I see your point in theory for skills. In practice, however, the MATH doesn't add up.

For example, buying specializations doesn't actually GIVE you anything by itself. You pay less for certain skill, but you STILL pay for them. Not to mention that talents aren't free, either. You pay for cheaper access to skills, but don't get anything else for the thirty-plus points spent.

On the other hand, buying two ranks in a non-career skill pretty much becomes 30 points off the bat. That means for reasonable competency in a single non-career skill I can already buy a specialization instead. now imagine that three or four skills are this way….good luck making what you want.

Using the movies as an example, Luke was a Fringer, Mechanic and Pilot at the beginning of the movie A New Hope! He used those skills later, but presumable had at least some of them from minute one.

The Force IS special, but it's the only ability that comes complete with it's own problems, moral issues and outright dangers that NO OTHER CHARACTER needs to worry about. Not to mention that it's already more expensive in Practice than other specializations because you have to buy separate trees, most of the abilities have hampered use until AFTER you've mastered the Exile tree and with the new rules I don't see how ANY PC gets higher than 2 as a force rating except at character creation, which is expensive by itself.

This smacks far more of people being AFRAID of the force rather than balancing it. Just making the cost higher and higher just makes for a passive-aggressive way of removing the Force-User from a game by making one entirely too expensive or inconvenient to play. The cost isn't just points, or being hunted like a dog if you ever use it. The very fabric of the character changes, and not always for the better. It's the fact that half the universe can be a brand-new fatal incident waiting to happen but ONLY for the Force-Sensitive, everyone else is safe.

Thank you for the comments and opinions. It seems we don't agree on this particular subject, but the input does give me another perspective to work from. That's always appreciated, if not always agreed upon.

dreddwulf1 said:

You don't have to agree with me, but you may want to check your math… I'm not sure I understand where yours is coming from. You seem to ignore the cost you would pay to get the 2 ranks in a skill as a career skill, and your math still doesn't add up when you claim "buying two ranks in a non-career skill pretty much becomes 30 points off the bat". Lets take another look at your example: the costs of buying 2 ranks in some skill, career vs OOC.

• 2 ranks in a career skill: First rank bought for 5 XP (1 x 5), second rank bought for 10 XP (2 x 5). Total cost is 15 XP
• 2 ranks in an OCC skill: First rank bought for 10 xp (1 x 5 + 5), second rank bought for 15 XP (2 x 5 + 5). Total cost is 25 XP

The OOC is more expensive, but only by 10 XP (Paying the OOC skill rank 'tax' twice). 10 XP doesn't get you your new spec. not even close. Now, if you were doing this for 3 skills that become class skills, yeah, you're breaking even. You also break even by buying 2 skills that were OOC up to rank 3, and one skill never reaches equivalency. Its just wrong to say "I can already buy a specialization instead", and if you believe buying the specialization doesn't actually give you anything anyway, why would you buy it? Seriously, if you bought the spec, you'd have that, but no ranks in the skills you want. To put it nicely, pointing out "buying specializations doesn't actually give you anything by itself" is… shortsighted? It gives you access to new talents and classifies up to four skills as career skills, dropping the price, which leads to savings on future XP expenditures. Basically, spending Y XP now saves more than Y XP later, which means you reach the goals you're aiming for sooner. It's like spending $20 to get your oil changed to avoid spending $2000 to replace the engine because you didn't. Now if you want to talk about "making 3 or 4 skills this way, good luck making what you want". Well, OOC, 3 or 4 skills at 2 ranks each will cost you 30 or 40 XP on top of what you would spend anyway. If you're lucky enough to find a single specialization to make ALL 3 or 4 of them a career skills, then maybe that new spec is worth the investment of XP and would meet your needs. Pointwise, it would be a smart investment (as long as the spec costs 30 or 40, or less), and the math adds up.

If you're in a situation where you want to start with 3-4 OOC at rank 2, maybe reconsider your starting career/spec choice. I'm confused by the tone of your message, honestly. You seem intent on making sure you get the absolute best value on every spent XP, but then invoke "character concept". Sometimes you have to make choices. I actually think that's one of the cornerstones of good game design: consequential decision making. If the idea that you can't have everything you want at creation bugs you, maybe this isn't the system for you.

