I love the new edition, but there's a couple minor gripes I have. I feel that character creation (and probably spending xp) takes longer than it should due to analysis paralysis as players feel inclined to read 100 actions and a couple dozen talents before making their decisions. I'm a little bummed that the Careers are less flavorful and less meaningful than they were in the previous editions. And I'm conflicted on the whole issue of, say, a Scribe being able to buy Troll-Feller Strike.

I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that there'd be a cool way to solve all of my little complaints. I could make a list of associated Actions for each career. When you bought Actions from the list for your career, they cost the normal amount. You could still buy ones that aren't on your list, but they'd cost 2 Advances each and count as non-career advances. Players would be less-motivated to dig through the whole deck at character creation, and careers would gain a lot of flavor and impact.

I took the first steps towards this, compiling a list of the Actions, sorted by Skill and Characteristic rolled, and the side that was clearly better (if there was one). I compared this to the Career Skills, Primary Characteristics, and starting Stance pieces of the existing careers.

What I quickly found was that there's about 20 actions that are a good match for a Thug, for example, but only 3 actions that take advantage of the skill and stat combos found on a Roadwarden.

For the Roadwarden (and a few other careers) I'm going to have to pad out their lists with sub-optimal choices, or design a bunch of new Actions.

But for careers like the Thug and Pit-Fighter, I'm not sure I want to give them 20 choices. I'd rather hone in on a smaller number, and in the process illustrate the differences between these two careers.

So my question for the forum is "Assuming for the moment that I was going to go ahead with the plan / house rule outlined in my second paragraph, how many actions should I give each career?" Too large a number and it fails to feel flavorful, the careers just blend together. Too small a number, and the players may feel cheated or straight-jacketed. I'm trying to find a balance in-between. Any suggestions?

Did you also take into consideration the keywords on the careers and actions? Having at least one match both might help you pare down the lists you've created.

keltheos said:

Unfortunately, there's not much overlap between the Keywords available on existing careers and the keywords available on existing actions. About the only one that really overlaps is "social", and there's 12 social actions and 14 social careers.

In general, the problem isn't knowing what to trim. That I can do, and thanks to skill and characteristic requirements, a lot of the trimming isn't even arbitrary.

How far to trim is the question. Do I list just the 4 best actions for each career, or the 12 best actions for each career? My gut is telling me somewhere around 6 to 8. Should that number be at all influenced by how many Action Advancements are on the career's advance scheme? How far could I trim it down without players starting to get pissed off?

Well, trim it down to four (start low) and see what it gets you. It might take fine tuning and your players' input to come up with the combination that you and they feel work best for each career. If you're planning on tweaking up the system in this way I'd suggest you listen to their complaints and see why they're pissed off and go from there.

A couple of places to find a good numerical place to start:

1) Take a look at the spell casters, they have the most pigeonholed career specific actions. How many rank 1 actions are available for a Grey Wizard, or a Bright Wizard, your total choices avialable should be at least that many.

2) The Careers that offer the highest number of action purchases, what is that number, is it 3? 4? 5? I don't remeber off the top of my head, but look at the front of the career cards. I think you should have at least 2x that many available to chose from per class if you offer less, then you get into having "cookie cutter" characters, almost everyone who takes the (career name here) will come out of said career looking almost exaclty the same. If Soldier offers 3 actions, and I only have 4 to choose from, then I'm guarenteed to have at least 2 of the same actions as anyone else who goes through the soldier career.

Also take into account, character creation allows for purchasing actions, these are in addition to those the career offers through progression, so if you can get 4 from creation, and upto 4? from advancement, then thats upto 8 action I could have purchased with my first 4 advancements. If you only have 4 or 6 available, then you are now starting to limit some of the careers core potential.

Lastly, I would make a smaller list of actions that are availble to only specific careers, and have a list that is available to any career, or at least a catergory of careers. That way ther are fewer actions to choose, but there is still at least a small amount of "Universal" actions available.

Just some thoughts

keltheos said:

Ordinarily, that's great advice, and exactly what I'd do. Complication is, I'll be running this for a group of buddies that get together about 5 times a year. My wife and I take a train down to Portland every 10 weeks or so, get together with this group, and cram in about 20 hours of gaming into a long weekend. Then we take a train away and don't see them again for another couple of months. So it's important that character creation doesn't take up much time, since time is limited and then has huge gaps between visits. It's not a reasonable expectation for them to buy a copy of a $100 game to reference in the gaps in-between us playing, nor am I likely to loan them all my books and action cards for 2 and a half months at a time.

In the off times in-between, our pattern has been to barely talk about the gaming, as we have busy lives 200 miles away. I ran Savage Worlds for them for a year and a half, and on our last visit figured out that one player despised the mechanics. She'd never given any indications, always seemed to be having fun, deep in-character all the time, excited and quick to get started, etc. As it turns out, her disatisfaction with the game mechancis was festering. She didn't want to spoil anybody else's fun, or eat up valuable game time grousing about mechanics, so she kept quiet for over a year about things that were really bugging her. (Funny thing is, her eventual complaints were about the same elements of Savage Worlds that I was least happy with, she just felt more strongly about them than I do.)

