-year-old force-sensitive girl whom they're doing a very mediocre job of straightening out).

That's a big and cool sounding group, thank you very much Vorzakk. I think that is awesome that your group isn't focused on the gear. My take on this game has been to downplay or not other with the gear so it wouldn't be a focus, but it never seems to go like that in play. The devs took an interesting path with gear in this game, but I think they were dealing with contradictory forces: the non-gearing up aspect of the movies and the always gearing up aspect of RPGs.

Seems to me like the RPG version is what I always see in play, so I decided to just embrace it and go full tilt.

11 hours ago, Archlyte said:

I think that is awesome that your group isn't focused on the gear.

Well, I do have one players who's a little more of a gear-hound, but he's also an awesome player (and friend) so it's all good. Right now he's getting a little frustrated with me because every time he finds a piece of a equipment that I find broken, I end up nerfing it a bit and then he doesn't want it anymore.

23 minutes ago, Vorzakk said:

Well, I do have one players who's a little more of a gear-hound, but he's also an awesome player (and friend) so it's all good. Right now he's getting a little frustrated with me because every time he finds a piece of a equipment that I find broken, I end up nerfing it a bit and then he doesn't want it anymore.

I liked this a lot. Mainly because I think I understand where you are coming from.

Also, I feel that this thing where the characters automatically somehow know of every piece of gear in the splat books is not good. Maybe someone who is a soldier character would know about guns, but then again only certain manufacturers of each class of weapon. For your specialization it makes sense for you to know a bit about better equipment, but comprehensive knowledge of all the gear ever made on different places throughout the galaxy shouldn't be the case I think. The player knows about every item in the game it seems either because of the Character Generator, access the internet and look up its stats without access to the description, or they have all the books (which is an impressive feat of finance). Again this reminds me of D&D where players commit the Magic Item list to memory so that it just becomes product and not magic.

A skill check using the appropriate skill to use the item would seem in order to even know about items, and to know if they are actually better than the core rulebook version. I would use the difficulty provided by the Rarity of the item as the check difficulty. Could give a boost if the item is popular for some reason, or setback if it's an obscure item from the back end of space.

Just my two cents

59 minutes ago, Vorzakk said:

Well, I do have one players who's a little more of a gear-hound, but he's also an awesome player (and friend) so it's all good. Right now he's getting a little frustrated with me because every time he finds a piece of a equipment that I find broken, I end up nerfing it a bit and then he doesn't want it anymore.

Do you do the same for Force Powrrs, Talents, and Signature Abilites? Those are every bit as "broken" as the worst of the gear.

In my Age of Rebellion game, we have 5 PCs and approximately 6,000 NPCs. The players have indirect command over a Rebel Sector Force which includes a naval compliment of a Home One-type star cruiser and several smaller capital ships.

Any sort of basic combat gear or reasonable vehicle, up to and including X-wings, is available to them.

51 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Do you do the same for Force Powrrs, Talents, and Signature Abilites? Those are every bit as "broken" as the worst of the gear.

If I think they're going to be a problem, absolutely. Thus far nobody has purchased anything which I've found to be an issue, though my little sister has been cautioned to exercise some restraint with that Move power of hers.

5 hours ago, Concise Locket said:

In my Age of Rebellion game, we have 5 PCs and approximately 6,000 NPCs. The players have indirect command over a Rebel Sector Force which includes a naval compliment of a Home One-type star cruiser and several smaller capital ships.

Any sort of basic combat gear or reasonable vehicle, up to and including X-wings, is available to them.

I should have stated that this was not a consideration meant to be applied to a large story-level game like that. I concede that at some point the character may progress into a story where items don't matter to them as far as their ability to project power. This was meant more for use in the "keeping them hungry" games.

I am fully in the corner of having power through controlling an army vs. power because of my +8 Armor and demon sword.

Also a game that is super story-based like something with a lot of intrigue and social combat probably doesn't need attention to gear like this.

I feel like the game was built with several axes of progression: Specialization Collection, Skill Upgrades, Money & Gear (to include rare gear and the chancy modding). My intention was to take the original Rarity system which is designed (at least partly) for shopping, and simply filling in the other side of it: the gathering and occurrence from non-mercantile sources.

The Rarity system is great for saying ok there are things you might have but you can't always have them. I wanted to build on that and have a random way of determining what's available on the loot side vs. fiat or whim.

5 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Do you do the same for Force Powrrs, Talents, and Signature Abilites? Those are every bit as "broken" as the worst of the gear.