The devs didn't provide the motivation for this change, but I suspect it was made to discourage players grabbing specs just to drop the price of buying skills, avoiding the exact "economic" or "point-wise" thinking I described above. and I personally think that was a damned good reason to do it. I don't think players should feel "forced" to buy additional specs to be able to expand their skill selection, which was the problem with the previous 10* new rank formula from the week 4 patch. That was a BAD decision. It's been rectified in this patch.

-WJL

Donovan Morningfire said:

This. They need to stop ramping up the cost of multi-specing. Getting a new spec doesn't provide huge benefits, and should not have prohibitive cost. It was too much with the last update, this update is a deal breaker.

If they want to ban multi specing, then they should just go ahead and do it.

In thinking of the costs of abilities, specializations, skills, etc., I've realized something:

It really sounds like the biggest complaint boils down to, "I can't make a starting character who's awesome at three or four things at once."

And okay, maybe that's exaggerating a little bit (at least in some cases), but the thrust of most of the arguments I'm seeing is that the starting XP budget doesn't allow a starting character to pile on multiple specializations, and I'm trying to figure out why that's necessarily weird or bad or undesirable.

To look at Saga Edition, which is extremely multiclass-friendly (and encouraging), when you build a character, you're still starting out at Level 1, and so you're still limited in what your character can be good at out the starting gate. Sure, you can take a feat or two to expand your repertoire beyond what the core class itself gives you, but your resources for character proficiency are limited. I don't see why Edge of the Empire limiting starting character power levels like that is a bad thing when nobody is in an uproar that a character in a d20-type system can't have abilities from three classes at the start at Level 1.

And yes, frequently, GMs and players like to have campaigns start with more powerful PCs, and so they have the players start out at a higher level, such as 2 or 3 or 6. The FFG Fun Police aren't going to kick down your door if you want to start your PCs with a larger XP budget to start, in order to create characters that can be more capable. You may want/need to limit the amount that can be spent on characteristics, for balance considerations, and maybe that's even a guideline that can be written into the rules.

I guess what I'm saying is, just because costs don't let you be immediately instantly awesome at character creation doesn't mean that the costs are wrong or prohibitive or unfair. And assuming you're getting something like 20 to 30 XP across two sessions, that right there is enough to buy yourself a decent talent and maybe bump a skill or two, and (at least by RAW), Saga Edition sure doesn't let you advance that quickly, most of the time.

In that light, is multi-specing even that prohibitive, when you really get down to it? If you were only getting 5XP a session or something, then sure, I can see the complaints, but I honest'y don't see that advancement would be all that slow with the numbers as they are now.

LethalDose said:

LethalDose said:

Math in Skill Training: Changed back from the Week 6 update. Slightly better, but doesn't change the problem. If the concept itself is poorly reflected, the 'Choices' don't really matter. I already spoke of this with the smuggler. Yes, choices need to be made, but they should be properly reflected with the classes as they currently are, which is NOT the case now.

As for dropping the price, I already mentioned that. I also mentioned that versatility was something set up in the movies themselves, and in the game. Just saying "live with it" is not the premise or purpose of this thread or the Beta Game itself. The specialization was just fine with the earlier edition (x5 Career Spec./x10 Non-Career Spec) because it made you look at the choice of Career first. and it was a consistent, simple method. This new "add 5" or "add 10 carry the 4" just adds more MATH rather than one consistent Mechanic. Same for the Force Exile. It adds a career specializations without BEING a career, an inconsistency in creation. If the Force Powers have a flat rate, the Force Exile Tree should do the same (obviosly costing more than the powers because it has more in it than any one of the force power trees). I'm not looking to maximize anything as GM, just for consistent rulings that are easier to remember than tacking on excess complication for no real reason.

