That Blasted Samophlange said:

An interseting notion, and I'm starting to side a bit more with your original post that FFG had a pretty good means of controlling rampant speciazliation purchasing with the system they had originally (max of 3 specs plus the permanent/non-perm talents).  Granted, there was a bit more bookwork involved in tracking which talents were permanent and which ones weren't, but there's bookwork involved already just from tracking which row you purchased certain talents from.

As for making a talent permanent, one simple method would be to add a 5XP kicker to the cost of the talent when it's purchased.  This enables the player to say "no matter what else happens, this talent is a key feature of my character."

I am also concerned about power creep, but I am not that concerned about characters eventually becoming masters of everything.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine a group that plays one session every week. Let's assume that each session results in an average of 15 experience points. That might be a little bit conservative, but I think it is a reasonable number to work with.

After one year, a character in this campaign would have earned 780 experience points.

If one player loves specializations and wants to get all the specializations for three careers, then that would cost 440 experience points for nine total specializations (2nd is 20, 3rd is 30, and so on).

That leaves 340 points for talents. The minimum number of experience points needed to get a top tier talent is 75, and that is only following one line straight down a tree. So, at best, a character like this could have four top tier talents in the nine specializations after a year.

The character would also only have a handful of points in skills, so I think this would be a pretty extreme example.

The bottom line is that choosing to have many specializations would completely hamstring talent choices. I think most players would want to have fewer specializations and more top tier talents within those specializations. If someone wanted every talent in one specialization, then that would be a minimum of 300 points! I figure that is at least twenty good gaming sessions.

I am aware that some people have massive multi-year campaigns, and that is completely awesome. However, when it would require two or three years of regular gaming to really start to fill in several talent trees, I just don't see a serious problem with having unlimited specializations.

In almost every case that I can imagine, a player would do much better focusing on two or three specializations, appropriate talents, and skills.

I think that getting rid of the complications involved in tracking permanent talents and dropping specializations is a perfectly reasonable design decision.

My math was a little bit wrong, but I don't think it changes the point.

I should have added 70 more points to the total cost of nine specializations because seven of those specializations will be non-career.

So, the total number of points for nine specializations should be 510 experience points. This means that the player would have even fewer points for talents and skills.

I suppose that someone who played the same character for ten years could start to master many of the specializations, but that would be an extraordinary example.

In most campaigns, moving beyond two or three specializations would severely restrict points for talents and skills. I assume that most people would like to move towards at least some of the top tier talents and have a reasonably balanced set of skills.

In my opinion, this rule change primarily simplified the tedious tracking of dropped specializations and permanent talents.

Simple is not necessarily better, but I think that this change is an improvement.

Actually, a couple weeks ago I and some friends did a few high-level (characters had their starting XP budget plus an extra 250 XP) system stress tests, and the following showed up amongst the four sample PCs:

The Wookiee Death Machine (Hired Gun/Marauder) didn't buy an additional specializations, but rather focused entirely on the Marauder tree, and given he also raised a few of his skills (including some non-career ones), he still hadn't purchased every talent in his starting specialization.  Something of a one-trick pony, as he was really good at smashing things, but not much else beyond that.

The Twi'lek femme fatale (Bounty Hunter/Assassin) bought the Gadgeteer specialization, but didn't get much past mid-level in the two of them, trading focus for versatility, being fairly adept at combat, social interaction, and investigation/tracking.

The Human brash rogue (Smuggler/Scoundrel) bought the Pilot specialization mostly to buff up his piloting ability, but didn't go much into the talents (just the Row 1 talents), and somewhat foolishly devoted XP to buying the non-career Lightsaber skill (bought at the pre-Week 7 Update rate of new rank x 10).

The Human Minor Jedi (Smuggler/Scoundrel/Jedi Initiate*) only had a couple of Scoundrel talents, but spent most of his XP on Force Powers (Sense and Move) as well as Jedi talents, and still wasn't able to to buy all the Force Upgrades he'd have liked, and roughly a third of the Jedi Initiate talents (providing a lightsaber, some defensive abilities with said weapon, and the Force Rating talent).

Nobody went past two specializations, even with all that XP, and only one character came close to filling out a specialization tree, and even he didn't manage it.  With non-career skills (one of the biggest reasons to buy additional specializations) being reset to their original cost, I think the draw to purchase a bunch of specializations has been reduced quite a bit, and that's before factoring in the increased cost of even buying a career specialization.

So from all this, the need to have "unlimited" specializations doesn't really seem to be necessary, as most PCs will be spending quite some time, even at MetalJedi's proposed "15 XP per week" rate, just purchasing the talents from their initial specializations, so we're probably only looking at certain character types needing to have more than two additional specializations.

*this is a home-brewed Force-Sensitive Specialization I came up with as a means of providing a "Jedi trainee" character but not going full-blown Jedi Knight in the process.

That Blasted Samophlange said:

borithan said:

Well, there's always the seemingly novel idea of retiring that character, as they've probably accomplished everything they'd set out to accomplish during that point in terms of story.  Completely filling out just three talent trees is hundreds and hundreds of XP, to say nothing of increasing your skills.  And even the rate of 15 XP per week, that's still going to take a long time (probably a couple of years), and longer still if not accumulating XP at that rate.

And truthfully, how many campaigns really last more than three years with the exact same characters?