Happy I hope you don't mind if I comment on this as well, but at least for me the Talents are basically hard to moderate for the GM without really taking a razor to RAW. I make sure that my understanding and the player's understanding of Talents is always drawn not from the bubble text on the tree but the actual description in the Talents section.

Force stuff for me is something I always promote as being To Be Used When Appropriate. When players have a power that they use at the same cadence a kid with a new song flute blows it then it gets annoying.

Equipment is one way to tame things down a bit and you as the GM I think quite reasonably have total control of what appears in the game as far as that axis of progression.

2 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

Happy I hope you don't mind if I comment on this as well, but at least for me the Talents are basically hard to moderate for the GM without really taking a razor to RAW. I make sure that my understanding and the player's understanding of Talents is always drawn not from the bubble text on the tree but the actual description in the Talents section.

Force stuff for me is something I always promote as being To Be Used When Appropriate. When players have a power that they use at the same cadence a kid with a new song flute blows it then it gets annoying.

Equipment is one way to tame things down a bit and you as the GM I think quite reasonably have total control of what appears in the game as far as that axis of progression.

If the non-gear can be a bigger problem, then get out the razor. Trimming at gear won't fix the broken heart of the game.

5 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

If the non-gear can be a bigger problem, then get out the razor. Trimming at gear won't fix the broken heart of the game.

I didn't realize this was such a big problem, but then again after 400 XP my players get a super reduction in XP gain per session so we usually peter out by 600 or so XP. I was surprised they didn't put suggested caps for XP in this game because unlimited seems kind of silly to me.

1 minute ago, Archlyte said:

I didn't realize this was such a big problem, but then again after 400 XP my players get a super reduction in XP gain per session so we usually peter out by 600 or so XP. I was surprised they didn't put suggested caps for XP in this game because unlimited seems kind of silly to me.

Most RPGs allow characters to level up at ludicrous speed until they've gone to plaid.

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

Most RPGs allow characters to level up at ludicrous speed until they've gone to plaid.

Oh man thanks for this, made me laugh. And you made me feel less alone. Yeah I don't really enjoy the way they did advancement in this game even though I like the build-out mechanics and skill-based emphasis. It would be kind of cool to figure that out at some point to have a reference of about what XP levels could be helpfully described as being. Is a Master Bounty Hunter at around 500 XP? The lack of definition was a cool idea in that it left it open for you to determine for your campaign, but it also seems to feed the excesses.

Well I do appreciate your post, lightened up my day

Id like to see some caps any suggestions and like you said is Master Bounty hunter around 500 xp. That would be very useful. Personally I dont like Unlimited specs advancement either. 3-4 spec seems more than enough for a character concept. Does anyone else not like that? and do you make any kind of limit on how many a player may take? Im trying to stick with 3. With a 4th possible with certain prereqs.first

All this talk of XP caps is misguided imho. It very much depends how you play the game. My son's PC is around 1000XP, but he's built for breadth and has a lot of room to grow yet. As a solo Sentinel patrolling the darker urban streets, he needs to have a lot of tools in his tool belt, but he still can't bring more than YYYG to bear in his best skills, and only a few of his Force powers have more than a few upgrades (other than Enhance, which is maxed). And he's still only FR2.

Unfortunately, most people go for the D&D-inspired party-slot system, where a PC is expected to fill a certain role and no other. Then, sure, by 500XP you're likely to be bringing 5xY dice to bear in your strengths, never mind the Talents. But that's not a fault of EotE, it's a fault of the GM and players for playing D&D with the EotE system.

13 hours ago, whafrog said:

All this talk of XP caps is misguided imho. It very much depends how you play the game. My son's PC is around 1000XP, but he's built for breadth and has a lot of room to grow yet. As a solo Sentinel patrolling the darker urban streets, he needs to have a lot of tools in his tool belt, but he still can't bring more than YYYG to bear in his best skills, and only a few of his Force powers have more than a few upgrades (other than Enhance, which is maxed). And he's still only FR2.

Unfortunately, most people go for the D&D-inspired party-slot system, where a PC is expected to fill a certain role and no other. Then, sure, by 500XP you're likely to be bringing 5xY dice to bear in your strengths, never mind the Talents. But that's not a fault of EotE, it's a fault of the GM and players for playing D&D with the EotE system.

Yeah it's a style of play issue and I understand the desire people have for these big changes in capability as the campaign progresses. Also I would say a solo game would be a good place for a 1000xp character, but having too many Wolverines in the X-Men doesn't work well in my experience. A bunch of characters who don't need each other except for boss fights can be a recipe for constant separation.