The only real way I see of solving the problem with skills is to make all the skills the same price and leave the price for Specializations so that characters buy access to TALENTS, rather than worry about skills at all. That way, there are no further specialization buys just for skills, you buy specializations for access to talents. Simple fact is, anyone can learn how to perform a task, not everyone has the talent to be amazing at it. Careers can give you that talent over time, skills are simply learned and applied tasks. Anyone can learn to be a pilot, not everyone is an ACE (which the talents reflect). Solves the problem completely because there is no skill-based reason to get a specialization at all, and the Force-Sensitives are on a somewhat even spending footing in aquiring the Specializations while still spending more for their "Kewl Powers", as it were. Versatility, efficiency and simplicity all covered.

Just looks to me like making skills a different price based on career is a mechanic with no real reason, except for saying: "You wouldn't use that anyway". Smuggler proves that wrong, as well as the movie that this entire system is based on. All the GM has to do is enforce the ability to attain skills based on background, use or study in-game, something most decent roleplayers I have dealt with happily do, anyway (Noone's perfect at this, though it IS good to see the attempt made).

Thanks for the input, that really help make this decision possible! WOuldn't have thought it up without your input.

Right.

My main issue with this update: Spec cost. Way too high. Keep it at the previous update's level and I'll be happy (ish) - in particular with the reversion of skill costs, this makes more sense to me (it seems they are unwilling to remove skill classifications completely, which I guess is a design choice). About the force exile spec: giving this a flat price could be interesting, although I'd prefer it to have "fluid" cost like others, simply for consistency. With this new cost, the two of my players with 2 specs would now have negative xp. So. Yes. It's a difficult issue really, because specs should be a "major" change, but the steep cost of specs is now, not only limiting (which is okay), its debilitating for character progress and customisation. Not that my players wanted to be epic heroes at the get go, but some breadth when starting out is cool, without being totally gimped. Although I guess, for a long campaign and higher powered characters these things probably evens out - depends on the rate of progress in the campaign and power level one is used to, wants to feel and the like. I assume that with this higher cost, the power-level doesn't increase way too quickly, even if some character concepts becomes nigh-impossible to start out with.

The increased encumbrance capacity of the starships is interesting (and good imo), but I wonder about reasoning and … I'm still looking for a way to convert earlier ship's cargo capacity to encumbrance. My catalogue must now be updated - those that have encumbrance statistics anyways (most (if not all) only have metric ton capacity).

Rikoshi said:

I disagree, though I do not think that Multi-Specialising should be too cheap, pricing it too high will mean many players will ignore the mechanic because it is now excessively expensive. I think that the previous iteration was perfectly fine, it allowed for characters to have a little more dimensionality than this current cost mechanic will provide. In my opinion this is something which impacts the characters life throughout, what is the point in removing the three specialisation limit of they are only going to make the price so prohibitive that you will only be able to gain access to additional specialisations by saving a month or more worth of xp to just gain access to a maximum of four more career skills and an additional talent tree to spend even more xp on.In addition, this also effectively makes the Force Sensitive Exile specialisation almost moot as the cost to purchase it is becoming too much.

I would however say that even if FFG maintain this cost level to publication there is nothing to stop you from simply ignoring the change and ruling the cost as the previous version or even the original printed version. I know we all want the final release to be what we each perceive as the best balance but we are never going to all agree. I personally hope that they will retract this last change in the specialisations costs and while they are at it remember to look into the changes they made into the Force chapter as some of that still refers to the Three Specialisations Max rules.

Exalted5 said:

I don't see this last skill getting on. This game really doesn't WANT you to have a lightsaber, and even if that weren't the case, FS Exile is also, probably, set up to reflect other Force Sensitive traditions, like the Baran Do Sages, the Fallanasi, or various others; ones who, while still hunted by the Emperor's pogroms, are seen as much less significant than the Jedi, or other Sith, and so not hunted AS feverishly, and thus actually more likely to be encountered by the players. These groups don't use lightsabers, and thus the skill is of no value to them, and they wouldn't, because they're not using them, and threatening the Emperor's power, are much of why they aren't exterminated.