That Blasted Samophlange said:

This sounds great… from a certain point of view. After having read through the rules and chatted about it on the forums, I would have agreed.

However, when we actually sat down to play, both myself and my players found it pretty cumbersome. Generating and spending 7 advantage on a single successful roll is fun. Generating 3-4 advantage on several rolls across a single combat, especially when most of those rolls are failures (drastically cutting back the options for what you can spend the advantage on) turns into a bit of a chore, and really slows down the flow of the game.

I really like this game, and about 90% of how it works in play… I just want that other 10% to be smoothed out a bit, so it isn't so jarring in play.

I've been tossing around the idea of limiting the use of Threats/Advantages to one per turn, so if you get 4, you can spend up to 4 advantage, while the others go to waste. Might speed things up a bit. Honestly, I found running combat to be very smooth, quick, and cinematic. As far as I could tell, nobody had many questions regarding positioning and my players had very little trouble spending advantage or threats during combat. I was at a loss for how to spend them sometimes out of combat, but in combat things went very smoothly.

beeblebrox said:

That was my experience too - when the PCs hit (succeeded). However, when they fail (miss), they can't activate critical hits or most weapon qualities, which drastically cuts down the options for spending advantage in combat, and (at least in my game) resulted in them trying to figure out how best to spend that 4 advantage, which usually was spent activating 2-3 things which cost 1-2 advantage each… that slowed things down a fair bit in our game.

gribble said:

This pretty much says it.  It's one thing to sit back and tell people "Oh yeah, you just need to get used to it", but another to do that in the face of play experience where players and GMs have said "This is a problem".  

If you haven't played the game (And I'm not saying you haven't, I don't know), then it's very difficult to have a feel for how the game plays, and therefore it is difficult to make informed judgments, either quantitative or qualitative, about these issues.  For example, a lot of posters here have gotten up my ass for wanting to change the dice because of the the math I've produced to illustrate the problems I see with mechanics.  However, they skip over reading the following fact:

I did the math in response to seeing problems at the game table!

Players were missing a lot more than we felt they "should" given their attributes and skills, even on simple tasks.  We kept getting "weird" results from dice rolls.  I did not go looking for theoretical problems with the dice math, I found real, tangible, empirical problems with the dice and set out to understand why it was happening to better understand how to fix it.  Unfortunately, because of what the math says, I don't think there is a way to fix it appropriately without redesigning them.

As far as your comment about the devs "caving to pressure" on the Spec limit, there were real design issues that necessitated a change in how specs worked.  In short, there were some major meta-gaming issues and very awkward record keeping that would have occurred if they hadn't changed the rules.  I don't think they made the best choice, but I do think they eventually made a good choice that fixed it.

Anyway, the real points here are:

1. Please play the game before you comment on the design.  Preferably, play for upwards of 8 hrs, then re-read the book, cover to cover, THEN play for another 12-16 hrs so you can really see what the devs are trying to do.
2. When you see a problem, either with RAW, patch notes, or recommended fixes, please post facts and examples instead of "I feel its fine like this", or "I don't like that I can't that I can't do this". Show us instead why it is or isn't okay.

alright </Soapbox> enough of that crap.

-WJL

gribble said:

How about disarming the target, or providing yourself a +1 bonus to ranged defense?  Both of those are three advantage, and neither one requires you to successfully hit the target.

Also, don't be afraid to get creative, either as the GM or the player, or to allow things normally outside the pre-set list of suggested options.

The groups I've played in had very little trouble figuring out how to assign any excess Advantages, hit or miss, after the initial combat session, doing things like multiple boost dice or multiple setback dice, as neither of those options say you're limited to only applying one die per target.  Had one combat encounter (fourth combat for the group as a whole) where a player rolled 6 Advantages, then spent them for +1 ranged defense (she did not want to get shot), and then a boost die for the next two PCs to act, all of which took her less than 10 seconds to figure out how to spend them.  In an earlier combat, one PC spent his 4 Advantage to provide the bounty hunter PC a total of 4 boost dice, which enabled her to score one doozy of a critical hit on the enemy bounty hunter that was sniping at them, and it only took him a few seconds to figure out how to spend those Advantages, even though he did manage a basic success with his light blaster pistol (figuring she'd do more damage with her heavy blaster pistol than he could manage even with a possible critical hit).

gribble said:

Hmm.  In the games I've run - it hasn't been an issue.  Maybe I've got an abundance of creative players.  They also took to the system like fish to water.

This is also mitigated by the fact that a combat encounter is generally FAST.  Unlike a d20 system, where it can slog on for 10 rounds - most foes are DOWN in one or two hits.

GM Chris said:

This.  Oh so very much this.  Having played an EotE game on a Friday night and then a Saga Edition game the following Sunday, the difference was night and day.  We managed to get a whole lot done in EotE in only a few hours, with an extended combat that took about a third of the session, with only one PC (mine) being specifically geared for combat, while the Saga Edition game was a single combat that took over 2/3rds of the session to resolve, and we're 6th level characters, all but one of whom are pretty combat-capable.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Both of these options were used, then generally bypassed in favour of other options. Adding +3 [boost] to the next PCs attack (or better yet, spreading it around) was generally considered better by the players, and spending the time to consider and allocate those slowed things down.

We did have some "creative" uses of advantage as well, but it's hard to be doing that continuously for a long fight…