I have had the rules for a while, but I am getting ready to run my first game. I was doing some math and I want to confirm what I found with you more experienced players.

I have played tons of games where you bought Characteristics and Skills and they somehow added together to get what every you rolled. Skills are usually cheaper where as characteristics apply to more skills. But most games tend to favor one more than the other (From a cost/benefit perspective)

So Let's say you have a 2 in an attribute for a certain skill lets its is agility for piloting. To increase your piloting ability you can buy up your agility or your piloting skill. In Edge of Empire buying up the skill though doesn't actually give you any more dice it just upgrades your dice. A green dice seems to have 5 successes out of 8 possible sides where as a yellow dice has 10 successes out of 12 possible sides. Clearly the yellow dice is better. But getting a yellow dice costs you one of your green dice. Let's do some quick math (10/12) .8333... - ( 5/8) .625....=.208...

So buying up your characteristics increases the expected number of successes of any applicable skill by .625... and buying up a skill only increases the expected number of successes by .208. Buying up a characteristic is three times as good as buying up a skill even if that characteristic is only used for one skill. (This of course ignores all other uses for characteristics like soak and strain)

To me this seems opposite from how it should be. I feel like buying up a skill should be if anything more useful for that skill than buying up a characteristic.

It all comes from the fact that a rank in a skill does not actually give you a dice, instead it upgrades one.

Reread the rules. You have two values. One is the Characteristic, the other is the skill. Take the larger of the two, that is the number of green dice. Take the smaller of the two, that is the number of upgrades.

So, Agility 3, Piloting (Space) 2 gets you the same dice pool as Agility 2, Piloting (Space) 3.

YYG

It's generally most effective to push the characteristic as high as possible. That's why the game puts the brakes on such attempts by forcing you to wade through talent trees to get to Dedication to raise characteristics.

Hy!

You can use the probability calculator in my signature to do some numbers if you like.

Although it has been pointed out, lemme try to rephrase it a bit....

Boosting your Characteristics isn't the 'be all end all' to the game. Take starting exp, for instance.

Let's say you have one character who is Characteristic intensive at the beginning of the game, (Me. Not gonna lie; almost every point goes to Characteristics) and another who invests more into Skills.

Starting off, the Skill junkie has a better chance at getting things done than I do. Even if we are different races, I'm likely to only have MAYBE 1 skill with 2 points in it. Maybe. And despite having more Greens in certain rolls, that leaves me with few Yellows. I might win, but it won't be epic.

On the other hand, Player 2 might even have some exp left over. End of game 1, he is no longer limited to Rank 2 on his Skills. He can boost up higher for a lot less than I had to pay for my Characteristics. Depending on how it is played out, I could be Agility 5, Ranged (Heavy) 1 at the end of game 1, while the other guy is Agility 2, Ranged (Heavy) 4. Sure, I've a bigger dice pool, but he's got 2 Advantage die now and an easy third lined up. I'm still trying to work on my second while he's got Advantage die ready for several different occasions.

On the flip side of that, keep in mind that maxing out Characteristics gives you the largest dice pool possible. You can only Rank up to 5, but you can put your Characteristics up to 6. (I feel like there is a 'This one goes to 11' joke around here somewhere....)

So, while I won't be the go to guy for everything at the beginning, by specializing in specific things, I end up stronger, faster.

Especially if I focus my game play towards getting the Dedicated perks to boost myself up even higher.

And also keep in mind that I can buy Cybernetic Enhancements to get an additional boost.

What it comes down to his how you want your character to handle situations. If you have a fairly large group and can sync of your needs, I vouch for specializing your characters. Smaller groups, just split the bill.

Neither one is going to make you OP by itself. I can have 6 Agility and still be the groups 'Crash Landing Specialist'.

Thank you for your repsonses, and the rules clarification. All that being said, am I right that getting an extra green dice is better than upgrading a green to a yellow?

Thank you for your repsonses, and the rules clarification. All that being said, am I right that getting an extra green dice is better than upgrading a green to a yellow?

For getting successes I do believe that is correct, yes.

Thank you for your repsonses, and the rules clarification. All that being said, am I right that getting an extra green dice is better than upgrading a green to a yellow?

It's worth noting that upping a skill only benefits you when you're rolling that skill, whereas a characteristic increase benefits you whenever you use any skill that's linked to it. If you're a fighting type and a pilot, increasing your agility and upgrading an extra die on all ranged (light), ranged (heavy), and pilot (space) rolls could easily be worthwhile.