Me being one of those people who do want to sneak in as much a "Jedi" character in as possible, I really wish there was a lightsaber skill, and a career that could get it, but I don't see it being THAT spec. Maybe a Talent within that Spec, that gives you Lightsaber as a Class skill, maybe with one or two other things, I don't know, but make it worth a Talent, but otherwise, I doubt it'll happen.

venkelos said:

I agree, having a Lightsaber skill for the Force Exile really doesn't fit, as the Force Exile is meant to be the "self-trained, on your own" breed of Force-user; it's just that with the lack of other options for F/S heroes, it's being forced into a "jack-of-all-trades" role that it's really not suited for.

If there is a Lightsaber skill, make it part of a Jedi-centric specialization. Perhaps a talent similar to F/S Exile's that provides Perception & Vigilance as career skills, only said talent gives you Disicpline and Lightsaber instead?

I'd also initially toyed with giving the F/S specs (Exile and my two homebrew ones) a listing of career skills, but the problem was (aside from the Jedi one), exactly what skills to give them beyond Discipline? In the end, I wound up dropping the extra career skills and going the F/S Exile's route of a Row 1 talent that lets you add two career skills to your list.

dreddwulf1 said:

I've been working on a number of character conversions and the costs of dipping into a specialization just for a skill (looking at you medicine) is really limits spending xp's in other areas. This becomes quite clear when you just want a skill and really don't have use for the associated talent trees.

I really agree with LethalDose on his suggestion. Let anyone have any skill (maybe encourage some background story element if the skill seems really out of line) but charge for the access to talents.

just my 2 credits.

rhaz said:

First time posting, but I'm not sure I understand your problem - if the character (to use your example) wants the medicine skill, but has no interest in any of the talents associated with a specialization that gives you the medicine skill as a Career Skill, that is what Non-career skill is for. For a starting character, to bring a Non-Career skill up to max (2) it costs 25 XP.

Compared to rules as they currently stand, to buy a Specialization you say you have no interest in, (e.g. Doctor) it would cost (again assuming a starting character, and it is your second specialization - just to get a reduction in costs to increase a Career Skill) it will cost you 35 XP (20 for Non-Career Specialization + 15 for Rank 2). - Yes this is not worth the cost, but it's not intended to be.

Ok, to fix quotes here, I said make all skills the same price. I did not get into conversions that much, though I DO think that The newest change to specialization cost is unnecessarily expensive.

No stealing my words. Use the idea all you like, I just want acknowledgement for my ideas.

Hello, everyone.

First off, I'd just like to ask that everyone remain calm and civil in these discussions. The feedback you all have provided has been very valuable, and we all appreciate it here. However, overt hostility does dilute that feedback and lessen that value.

Second, I would like to draw everyone's attention to another update concerning the Force Sensitive specialization. As of this week, it counts as a specific specialization, referred to as a universal specialization. Simply put, purchasing it does not incur the additional costs for an out-of-career specialization; as long as it's your second specialization it'll be 20 xp. So the cost for it has not increased as per this week's update.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for clearing up the Cost for Force Sensitive Exile, I think we all needed to hear that. As for the skills, I think the buying of skills and access should be viable for the 'freebie' character creation skill points only. After that, let all skills be the same price (Career skill prices, specifically). Specializations could stay at earlier cost ( 5 x total number of specializations for in-Career Specializations, 10 x total Specializations for out of career Specializations ).This way, the character concerns him/herself with purchasing access to career talents while remaining free to purchase any skill deemed necessary, as long as there is a background or in-game reason to access it. This will take a little more RP for characters, but shouldn't unbalance the game in any way. More than that, it solves the skill problem without making specializations overly cheap or expensive. In fact, it takes the focus away from skills entirely.

Just an Idea. Opinions?

dreddwulf1 said:

I don't think having a significantly different cost for character creation is a good thing. It encourages certain build strategies over others to get the same character. This has the opposite effect on RP-based choices than what you are suggesting: players are encouraged not to buy what makes for the character, but instead delay those purchases until play. At that stage, players aren't making choices based on RP.