Whafrog you are totally correct about the one-trick or two trick ponies, and most of the time I am seeing players make that kind of character and focus it for 4 or 5 sessions worth of XP so that they can cement their specialty as being successful at most attempts. That's what initially made me look at an XP cap, but it would be better if players didn't build the specialists out the gate and broadened out a bit.

I don't stop XP at 400 though, I just slow it down to a trickle, and that XP that comes in after 400 is always in context and never a participation award. Also there should probably be some sort of decay for unused skills as that is never looked at either through criticals and/or disuse. A FATE hack called Diaspora just shifts your points around based on the focus to represent the limited focus of the character. Doing a lot of shooting and not much computer use, the shooting goes up and the computer coding takes a while to get back into at full strength.

Also I will say that I feel like this game does a much better job in the overall Progression Mechanic than games like D&D/Pathfinder because starting characters don't suck, and the higher end characters are not ridiculously immune to damage.

3 hours ago, Archlyte said:

Also I would say a solo game would be a good place for a 1000xp character, but having too many Wolverines in the X-Men doesn't work well in my experience. A bunch of characters who don't need each other except for boss fights can be a recipe for constant separation.

Well, my son's PC isn't a "Wolverine"...he can't do everything, far from it. At least 1/2 his dice pools are still "GG". If a bunch of PCs like his (but with different points of focus) got together in a group, I'd still be able to provide a challenge to everyone because there's still room to work with.

3 hours ago, Archlyte said:

Also I will say that I feel like this game does a much better job in the overall Progression Mechanic than games like D&D/Pathfinder because starting characters don't suck, and the higher end characters are not ridiculously immune to damage.

The power curve is much flatter, yes.

3 hours ago, Archlyte said:

That's what initially made me look at an XP cap, but it would be better if players didn't build the specialists out the gate and broadened out a bit.

Waaaaay back when I first started playing this game I had the same issue. The solution was to provide challenges that didn't leverage their specialities, split the party so that the walking muscle had to use his "charm" and the face was suddenly caught in a shoot-out...etc. You can always hit them in the dump stat too. Obviously you want the players to feel like their character shines, but there's plenty of opportunity for that...I found once or twice a session was plenty for them to feel like their PC was great at their speciality, with the rest of the time dealing with the unfamiliar. Designing an encounter then becomes an exercise not in just providing a location and opposition, but how to lure and separate the PCs into a situation where they couldn't always bring their forte to bear.

In some ways it made the "standard" encounters that much more enjoyable, and I found there was more enthusiasm for the times when they could all function like a well-oiled machine than previous campaigns where that was the baseline...the baseline becomes boring after a while.

Anyway, the first few sessions I had on the new "path" I got a lot of questions like "it seems we spent a lot of time in the wilderness, is there going to be more of that survival stuff?" I just made it clear that I was going to exercise *every* skill for everybody, and it wasn't long before they started making more interesting choices. That campaign dried up unfortunately (too many family-related obligations), but we were closing in on 700XP for every PC with a LOT of room to grow yet.

19 hours ago, whafrog said:

Well, my son's PC isn't a "Wolverine"...he can't do everything, far from it. At least 1/2 his dice pools are still "GG". If a bunch of PCs like his (but with different points of focus) got together in a group, I'd still be able to provide a challenge to everyone because there's still room to work with.

The power curve is much flatter, yes.

Waaaaay back when I first started playing this game I had the same issue. The solution was to provide challenges that didn't leverage their specialities, split the party so that the walking muscle had to use his "charm" and the face was suddenly caught in a shoot-out...etc. You can always hit them in the dump stat too. Obviously you want the players to feel like their character shines, but there's plenty of opportunity for that...I found once or twice a session was plenty for them to feel like their PC was great at their speciality, with the rest of the time dealing with the unfamiliar. Designing an encounter then becomes an exercise not in just providing a location and opposition, but how to lure and separate the PCs into a situation where they couldn't always bring their forte to bear.

In some ways it made the "standard" encounters that much more enjoyable, and I found there was more enthusiasm for the times when they could all function like a well-oiled machine than previous campaigns where that was the baseline...the baseline becomes boring after a while.

Anyway, the first few sessions I had on the new "path" I got a lot of questions like "it seems we spent a lot of time in the wilderness, is there going to be more of that survival stuff?" I just made it clear that I was going to exercise *every* skill for everybody, and it wasn't long before they started making more interesting choices. That campaign dried up unfortunately (too many family-related obligations), but we were closing in on 700XP for every PC with a LOT of room to grow yet.