Obviously, I'll be keeping an eye out for that sort of thing in the future, but it's hard to listen to someone's complaints when they keep them to themselves for so long. Which means there's a fair amount of pressure on me to get this right from the start, as opposed to adjusting it on the fly as problems come up.

Thanks for your advice and help!

BCA said:

Good guidelines, thank you for suggesting them. I probably would have overlooked the whole prospect of buying actions before advancement, it just wasn't on my radar. Glad I put out feelers here.

1) Spellcasters all have 4 basic actions that they get for free, IIRC. Then each Faith or Order has access to 7x Rank One actions, and 3x Rank Two actions. So, as far as things they can actually buy for 1 advancement, they've got 7 essentially.

2) No existing career provides more than 3 Action advancements (and the only ones that do so are Wardancer, Acolyte, and Disciple, the rest give 2 or less). Add to that the 1 "general career advancement" that is an action card, and you face the prospect of characters buying up to 4 new actions in the course of a Career.

Taking those two factors into account, I'd be inclined to say 8 is the number of actions I should link to each career.

The bonus actions at character creation sure do complicate it, though. It's amazing how easily you can buy extra options for your starting character. For 6 out of your 20 points you can start with 3 extra talents and 4 extra actions. That'd be like a 1st level D&D character starting with 7 Feats! But I suppose that's beside the point...

I think 8 will still work. If two PCs are both Wardancers, and started as Wardancers, and took the maximum starting actions and all their entitled career advances actions, then they will be very cookie-cutter by the end of that career... but I think that's enough of a "corner case" to not worry about it. I'll just make sure I have everyone choose their careers at the same time so that there's no doubling-up on starting career. That should solve the problem.

I suppose I might eventually run into trouble down the line if someone is taking their 3rd or subsequent career. If it's very similar to their first two careers, then it's possible the list for the 3rd career could have 6 actions they've already taken and 2 actions they previously had access to but declined on. And then it's possible (but unlikely) that the 4th career could have only actions they've already bought. Maybe FFG (or the fanbase) will have come up with some new (or higher-Rank) actions by then, but I shouldn't count on it.

BCA said:

My plan is to handle the actions just like skills. Per the RAW, anyone can buy any skill, but if it's not on your career card, it costs x2 xp and goes in the "non-career advancements" section. Same thing with actions, under this set of rules. If someone really wants a particular card, they can always buy it regardless of career, but it'll cost double. My inclination is that this would eliminate the need for any "universal" actions, but I could be persuaded otherwise if anyone feels strongly about it.

If the goal is to shorten character creation time, you could just make the rule apply to the initial action picks. That way characters start out differentiated by the career they have chosen, but there is no need to worry about future ramifications of the house rule. There should be plenty of time to thumb through the rest of the cards during down time in regular play. When it comes time to spend the advance, the player just buys the one he decided on earlier.

SStreet said:

I think that sounds much more reasonable actually. I think it stands to reason that a Scribe that picks up adventuring can learn, e.g., Sniper shot after being in a bunch of combats (and perhaps have seen the action in use by someone else). But it's very unlikely that he will have that action from the start. I think that it's kind of implicit when building characters, if you care about actually playing a role you will not pick actions that doesn't fit the concept.

If you go with your initial idea, r_b_bergstrom, will the non-career actions also be treated as non-career advances?

gruntl said:

That's a noble sentiment, and in my heart I agree with you, but I'm not sure it's 100% realistic given that you draw careers at random.

I mean, if Joe Gamer is the sort of guy who likes to play big nasty melee brutes, and the three cards he draws are Scribe, Barber-Surgeon, and Gambler, chances are he's still gonna want to take some sort of melee attack card, because that's what he finds fun. Sure, those careers might mean he takes Nimble Strike instead of Reckless Cleave, but he's still probably gonna take at least one action of the type that appeals most to the player.

Especially if it's his first time playing the system, because the realities of the advancement system are a little opaque at first blush. He might not realize that he'll be able to justify and purchase that action after the first or second session anyway.

Complication is, I'll be running this for a group of buddies that get together about 5 times a year. My wife and I take a train down to Portland every 10 weeks or so, get together with this group, and cram in about 20 hours of gaming into a long weekend. Then we take a train away and don't see them again for another couple of months. So it's important that character creation doesn't take up much time, since time is limited and then has huge gaps between visits. It's not a reasonable expectation for them to buy a copy of a $100 game to reference in the gaps in-between us playing, nor am I likely to loan them all my books and action cards for 2 and a half months at a time.

Is that Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon? If Oregon, I'd be willing to arrange to get together with them (since I live in Portland, OR) with my set and walk them through character creation, and/or a rules review, etc, ahead of time or rules stuff between sessions. Whatever you think they'll need. If you want, of course. I know sometimes just making characters together as a group can be fun.

r_b_bergstrom said:

Well, I find the concept of random career draw rather weird. Why would you ever force a player to play something he's not interested in? It will just lead to conflicts, metagaming (as in picking Reckless Cleave as a Scribe) and general unfunniness. Random draw is perfectly fine if the player wants it, but otherwise I think you should just let Joe Gamer play a Thug like he wants to.

But ok, RAW says random draw so you do have a point.