OOC Character Creation Thread

The Masters... as you must call them... are cruel and uncaring. And most of your fellow Learners are too. You have seen several die, with your own eyes, as a result of this cruelty, and many more have just disappeared when seemingly no one is looking.

You've got to get out of here!

You know that you are out in the middle of the vast wastes of Moraband, somewhere. And there is a Commerce Guild city and space-port, somewhere beyond. Maybe a handful of mining and manufacturing communities too. But how could you ever reach them? And The Masters have taken your personal documents, so would you be able to even get off planet if you did?

Oh well... those are problems for later.

Right now, you at least know you've found two other like-minded friends, and if the three of you stick together, maybe you'll live long enough to try to address those problems.

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Hey everybody, here we are! Let's make characters!

As described, you're creating Force users who, for one reason or another (you decide), have found yourselves at some sort of Sith Academy. More will be revealed about this, of course, in play.

You may use material from Force & Destiny ONLY (sorry, keeping it simple) for character creation, following default character creation rules, with the following exceptions:

1. No character may raise any Characteristic above 4 in character creation.

2. Please use your starting creds to buy starting gear as per normal. HOWEVER, you will not begin play with these items in your possession. You MAY be given access to them for "special missions". But usually, it is all going to be locked up somewhere on-site of the location we begin at. Instead, everyone will begin play with just an Ancient Sword and EITHER Concealing Robes or Heavy Robes, your choice.

Let me know if you have any questions, and please feel free to discuss your characters - with me or the others - below!

Hey gang, Rean asked me some (more) excellent questions via PM before I got the character creation thread up, and so I'm going to copy pasta then here in case anyone else is wondering the same things!
I'm fine with that. It's mostly that your character would not be here in the first place if they weren't Force sensitive, hence the requirement. I will mention though that, at least at this time, this is conceived of as a limited-run campaign, and so I wouldn't recommend pursuing any "long game"-type builds.
Yea, no Knight Level. The way I tend to run this system in PbP is that you earn 10 XP at the first of every month. And you MAY (or may not) earn additional "mission related" XP on top of that. This plays out as a target progression-rate of ~150+ earned XP per year. As this is a short-run campaign, we may be accelerated a bit above that (bearing in mind, I do not anticipate this campaign going a full year).
No, sorry.

Hello @Rean411,@Pedrop

Vespin reached out to me in PM to say that, once they saw the premise of the game that they were no longer interested in playing.

So in case you guys had similar concerns, I wanted to talk about it a bit more.

I told Vespin what I'm about to tell you, but the point of the premise of the game is not to focus on the Sith, nor the Dark Side, nor any sort of torment or struggle your characters might have between Dark and Light.

The point of this premise was just to give us a high stakes, action packed starting point for a one-off game focused on Force users, and the escape from the clutches of the Sith, where escape wouldn't be easy (or at least, not as easy as just running off into the night) and would require all sorts of skill sets.

I extended the explanation to Vespin but haven't heard back as to if that changes anything for them, but if not, in my experience the game still works fine with just two players and so I think we press on IF you two want to.

Would you want to?

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about the game or what kind of characters you should make?

Everything is good for me. Reading your descriptions I also had this "high stakes" feeling - and that is what I expect from Star wars game. Could it be better beginning for force users other then escaping sith school? I don't know of any :)

So: all good for me from what I've read so far. I'm willing to go even in two:)

Any advice what character I should make is more then welcome :)

Shouldn't we bump the recruiting thread to check if anyone new is interested?

Also I'm willing to play some good pre gen character to make things faster if you have any good ones ready and especially good for this sceneerio?

A big part of the point of this game for me, and why I chose to "come out of retirement" to run it, was so that you guys could learn/experience the system.

I'm thinking that the three of you said in Rean's initial interest check that you all had limited to no experience, right?

I know Rean has since gotten in on a game elsewhere, but they were still interested in this so...

Anyway, I love this system, I want ppl who want to know how to play it to know how to play it.

And a big part of that is character creation, imo.

So I think we do the work, take the time, to create our own characters.

RE: advice on what character you should make.

I would advise you first just pick a Characteristic that governs the Skills that interest you in seeing how they play. So take a look at the Skill list and say, "I want a character that can do this and this and this and that." Then pick a Species that interests you from F&D, raise the previously mentioned Characteristic to 4. And then just do the rest of Character Creation, picking a Career/Spec that probably relates to the Skills you liked, bump some other Characteristic(s) up if you want, distribute your Skill points, buy a Talent or two, and buy a Force Power or two, on your own/making whatever choices sound interesting to you.

I'm gonna hold off on recruiting anyone else until we have a final answer from Vespin. And even then, I think I'd rather just run it with two than go through the hassle of trying to recruit someone else. Unless one of you two know someone who wants in.

