Hello Testers,

This thread is stickied for the purpose of posting feedback and comments concerning the character creation mechanics. Thanks, everyone!

 It's possible I missed it, but I was very disappointed not to see guidelines for creating higher powered / more experienced characters. 

Hey Sam! I believe you are the very hoarse-voiced guy who ran our Edge of the Empire demo at GenCon. Thank you very much for that, we had a blast (we were in the group where one of the players was in a wheelchair, so you let my wife sit near me in the spare chair and work the ipad with the dice roller app, a very courteous gesture)

So, I've now created three test characters and on the whole it's gone very smoothly. The only thing I struggled with, as has been documented elsewhere on these boards, is not being able to find how much money a new character starts play with for purchasing gear.

I would encourage adding a new step to character creation along the lines of "Purchase Starting Gear", and this would be the place to explain starting funds and whether there are any limitations on purchasing initial weapons, armor, and other gear (for example, can PCs freely purchase rare equipment such as lightsabers at character creation.)

 I'd like to see a few more species options, namely Duros and Ithorian, though I'd also like to see Devaronian and maybe Bith.  I get that you're doing Outer Rim and will probably expand races as the game moves towards the Core, but since the Mos Eisley cantina scene is kind of iconic for the seedy parts of the Empire, I think having a few more of the races we saw in there would help.  The Bothans may get mention in New Hope, but we got to see Duros, Ithorians, Devaronians, and Bith.  

 Aren't all Ithorians force sensitive?  It might be better to hold them until the force book and avoid that can of worms.  

Speaking of races though, I wanted to mention that I found the human racial ability of an extra in-class specialization underwhelming. Most of the other races had a skill rank. That rank was usually worth 10 points since it is frequently out of carrear or the second rank of a carrear skill.  I'd be much more excited by humans if they could pick any spec. 

cetiken said:

I thought that was Kel Dor.  Ithorians were very respectful of Jedi and my have contributed a good number to them because they had a particular love of living things and studied biology pretty intensely, but I don't think there were necessarily force sensitive.

lowdog said:

Neither of those species are all force sensitive. Your thinking of Miraluka which are all blind and use the force to see. 

 +1 for Duros. The iconic SW spacers should be in EotE.

Add another +1 for Duros.  One of my favourite characters in Saga Edition Star Wars was Kavis Foon - Duros Pilot, Equal parts coward and wacky plan tactician. I have to remake him.

I agree, Duros should also be included imo. The cantina scene where two of them are discussing is iconic, but also if you include that children's series called Clone Wars, one of the iconic villains there is a Duros bounty hunter, Bane.

Ithorians are also great, should be included. Devaronians are like the Rodians imo, iconic scum and villainy material.

But the species that are included in the book are great! That the Gand has been included almost made me wet my pants, they're by far one of my favourite species ever. If we could get one more species, I would say Duros, but the ones already included are good and creates variety.

There doesn't seem to be any clear statement that you should not be able to buy the same "ranked" talent several times to get more ranks at a lower cost. I think this might be important to mention.

This is a fiddling bit of detail, but it would be nice if the Characteristics listed for each species would appear in the same order that they appear on the character sheet. This would make transposing them from the book to the character sheet a LOT easier. It is such a simple thing that would make character creation go that much faster.

another + 1 for Duros so that i can migrate my D20 fringe group across.

In the species descriptions it provides starting thresholds for wounds and strain. It states that x+Brawn/Willpower is the initial threshold for these derived attributes. Later it states that increases to Brawn and/or Willpower do not increase these initial thresholds. Is this before or after spending starting XP on characteristics? If changes to the characteristics still do not improve these initial thresholds, they should just be given as static numbers rather than a formula because they will be the same for every starting character of the same species.

Page 65, acquiring new specializations:

It is mentioned that a player can train beyond the 3 they're normally allowed to have, but to do so, they must "discard" a current specialization, and suffer the losses that they would incur. I see no reference to what this means.

Loss of talents? Loss of skills as career skills? If either of these, it seems like a horrible idea to try and do (I can get RP reasons, but it just seems like a way to spectacularly injure a characters usefulness. Is this what the "permanent" talent designation is for? Still reading through the book, but that exact section was a real head scratcher for me.

I would imagine that derived attributes would be based upon FINAL characteristics, particularly since characteristics can only be increased by using up a talent/specialisation/something (not entirely sure, given that my book is still en route to me). Making it any less than that seems to diminish the value of increasing characteristics, and also makes every Human too similar, every Rodian too similar, etc., at least in terms of one statistical area.