The continually rising costs for new specializations is starting to annoy me. They become crazily expensive in longer/high XP campaigns.

Has anyone experimented with a different system of costs for new specs?

I'm considering instituting an unchanging, flat cost: 10 XP for new in-career specs, and 20 XP for new out-of-career specs. Or even free new in-career specs, and 10 XP for new out-of-career specs.

1 hour ago, Bellona said:

The continually rising costs for new specializations is starting to annoy me. They become crazily expensive in longer/high XP campaigns.

Has anyone experimented with a different system of costs for new specs?

I'm considering instituting an unchanging, flat cost: 10 XP for new in-career specs, and 20 XP for new out-of-career specs. Or even free new in-career specs, and 10 XP for new out-of-career specs.

I think it's good as-is. If you want to reduce it, I'd say stop increasing the cost after the third spec (so 30 or 40 XP)

If you make the in-career specs free, then it becomes a game of grabbing low-hanging fruit for comparatively no cost. Even worse if you reduce it to 10 XP for out-of-career specs.

Part of the reason for the steep cost increases is to encourage the players to think carefully about what they want, rather than just grabbing whatever catches an "Ooo... Shiny!" interest or has low-hanging fruit (like Toughened, Grit, Setback removal). It also encourages dedication to a tree as the cost to skip around grows increasingly problematic, motivating them to stay in the tree and expand that way.

1 hour ago, Bellona said:

The continually rising costs for new specializations is starting to annoy me. They become crazily expensive in longer/high XP campaigns.

Has anyone experimented with a different system of costs for new specs?

I'm considering instituting an unchanging, flat cost: 10 XP for new in-career specs, and 20 XP for new out-of-career specs. Or even free new in-career specs, and 10 XP for new out-of-career specs.

They are supposed to get crazy expensive because once you buy in, the first few talents are always crazy cheap (5xp each). This is intended to create an opportunity cost to prevent constant specialization hopping and to slow character growth beyond the lines of a character's core concept (most core concepts are fairly well fleshed out after 3 or so specializations, if you need more than that, you might not be leaving room for other PCs to shine).

An alternative is simply to award more xp.

Like in the pre-written adventure books, if they achieve a specific goal then award them 5-10 xp for that. Set up 2-3 goals per adventure and that should offset the costs. Less work, less book keeping, rules still followed.

Just please make sure to explain where the xp is coming from, if players dont know what gets them xp, they wont know to try to aim for that kind of stuff in the future.

In my game, specs are a flat 25 points, but I give you a second spec for free at character creation.

Costs aren't so high I believe. In general therms PC use to pick (as an average) between 2 and 4 specs (signature apart of course). Just 3 PC's till the moment picked more than 4 specs. Not everything are talents if do you want to justify "my character knows about mechanics". Thats a discussión we had a few times.

Sometimes a good ability score and a few ranks are pretty enough. And I'm speaking about even long therm games with more than 2400XP PC's.

By the way, we are converting SW to Genesys PC's (no spec trees) an personally, I love it so much, even I prefer it.

So give a try to Genesys, maybe it fits you better

Hope it helped!

4 minutes ago, Josep Maria said:

Costs aren't so high I believe. In general therms PC use to pick (as an average) between 2 and 4 specs (signature apart of course). Just 3 PC's till the moment picked more than 4 specs. Not everything are talents if do you want to justify "my character knows about mechanics". Thats a discussión we had a few times.

Sometimes a good ability score and a few ranks are pretty enough. And I'm speaking about even long therm games with more than 2400XP PC's.

By the way, we are converting SW to Genesys PC's (no spec trees) an personally, I love it so much, even I prefer it.

So give a try to Genesys, maybe it fits you better

Hope it helped!

Genesys doesn't have Specializations that you have to buy, but repeated purchases of talents increases the tier, so while the first Toughened may only cost 5 XP, the next costs 10 XP, then 15 XP, and eventually any further will cost you 25 XP (along with needing sufficient "base" to your pyramid) so it has its own form of balance built in. SW tuled to do away with Specialization costs risks having certain based talents picked up in large numbers on the cheap by skimming the least expensive rows of multiple Specializations.

20 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Genesys doesn't have Specializations that you have to buy, but repeated purchases of talents increases the tier, so while the first Toughened may only cost 5 XP, the next costs 10 XP, then 15 XP, and eventually any further will cost you 25 XP (along with needing sufficient "base" to your pyramid) so it has its own form of balance built in. SW tuled to do away with Specialization costs risks having certain based talents picked up in large numbers on the cheap by skimming the least expensive rows of multiple Specializations.

Yes but also the main difference. Spec costs doesn't give (directly) any benefit. So you spend XP for in a future begin to build your char. In Genesys, expensive at higher tiers yes, but each purchase gives you a benefit, not just a requirement.

Two differents and interesting models sincerely. By the way, when we converted is was impossible to convert it fully legal because those high XP PC had above:

8 T1 / 9 T2 / 14 T3 / 12 T4 / 9 T5 Talents

In other cases the effect was the same.

