1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Baiting? Say hello to my ignore list.

Hey there!

That's just it really; if a character super minmaxes hitting only one stat really hard; I would as the GM to both make encounters play into that when the opportunity arises, while regularly hitting them in the stats that they dumped. Because an althetic brawn character with no sense of balance is pretty tragic. Or have them make a perception check.

Jayne from Firefly is a murderhobo **** through and through, he's repulsive and self satisfying as a character can possibly get, even considering selling out members of the crew for a quick buck and on several occasions considered mutinying against Mal, the only reason he hasn't succeeded is he is unlikeable, (low pres) untrustworthy, stupid in the implementation of his hairbrained schemes and lacks any intelligence of the world around him to put anything together aside from his hand and his rifle (ahem). But the reason Mal keeps him around is that he's amazing with guns and in combative situations which seems to justify keeping him around despite the liabilities associated to him. Even so, the GM would occasionally target Jayne as a character to make checks outside his wheelhouse, one time he was the hero of a small town by accident.

Thus is how you counterbalance a strong min-maxer; you ensure that they have to on occasion be subject to the target of checks outside their wheelhouse that no one else can handle. Maybe they are randomly approached when being undercover and have to quickly spin a tale on why they were here or if they are the watch man; only that person can roll the perception check. Or the party is spilt up as necessary to cover more ground, a practice that is paramount in certain great adventures like the Jewel of Yavin which has so much going on that the party isn't going to accomplish it by sticking together; they must spilt up to cover more ground and the specialist character can't be where they are needed all the time. This can encourage characters to improvise and develop secondary skills.

That's why I like to, at least initially, encourage campaigns where combat isn't necessarily the first solution or even a solution on the table (the empire/a big crime syndicate have more resources then mere smugglers could ever hope to contend with) but rather a fun consequence for complications. Encourage the players to engage on a co-occupation, if you are concerned about power gaming have a session zero and have the conversation about expecting it to be a game less focused around combat and get everyone onside on creating a interesting group of characters. I often find the base characteristics of the character the least game breaking, often it's the use of easy to abuse machanics (auto fire) and obtaining too many talents in a single field (Picking up too many soak upgrades) that tend to change the game.

Might be just the gamer speaking to me as I chose to go 2,3,4,3,1,2 Gadgetter that I fluffed as a machanics son that decided to use his skills for petty theft and revenge. While for a long time he was the most intelligent member of the party (bumped it up to 5. Being the ships machanic was something I wanted him to be really good at.), he wasn't particularly experienced in the greater galaxy and thus the GM would sometimes rule that my character simply wouldn't know some facts without seeing a broker in the region. I was just happy to use machanics and skulduggery to become a bonified safe breaker.

in regards to skill ranks: I think most people criminally underrate the value of skill ranks. Sure, they don't have the bang of buck that hoovering talents like a booster blue addict would have, but they make those dice much more likely to generate successful and advantageous checks on average; consistent results is the real reason you want yellows. That and the value of the T/D cannot be understated; depending on the situation the narrative elements can change a lot.

13 hours ago, Jawa4thewin said:

Nonsense???

Why so mad bro? I just gave my opinion on the subject. View it how you wish and I will view it how I wish.

In this system skill ranks are not very important at all. Mathematically having a yellow die instead of a green is very little difference and this shows in game play as few players will put xp into skills beyond those that link to talents that give bonuses based on skill ranks (ie deadly accuracy).

The power gamers dump all initial XP into stats, then all XP into talent trees focused on getting down to dedication with a smattering of XP to get a few combat skills up to 2 or 3 ranks max. If this statement makes you mad you are probably a power gamer and that is OK. There are room for all type of games and gamers. I just prefer some characters with a little character to start, not 4 football captains that are strong, fast, smart, and charismatic....

The system is designed to dump all XP to characteristics at start. It's not power gaming. Yes, yellow dice only marginally improves your succes chances, but significantly improves Triumph and Advantage chances, which is there to help RPing....

The players you mention, that buy only talent related skills... Now that's powergaming...