Yes! Very good point. I think it will be a lot of fun to create exactly the character I want and will show me the system even more. Thanks for sticking with our initial assumptions! So I will get into it, but I think I will make the character near the end of this week. Would it be ok? Or you want me to make it faster? (I'm a little sick right now, and have still a lot of work - but agreement is agreement:) ).

That's fine, take your time, let me know if you have any questions.

Jumping on here finally: While I have extremely little experience with SWFFG, I know Genesys quite well. I've rewritten much of the core book in my own words while crafting an SRD for myself. However, I do understand that there are some differences here and there between SWFFG and Genesys, and I don't know what all of them are, so someone'll just have to yell at me if I do a Genesys when I should've done a SWFFG.

I'm in another SWFFG game right now, on this website, based on Edge of the Empire. So I'm not 100% a newbie, just 99% of one. :)

I own all three core SWFFG books.

The biggest difference is Force Dice and how the Force works vs. Genesys' Skill-based Magic.

There are other smaller things like Characteristics limits and ofc Specializations/"Skill Trees" and the Vehicular Combat rules, and I'm sure others. But all of that is at least still the same "chassis".

The Force is completely different.

Confusing at times/in places. But very Force-like, and does a good job at capturing the feel of the Star Wars media.

[EDIT: also, glad to have you here Vespin, and glad you were able to get in on a game, elsewhere as well. I wish more ppl played this system, so it's always exciting to me to hear ppl are playing it.]

I can't speak much to SWFFG, but I have a soft spot for Genesys. There are things I don't like about the system, but I always seem to come back to it. It was the first system I bought in my renewed quest to get back into TRPGs. I'd walked away back in 2010 or so, and bought a few titles now and then afterward, but only out of a mild curiosity. However, last year I decided I wanted to truly try and get back into the hobby again, and Genesys was the gateway for me. Despite attempts to find other universal systems I liked more, my nose would always end up back in a Genesys book. (BESM 4E has been the most serious challenger so far, not for the anime, but for its Tri-Stat system.)

I'm very much looking forward to Twilight Imperium. I own every product ever released for Genesys (the universal rules, not Star Wars or Legend of the Five Rings).

I really like Genesys too. I go back and forth between whether or not I like Specialization Trees. Without them I've found that characters can get much more powerful much quicker, which... can be good (no "trap" Talents, no Talent "tax") and/or bad (power boat). Bad, particularly, if you're trying to run a longer campaign/story.

Aside from that, basically every other change that I can think of was a great improvement upon FFG SWRPG. The Skill-based Magic borders on being too flexible, imo, and so, too powerful, but what that means in play is that if you have magic in your setting you just end up with nearly every character having some type of magic, which isn't necessarily bad so long as that's appropriately thematic to your setting.

Your experience with Genesys should serve you well in this system, in just the roll-to-roll result interpretation, and the uses of the meta-currency (Destiny in swrpg = Story Points in Genesys), etc.

I am definitely still interested. It will be a little bit for me to make another character just because I just finished building a 1000xp for ce user for a different campaign and that was a lot. But I’ll whip up a character soon.

Last big question for me is, for character creation are we limited to species from the F&D books or is species one of those more open options? Only asking cause I’m not sure where all the species are from.

F&D only please.

The FFG SWRPG wiki I linked in the OOC Resource thread has this type of information. They are as follows:

Cereans, Humans, Kel Dor, Mirialans, Nautolans, Togrutans, Twi'Lek, and Zabraks

https://star-wars-rpg-ffg.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Force_and_Destiny

If you're using a website or app to create characters it may have the option of limiting what books are useable (or at least I know oggdude's does). Otherwise, in that wiki, for Gear and stuff, they should have flags or categories that tell you what book a given reference page is from.

And, yea, dropping a new player in at a 1,000 XP character is an absolutely horrible idea, imo. That's like playing a 15th level character for your first D&D game. Too much.

Only 15th level? I did some calculations today using Genesys, and I'd say a 1000 XP character is pretty maxed out - at least in Genesys. I mean, assuming nothing was spent on characteristics, we're looking at 8 maxed career skills, a species/archetype ability, 20 talents (two of them tier 5), two non-career skills maxed out, and another skill point somewhere. It would take about 50 weeks of weekly 3-5 hour sessions to reach that point. Is that character not ready to retire? lol

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that the XP cost of talents in Genesys should probably be increased, with perhaps a separate buying system for characteristics. 20 talents is rather ridiculous, though 15 would be the minimum to get a tier 5 talent. (Even 15 seems a bit much.)

Agreed, I've never heard of anything played close to 1000 XP in Genesys. 600 even seems rare from what I remember.

But I've seen a number of 1,200 XP games in the SWRPG.

On the old FFG forums, I think I even saw ppl talk about 2,000 XP a couple times. But I can't imagine such a game being much fun really as the dice pools being thrown would just be so ridiculous.