It also has the secondary problem of not being able to tell how many XP a character is built with without knowing how points were spent at chargen.

rhaz said:

Yeah, I didn't say this. This isn't my idea. I strongly disagree with it. I don't want credit for it. This is all Dwulf

Saying all skills are career skills for everyone is simply too homogeneous. Let specializations be good at what they SHOULD be good at. This means they have talents that represent their abilities AND reduced costs to their set of career skills. The caveat, there, is that their skill lists need to make sense, which needs some work, and dreddwulf1 did indicate and made some good points.

-WJL

FFG_Sam Stewart said:

This does help. It'll also be interesting to see what gets done with "universal specialization" mechanic in the future.

I'd like to say I'm sorry I missed this on my weekly patch-note read through, but I still don't see it in the Week 7 update pdf.

-WJL

FFG_Sam Stewart said:

It does help, though I don't see it cited on either the PDF itself or the website page for the Week 7 update. Was it something that just got didn't get included, sorta like the Breach/Defensive oversight with Lightsabers a couple weeks back?

Hm, that does appear to be a mistake on our part. Sorry about that! We'll upload the PDFs with that update as soon as possible.

eldath said:

I think there's a big difference between capping a character and three specializations, and allowing more than three but making it pricey.

In the former, the game is basically saying, "Sorry, you're hosed" if you decide you want your character to branch out further. By at least making it possible, you're still leaving it open as a character option, but it's one that a character is seriously going to have to weigh.

Quite frankly, there's a big difference between "jack of all trades" (dabbling into out-of-specialization skills) and "master of all trades" (piling on specializations), and I think that's something that should take significant character resources to reflect. And yes, I know it does start to get pretty expensive after a while, but I think the question people should be asking is, "How long of a while?"

Honestly, when you're first starting out your character, do you really want to immediately just start working on piling on additional specializations, or do you want to invest your resources into the one or two specializations you're starting with? Adding specializations adds some lateral growth, but doesn't make for much depth, and I think the key to character development (and this may be what the designers are trying to encourage) is developing your existing specializations instead of stacking on new ones. Wanting to be "at least okay" at something that isn't in one of your core specializations isn't, in and of itself, a cost-prohibitive thing to do.

(To think of it another way, if this were D&D, and you had a party of characters at Level 6, you're probably better off with a build like Fighter 4/Rogue 2 as opposed to Fighter 1/Wizard 1/Cleric 1/Druid 1/Bard 1/Rogue 1. And that may sound like a silly example, but I think it's also a little silly to say that your character concept needs four or five specializations early on in order to reflect what he or she is good at.)

The other thing I keep hearing is that people seem to be in agreement that adding specializations should represent a major change in a character, but someone needing to bank XP for something like three sessions to add on that third or fourth seems like too long to folks. I'm honestly curious: compared to leveling in other systems, does this seem too long to people? In my experience, this is on the short to moderate end for advanced character growth, but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.

Doc, the Weasel said:

Its a 10 change point change; the difference between buying it at 20 or 30. I disagree that this is represents "a significantly different cost for character creation". A 10 pt change is pretty small, and if it's bought at any other point, the cost is the same. ten points is equivalent to the purchase of two OOC skill ranks, which is another place where order/timing of purchase matters.

Besides, I think for Force Exile in particular, the mechanism is appropriate for RP. If someone is going to create a force user as a base concept, then they're going to take Force Exile at creation for RP purposes, regardless of the cost. I feel the new rule just facilitates it.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

I think you may not have read the post I was responding to. It was in reference to getting rid of OOC skills except for chargen, not the Force Exile spec.

FFG_Sam Stewart said:

I think you meant SKILLS and Specializations. Talents didn't get any changes in their prices.

@ Doc

You're right, I mis read the original post. Upon re-reading it, I agree with you. Same cost for all skills is a bad idea. Covered my opinion on that idea in a previous post. Reverting to previous spec costs also a bad idea.

Sorry for the goof.

-WJL

I can't find an official update to the 4th specialization skill for Scout. Did I miss something?