5 hours ago, Rimsen said:

The system is designed to dump all XP to characteristics at start. It's not power gaming. Yes, yellow dice only marginally improves your succes chances, but significantly improves Triumph and Advantage chances, which is there to help RPing....

The players you mention, that buy only talent related skills... Now that's powergaming...

If it was designed to dump all xp into characteristics to start then it wouldn't be an option, it would be a rule. I am not sure what your definition of significantly is but for advantages there is no significant increase going from green to yellow. Below is a 5 green vs 5 yellow dice with a simple difficulty. in fact you get more of a chance for extra advantages with the green die.

All Yellow

1 - 10.45%

2 - 19.002%

3 - 22.942%

4 - 20.448%

5 -13.584%

6 - 6.881%

7 - 2.669%

8 - 0.71%

9 - 0.139%

10 - 0.016%

All Green

1 - 11.641%

2 - 21.39%

3 - 24.856%

4 - 20.333%

5 - 11.636%

6 - 5.007%

7 - 1.577%

8 - 0.341%

9 - 0.061%

10 - 0.002%

25 minutes ago, Jawa4thewin said:

If it was designed to dump all xp into characteristics to start then it wouldn't be an option, it would be a rule.

There isn't anything prohibiting it either. I always figured that investing in skills and talents in character creation was a option for more one shot campaigns, or something to do with spare xp just in case the character just doesn't manage to spend all of it otherwise (there are a few races that would always have xp left over, no matter how they spent it.).

Personally it's designed to do either or; though it is better to spend it in characteristics as they form the foundation of your character. Personally, I feel having weaker characteristics doesn't nerf power gaming at all but rather just delays the process mildly. I've seen characters who have never exceeded a characteristic of 3 or 4 who are exceedingly powerful gamers/characters, or have never invested in skill ranks and just chased talents to rely heavily on boost dice to become super sneaky without ever buying a rank in stealth. In my current party I believe I have the only character that exceeds a characteristic of 4 and my character is fairly skilled and powerful by the viture of tons of experienced earnt over countless adventures, but I'm not a power gamer because I simply don't chose to optimise my play style to dominate every encounter I come across; I moderate my strength to fit the theme of the session. Power gaming is really a player choice rather than a mechanical choice.

What I mean to say is that investing in characteristics isn't really power gaming for me; it's the mentality behind that character build that is.

I'm almost afraid to wade into this conversation, but here is something that I've done...

In my current campaign, I adopted one the Genesys restrictions on the Dedication talent. "You cannot increase the same characteristic with Dedication twice." The reason why I did this was because there are seven players in the group, and I plan on going for over a year, playing every week, offering 5XP per hour of play with an extra 5XP for a particularly enjoyable session. I wanted to keep the dice pools manageable for a longer time without arbitrarily increasing difficulties to prevent checks from becoming rote. It dissuades players from just grabbing multiple trees and racing to the bottom for the Dedication. After 700 awarded XP the dice pools are still manageable and the PCs are fairly diverse with skills and talents. The unintended consequence was that to get to a 6 in a characteristic, a PC is forced to start with a 5, which is not always possible with all species. It seems to work for us, and the players supported the idea from the start. This is our 4th campaign together as a group, and my 2nd time running.

5 minutes ago, LordBritish said:

There isn't anything prohibiting it either. I always figured that investing in skills and talents in character creation was a option for more one shot campaigns, or something to do with spare xp just in case the character just doesn't manage to spend all of it otherwise (there are a few races that would always have xp left over, no matter how they spent it.).

Personally it's designed to do either or; though it is better to spend it in characteristics as they form the foundation of your character. Personally, I feel having weaker characteristics doesn't nerf power gaming at all but rather just delays the process mildly. I've seen characters who have never exceeded a characteristic of 3 or 4 who are exceedingly powerful gamers/characters, or have never invested in skill ranks and just chased talents to rely heavily on boost dice to become super sneaky without ever buying a rank in stealth. In my current party I believe I have the only character that exceeds a characteristic of 4 and my character is fairly skilled and powerful by the viture of tons of experienced earnt over countless adventures, but I'm not a power gamer because I simply don't chose to optimise my play style to dominate every encounter I come across; I moderate my strength to fit the theme of the session. Power gaming is really a player choice rather than a mechanical choice.

