I find the career system to be the weakest area of Genesys in terms of providing flavour to a character. In my last setting, I created four archetypical careers (with 8 career skills) and then a slew of 'sub-careers' (providing four more career skills) in an effort to give characters access to more skills and more definition to their characters.

Has anyone else come up with their own way of doing Careers?

This is the most-used career maker

And, to be honest, careers are not supposed to add too much flair or flavour to characters. It's just a list of what skills are cheaper to improve.

That's careers within the established template, right? I was wondering about stuff outside of that , that people had come up with for their games. Thanks though!

I like the idea of careers informing players about the game world and possibly their place in it. 😀

2 hours ago, c__beck said:

This is the most-used career maker...

I've not heard anything about anyone going "outside the box" on careers. There's so many more fun ways to differentiate characters with (IMO) more fun things like archetypes/species, talents and equipment.

What you're looking for is found in Star Wars. Where you chose a Career, and got 8 Career Skills, which you picked 4 from to gain 1 rank, and then a Specialization within that Career, that granted 4 Career Skills (almost always with some overlap), and you chose 2 of them to gain a rank in.

But then again, Star Wars had the talent Tress that helped differentiate a solid path for each Specialization, and you could buy more of them.

This is what I did in my L5R conversion, because it felt right for the flavor of the setting.

I sympathize, TheBoulder. One idea might be to adopt a system of Signature Abilities (like those in Star Wars) that are tied to Careers. In Star Wars, you can't access these until you've reached the bottom of your Talent Tree, so in Genesys terms, that would mean getting to at least one Tier-5 Talent. That said, I can see designing some Signature Abilities that act kind of like Heroic Abilities in Terrinoth, improving at set XP benchmarks.