Hey thanks for this Whafrog, seems like great advice. I especially liked the part about keeping the game from being too formulaic so that the skill profiles aren't easily gauged and characters aren't built to suck at everything that doesn't come up in the "theme" of the game. In something like an Age of Rebellion game with a lot of fighter and ship combat that might be harder to do, but I see what you mean. Also the frequency of once or twice a game doing the specialty was a good bit of insight too I imagine. I would say the only time that isn't the case is when someone has put all their eggs in the combat prowess basket, in which case there is never too much reinforcement it seems. They will want to do whatever they can to overcome with a large margin.

That's a big issue for me in any game, and the root of it is in the way older game experience for me was deadly games, simple progression, and items and advancement needed to even hope for survival. This game has a narrative focus so it's not very deadly, complex progression, and items and advancement in power designed to mainly just to give a slightly wider margin of success and to keep the zero-sum game in operation as the characters progress into 500+ XP. In the old school games we would go through a lot of characters and only the survivors got to see the mid, or rarer, the upper end of the power spectrum. Even then though the games were built to be less narrative so the end of a character wasn't considered the end of the story. The contemporary experience seems to be that the character you start with is the character you finish the campaign with, a bit like a video game. I don't like that sense of comfort and feel that it breeds an entitled sense of advancement. The emphasis on MMO-like trees is a neat gimmick and I think it appeals to the younger players, but the complex and varied progression can also focus players on that advancement, which to me seems to lead to players regarding the right now (with lesser XP totals) as merely the stepping stone to the area of power they want instead of a meaningful part of the campaign too.

My solution to this is XP capping and increased danger. By giving the players a reason to need to be powerful, the item and power mongering is an adaptive behavior, instead of just power character building for the sake of it. I know that progression is a major motivation for playing these games, and I accept that it is going to be there, but I also believe that it's not actually necessary. Characters can progress through internal and external arcs that don't need to result in, or be driven by, a new level in a skill or a new talent that lets them pull inventory out of thin air. Those are cool things, and I don't resent them, but I do the resent the advancement sometimes as the main impetus for someone wanting to play. It diminishes the importance of the here and now.

One last thought: instead of XP capping, why not just skill capping, or talent capping? You could, say, not allow more than 4 ranks in a skill until they have at least a several others in the 3 and 4 range, or no more than X rank 4/5 talents or no more than 2 per spec. It's a bit heavy handed, and I preferred to make breadth the obvious choice based on the game I ran (or even bribe them with free specs), but that's still less heavy-handed than XP capping...at least this way they can still branch sideways and feel like there is some progression. They might even be surprised how much fun the branches are, given the opportunity, and it might change how they view the game.

6 minutes ago, whafrog said:

One last thought: instead of XP capping, why not just skill capping, or talent capping? You could, say, not allow more than 4 ranks in a skill until they have at least a several others in the 3 and 4 range, or no more than X rank 4/5 talents or no more than 2 per spec. It's a bit heavy handed, and I preferred to make breadth the obvious choice based on the game I ran (or even bribe them with free specs), but that's still less heavy-handed than XP capping...at least this way they can still branch sideways and feel like there is some progression. They might even be surprised how much fun the branches are, given the opportunity, and it might change how they view the game.

Well based on your advice I think I'll just toss it and see how it goes this campaign. They are only at 200 ish XP right now so I could just try it and see how it goes Been a while since there was no XP cap so might be fun.

12 minutes ago, whafrog said:

One last thought: instead of XP capping, why not just skill capping, or talent capping? You could, say, not allow more than 4 ranks in a skill until they have at least a several others in the 3 and 4 range, or no more than X rank 4/5 talents or no more than 2 per spec. It's a bit heavy handed, and I preferred to make breadth the obvious choice based on the game I ran (or even bribe them with free specs), but that's still less heavy-handed than XP capping...at least this way they can still branch sideways and feel like there is some progression. They might even be surprised how much fun the branches are, given the opportunity, and it might change how they view the game.

I like the tweaks in Genesys. Stats cap at 5. Dedication can only be purchased once for each stat.

On 8/20/2018 at 2:32 PM, Archlyte said:

Well based on your advice I think I'll just toss it and see how it goes this campaign. They are only at 200 ish XP right now so I could just try it and see how it goes Been a while since there was no XP cap so might be fun.

How many players do you have? I've never run into the problem of specialization, but I figure thats cause I am lucky to have 3 players. With the normal 2, you have to generalize.

5 hours ago, korjik said:

How many players do you have? I've never run into the problem of specialization, but I figure thats cause I am lucky to have 3 players. With the normal 2, you have to generalize.

4 players right now for that game. Makes sense about a duo, they have a lot of ground to cover, assuming you don't like to use NPCs.