With my luck on the rolls I`d take that exta .208 any day. Plus nothing is quite as fun as rolling three triumphs. If it was my point buy starting with a 2 in a characteristic I would put three skill in before one more characteristic. Gives me two yellow and a green for a nice dice pool.

But I can see the breakdown with upping characteristics to the max whole creating a character being beneficial. Poor droids can suffer horribly unless they want to be specialized however. You could put all 140 of your 175 into one characteristic for a 5 green, but then you`re all 1s elsewhere and who wants to be a loader droid anyways?

I've seen a medical droid that was 5/2/2/1/1/1, post-exra Obligation. It was actually extremely effective at its role, and being a medical droid it wasn't losing much by having a few stats at 1 anyway. I could see a similar spread working out VERY well for a MagnaGuard Marauder, among other concepts.

And hey don't knock the loader droids, the 5-brawn loader droid in one of my games is all that keeps us alive sometimes!

Thank you for your repsonses, and the rules clarification. All that being said, am I right that getting an extra green dice is better than upgrading a green to a yellow?

Yellow dice are the only way to get Triumphs and since they count as both a success and a special affect you're going to be missing out. I'd rather have YYG than YGGG.

It also depends what your goal is. Triumphs are great but hardly essential except to fuel certain Talents. Success is essential to…succeed! But yellow dice already have a better chance of giving success too.

Thank you for your repsonses, and the rules clarification. All that being said, am I right that getting an extra green dice is better than upgrading a green to a yellow?

Yellow dice are the only way to get Triumphs and since they count as both a success and a special affect you're going to be missing out. I'd rather have YYG than YGGG.

Except the stat gives you an extra green on a lot of skills. It comes down to the GM. If they require you to use a lot of different skills over the course of a game then the stats are much much better. If they let consistently make you use just 2 or 3 skills then investing in skills is better.

I'd go with characteristics off the bat. The rulebook suggests it as it's the easiest way to get your charactersitics up. Otherwise, you'll be limited when compared to your companions after a couple of games. Yes, throwing skills is a cheap way for early success in a Game, but you run the risk of really gimping long term development. Skills will cost the same for each player, no matter what your race/class combo is and can be raised, realistically at any time. Characteristics can only be raised at Chargen and when gaining the 'Dedicated' Talent (which takes time, but is basically the same as raising a career skill 5 or 6 in most cases).

With characteristics, in the long run, you will have a larger dice pool, with more yellow dice. You can more easily raise a skill to 6 than a characteristic. And this is optimal in almost all cases, as it will give you the best end-game character for rolls. But, the trade-off is that it takes slightly more time and creates, as previously mentioned, specialization. If your game is going to be long run campaign, than this is where you want to go.

On the other hand, if you're just trying to get a hang of the game and play it for a month, training more skills up front its probably the best way to go, because you probably won't have enough time to get 6/6 in any dice pool anyway.

The debate here seems to be between spending starting XP on Skills or Characteristics, but what about Talents? Are those just discounted until after you've invested in Characteristics and Skills first?

That's kind of how my players have evolved their characters, though now that they have 2 or even 3 ranks in their favorite skills they are investing in Talents too.

The debate here seems to be between spending starting XP on Skills or Characteristics, but what about Talents? Are those just discounted until after you've invested in Characteristics and Skills first?

I pretty much never buy Talents at chargen, unless I have a spare amount of XP that isn't enough for another Characteristic and that I wouldn't prefer to go to buying a new Career Skill or Rank 1 of a combat skill that's non-career (usually Ranged Light). I figure I will be spending most of my XP accumulated in-game by going down Talent trees, and would rather buy up immediately-useful stuff. But it really depends on what Rank 1 Talents are available to my Spec.

To me relevant skill value peters out after Rank 2 in the early game. At that point i start moving down the Talent tree to get the stuff I want heading towards Dedication.

Hmm...I hadn't considered that approach, although I'm playing a focused Force user, so I was thinking that an important goal would be to get to +1 Force rating quickly, as that's going to be more valuable than Dedicated.

That's not a bad idea, however when I play a Force-user, I try to buy some very useful Talents from my original spec before I save up to buy into FSE. Because at that point I'm going to be splitting XP between relevant Force powers and the awesome FSE Talents. You definitely want that +1 FR ASAP if you intend to commit Force dice to Sense and Enhance as often as possible.