What I mean to say is that investing in characteristics isn't really power gaming for me; it's the mentality behind that character build that is.

Read the OP. The person is having a problem with is group dumping all xp into one stat to start and being super good at what they do to start and he wants options to avoid such a thing. My quoted response was that the person said it was designed to dump all into stats. Like I said if that was the design then it wouldn't be an option to put XP into skills/trees. I am not saying it should be prohibited in general just addressing the wording of Rimsen's response.

As I said before, play how you want to play, house rule whatever you want to house rule to make the game work for you. For me, like the OP, people dumping all starting xp into stats is problematic as it either is powergaming (all xp into one) or against the idea of cooperative play (Making a character that will be good at 2/3rds of all skills cause they have four characteristics at 3).

Just my opinion and take on the OP. I am not here to debate or convince others of my view, just give my view in hope that it helps the question posed by the OP.

I am off to ionize some droids...

I have a house rule that you can spend xp on characteristics whenever you want, but only up to the levels you could get at character creation.

So if you want to have a bunch of talents in session one and buy a stat with 30 xp later you can, but you still can never spend more than starting xp plus 10 (for obligation etc, less any you spend on credits to start) in stars.

Also means it is helpfully enforced by Oggdudes.

I have read the OP and I have already given suggestion. Divide and conquer (e.g. Make checks target some people, engineer situations where the party must divide to succeed, or are divided) targeted checks, or blanket checks (checks that target everyone in a particular scene.) all serve the role of effectively hitting the "one staters" really hard for hyperfocusing to one grand number.

Though I underlined that with the ultimate advice; talk to the players and use that GM agency to say "this is what I want, while I am learning the ropes I would appreciate if you didn't hyper specialise, otherwise I am going to have to start targeting your dump stats individually just to challenge you.". As the one who is creating the world around the party I don't believe that request is wholly unreasonable, this isn't DnD after all where the name of the game is to kill monsters and collect loot, this should be a story telling exercise and it's important to stress that point at the start of every session. I don't feel any amount of house ruling can solve that; if the players don't respect the GM at the table and visa versa, there is no game.

Personally, I've always hated any and all restrictions that games put on the players character creation. I simply see no point to it. Some will argue that if you don't, people can min/max like crazy or start truely competent in a given field, and then have no way to grow the character. I personally call bull on that, because no character will be maxed out in all areas. True, people can min/max more with no constraints, but so what? I don't get my fun that way, but who am I to tell someone that they can't? And as for challenging a min/maxer, just force them to use a wide selection of skills and abilities. They'll then ace their specialties and mess up the rest.

As for Star Wars, I personally find that two green dice tend to equal failure or just barely getting through. Hence getting extra dice from better stats is virtually a necessity. And given how hard it is to increase stats after game start, not improving the stats during creation is borderlining idiocy. But granted, my table doesn't min/max a lot, and given how little we play, getting anywhere witv XP purchases take irl time.

However, each table to their own. The OP should do as he believes is right for his game.

The way skill checks work (you need one uncancelled success) is if you want to have an average (50%+) chance of success on an average (2 purple) difficulty check you need a 3 green dice (or better) pool. Having an approximately 50% chance of success on approximately 2/3rd's of all average difficulty checks does not equate to smart handsome captains of football teams.

Id bet the game designers made a deliberate decision for short range with a ranged light weapon to be easy 1 purple so "average" (2 green agility) characters wouldn't be useless in combat. But while ranged light at short range is probably the single most frequent skill check in the game it doesn't follow the statistical odds of pretty much every other check in the game where you're expecting to go up against at least 2 purple.

Point is 4 green or 3 yellow is required to succeed noticeably more than 50% of the time on the vast majority of skill checks.

A PC who has a 4 3 2 2 2 2 stat block is good at "1/6" of possible skills, average at another one/6 and bad at 2/3 of all skills.

But if you look at the design of the game putting a 3 attribute and 1 starting rank at character creation and assuming 25xp for the first session (admittedly so awards vary by table) allows "any" (scare quotes) character to be good at any one thing by the end of the first session.