I want to run a game involving 2 Knights with a Padawan each. I’d like to find a way to have the characters balanced, but with still a clear way to show the Knights being Jedi linger.

My initial idea was giving the Knights bonus XP in Force Power talents and the Padawans bonus XP in Characteristics, as Skills and Specialization talents don’t seem right. That way the Padawans might be naturally better, but the Knights are better trained. I’m worried that this will cause problems since you are limited in spending XP on Charactersitics during char-gen.

I’d be open to other suggestions that aren’t either “just give the Knights more XP” or “treat them the same and make it a story thing”.

There's actually such a game going on in the Beginners Forum here right now.

What changes did you make?

7 minutes ago, BeyondFandom said:

What changes did you make?

None. The Masters are all between 1500-2000 XP, but that's it.

I think the key to this type of game is you have more role players then roll players. As some don’t like the idea of playing a weaker character

9 minutes ago, Oldmike1 said:

I think the key to this type of game is you have more role players then roll players. As some don’t like the idea of playing a weaker character

True. Of course, with this game, everybody plays both one "Master" level character and one starting character.

Yeah I’m definitely not having everyone play two players and at the moment, I don’t have any players, whether role or roll.

Apparently, this sort of thing will be a major focus on Rise of the Separatists when it releases. From what I gather from the promo materials, they'll include ideas for how to run a game of Jedi, Padawans, and Clone Troopers, basically letting one group or another take center stage each adventure or so.

When I ran a game with 1 master for multiple Padawans, I spoke with the person who was playing the master and talked to them about the role I wanted them to play. To treat the adventures as test for your padawans, let them have the spot light in the games. You are the cavalry to come in and save them if things go wrong.

I also gave the master less experience at the end of the session to help reduce the gap between them.

the master was around 1200 EXP and the padawans started at knight level in the game I ran.

I'd take a long hard look at things and talk it over with your players. Power level is VERY subjective, and the difference between Padawan, Knight, Master of a padawan, and Master-master is going to vary wildly from person to person.

You could run them all at the same level and have the difference be purely roleplaying.

You could have the difference be a relatively small XP boost enough to buy an extra power or upgrade or two.

You could have the difference be a good amount of XP like 100 or more.

You could have the difference be thousands of XP.

All these methods will work, some may result in a much more obvious difference, and depending on character build, possible break the campaign from session 1... but it's really up to you.

My personal view... if you have a difference at all, keep it small. The movies and such tend to have Padawans be less of an obvious skill and power difference and more one of worldly experience.

Masters would have more exp compared to padawans. The benefit the padawans get is a constant mentor around so I would grant lots of bonus exp to the padawan as they have someone teaching all the time rather than working it out for themselves.