At our table, I have a long standing house rule of no XP tax for additional specs. In-career and Universal are always a flat 20xp and out of career is always a flat 30 xp. It hasn't broken our games. That said, my players aren't the type to pile on specs. They like to find a niche and focus on that.

I have not changed the cost for new talent sheets and I'm keeping it as is, to help the players to specialize in their talents.

The PC's currently are hitting between 1,800 - 2,000 EXP each and they can earn between 20 - 30 Exp per session. So if they WANT to diversify their talents, they can save up those EXP over a couple of sessions.

I think having the rule as is, is a good idea, especially when you have monster PC's (like mine) because the converse issue is that if you let your PC's grow to epic levels of awesome, the ability to diversify can lead to the problem that the PC's no longer differentiate in capabilities.

On a separate issue, I may have a crew of Ace Pilots among my PC's of 'Special Operators.' The only thing making the dedicated Pilots unique are their talent trees.

Still, after a month or so, each of the other Players COULD pick up those talent trees . . .

Yep, with copious experience, I highly recommend NOT altering this particular rule.

I don't think there's really an issue here until people start picking up their 8 or 9th tree and spending near a base 100xp for a tree.

A cap of 50xp/60xp in-career/out-of-career might be a reasonable middle ground.

In all honesty I question a lot of out-of-career tree/skill taxes in this game.

You can create something based on Genesys that the sixth spec, and so on, counts the same as the fifth XD

On 12/13/2020 at 12:49 PM, Bellona said:

The continually rising costs for new specializations is starting to annoy me. They become crazily expensive in longer/high XP campaigns.

I never made the players pay for a new spec. Sometimes I even gave them for free at the beginning of a campaign if in Session Zero I got them all on board with a particular theme or concept.

The extra point costs are ludicrous, and kind of deflating for the player unless you are pouring out the XP. Besides, the only purpose for the XP cost is to help GMs against players who would otherwise bounce around and, for example, pick up all the cheap Grit or Toughness. It's a brute-force method of control, but thankfully there's a better way to control it if your players are even mildly reasonable.

I just asked that the spec either builds on the current character concept, or fits and makes sense with what is happening in the campaign. I also would have limited a player wanting to dive straight to Dedication or Force Rating, or any other super potent Talent, but that was never an issue.

I've since dispensed with specs altogether and use something like the Genesys model. It's really liberating and the players like it better because they don't have to grind through the useless stuff (at least half of every spec is pointless fluff). The specs are still a nice template, like, "if you want to be a sniper, here are some good options", but otherwise they are really just a way to sell more books, so there's no need to constrain your game to what is essentially a marketing ploy...a really good one, and necessary, but still.

4 hours ago, Josep Maria said:

You can create something based on Genesys that the sixth spec, and so on, counts the same as the fifth XD

I tried to pick up the CRB but my shop was all out. Yeah internet, but I like to buy local if I can. But otherwise aside from lowering the stats cap and limiting some other stuff, I don't know anything about the game. Star Wars and L5R are the only FFG RPGs I own.

The Genesys CRB is available as a PDF on Drivethrurpg.

@False God

2 hours ago, False God said:

But otherwise aside from lowering the stats cap and limiting some other stuff, I don't know anything about the game.

It's functionally identical. Same dice odds, skill progression, character baselines, etc. It's just a bit more customizable, and dispenses with some of the straight-jackets like spec trees (though there's nothing stopping a player from following a basic spec progression if they like).

The RAW cost of additional spec trees never seemed out of whack to me. Not every character is expected to be good at everything, and if they are a Han-of-all-trades it should come at a high cost.

On 12/14/2020 at 3:49 PM, False God said:

I don't think there's really an issue here until people start picking up their 8 or 9th tree and spending near a base 100xp for a tree.

". . . with copious experience, I still highly recommend NOT altering this particular rule . . ."

If it costs 100 exp for a PC to pick up that NINTH talent tree, then it ought to cost 100 exp! At 2,000 Exp that cost of 100 exp is only 5% of the characters total experience cost.

I'm also an advocate for dishing out tons of exp because part of the joy that the players have in playing FFG Star Wars is saving up and spending those exp on kewl new talents and then using those kewl new talents during the next session. (I think they most enjoy ignoring all of those negative black dice and tossing them out of their dice pools).

But back to my point. So what if my player want's to burn 100 exp on that new awesome broken Jedi talent tree? On average they have to play through four weeks of RP before they can buy that talent. That's not that long really.

We occasionally get the argument of "Oh no, talent trees TOO expensive" mainly from GM's who are awarding WAY less than 25 exp per session. And because theres so little advancement currency floating about the PC's constantly whine about not being able to tap into those kewl L33T talents which puts on that pressure of reducing talent tree costs.

However, this particular purchase rule for talents isn't broken. (And as a GM who has up to 12 major rule re-rights for this game, its unusual for me to support RAW). Rather than fiddle with this rule I'd recommend that you try issuing more exp to the players and let them have fun in your own particular sandbox. Try that first.