Character Creation

Unlike other games, you don't need proficiency to use a weapon. Anyone can use any weapon; you're just better at it if you have some skill levels. But agility (and/or brawn) is just as important.

I had one of my players go very light when spending XP on Skills and instead spent as much as he could in kicking up his Characteristics. Doesn't roll very many yellow dice during skill checks, but does well enough due the 3 or 4 green dice he gets on just about every check.

Yeah I upped both stats and skills but I'm not sure how rolls work so it all seems random to me at the moment. Like, should I wait on spending on talents or are those equally important?

Yeah, it's typically best to put the majority of your XP into characteristics at the start, since they have such a broad use and can't be increased easily after character creation. Also, cooking could be knowledge education, maybe? I don't have the books, but I'd say that was the closest non-custom skill.

Usually you can safely wait on talents until later, unless there's one that you really want. The good thing is that there's no real wrong answer. You can increase any of these things later.

Rolls use custom dice. Green dice (the Ability die) and the superior yellow dice (the proficiency die) are assembled into your die pool based on your characteristics and skill. These dice have custom sides with successes on them that you'll want to roll. Yellow dice have better sides than green dice. So if you were doing a charm check, which is a presence skill, you'd do the following:

1) Look at your presence rank and look at your charm rank.
2) take the higher of those two numbers and pick up that many green (ability) dice.
3) look at the lower of those two numbers and convert that number of green (ability) dice into yellow (proficiency) dice.

So a 3 presence, 1 charm would be 2 green dice and 1 yellow, because I'd pick up 3 green and convert one to yellow. What Marithyme was saying is that your skill is just as important because a 1 Presence and 3 Charm would give you the exact same die pool.

I'll look it over when I get home in a couple minutes! :)

Sorry, that took longer than I thought. So if I'm reading this right, you picked Charm, Leadership, Negotiation, Streetwise as your free Rank for your Career skills and then Charm and Deception for your free Rank for Specialization skills. So that's 60 XP into characteristics, 30 points to bump Leadership, Negotiation and Streetwise to Rank 2, and 10 into Talents.

So, first off... Big disclaimer: There's nothing wrong with the character as it is now. I can give notes or alternatives, but they aren't better or worse than what you've got now. And really, since you just spend XP on whatever you want, whenever you have it, nothing at character creation is some permanent hindrance that'll haunt you while you play, or anything.

Secondly, let me explain Duty. So, in Age of Rebellion we have this resource of sorts called Duty. We pick how we define it, whether we see our Duty to the rebellion as winning battles or as recruiting new soldiers, et cetera, but it all has the same purpose. Every Duty has a magnitude ranging from 1-100. Your starting amount is determined by the number of PCs in the game. According to the book, with 4 PCs, we start with 10 Duty. We kind of combine our magnitudes to make a dice chart. So if we each have 10 Duty, the chart might look like:

Moofsalot - 1-10
MoMo - 11-20
Marithyme - 21-30
Mcneils5 - 31-40
Nothing - 41-100

At the beginning of every "session," however szemely chooses to define a session, a 1d100 is rolled. If it lands on Nothing, then surprise! Nothing happens. But if it lands on one of our Duty ranges, then some nifty stuff happens. Some story elements might unfold specific to our group or character (depending on whose was rolled), or something might positively affect our mission, and we get some benefits. The person whose Duty was rolled gains +2 Wound Threshold and everyone else gains +1 Wound Threshold. If the result was doubles (11, 22, 33, etc.) then those benefits are doubled (+4 and +2, respectively).

Additionally, we gain Duty as we complete missions. When our group total reaches 100, we get a prize, and it resets back to 0.

So Duty is a good thing! A very good thing. Because it's a good thing, you can choose to lessen how much Duty you start with in order to get some benefits at character creation. szemely posted this earlier, but you can do a couple things with it at character creation:

+5 XP - Lose 5 Duty
+1000 Credits - Lose 5 Duty
+10 XP - Lose 10 Duty
+2500 Credits - Lose 10 Duty

The only restrictions is you can't start with negative Duty, so you only have 10 to spend, and you can't choose any single option more than once. But you could, for instance, spend 10 Duty to get +5 XP and +1000 Credits. Since we aren't tied to the Rebellion yet and may not have some sense of contribution to the cause (but really because I love XP), I took the +10 XP for 10 less Duty.

Next, as far as your items, you get 500 credits, plus anything extra from spending Duty. Some armor, even if it's just Heavy Clothing, is good, as is a blaster of some kind. Beyond that just look through the book and grab what you think looks neat. Only restrictions are that you can't start with anything that has an (R) next to the price (without GM permission), and szemely said only rarity 4 items or lower.

After spending your credits, you will roll 1d100 and add that to your starting credits.

I'll post this and then offer some notes on the character...

Well done, MoMo, thanks a bunch for this. One point I wanted to touch on though is...
If I understand the rules correctly, XP can only be spent on Characteristics during character creation, so you will not be able to increase them via XP once we get rolling.

That's right; I shouldn't have said "whatever, whenever." But you can eventually raise your characteristics, too. It's just a lot harder to do so after character creation.

Character is submitted - allow me to introduce C6-9K aka The Iron Chef! He was once a simple catering unit but has now seen the evil of the Empire and has sworn to overthrow their tyranny (there may have been some re-programing by a rebel cell somewhere along the way) and uses his new skill set to bake up a different surprise for the imperial scum!!!!

I've shared the character if anyone fancies a look over him - C6-9K

Also I've not spent any duty so I'll be starting with the full 10

So, when making a character in this system, the game even recommends that you invest a lot of your starting XP into your 6 characteristics. After character creation, you cannot increase these with XP. At the end of every specialization talent tree is a talent called Dedication, which gives you 1 point to put into one characteristic. Getting Dedication (by spending a lot of XP to get to the end of a talent tree and then purchase it) is the only way to improve your characteristics after character creation.

Characteristics are more expensive, but they do the same as skills except they apply to a broad range of skill checks, instead of one. Additionally, some of them have innate benefits. Brawn increases your Soak (damage reduction), affects your carrying capacity and Wound Threshold, and Willpower affects your Strain threshold. Increasing Brawn or Willpower after character creation (by taking the Dedication talent) does not increase your Wound or Strain Thresholds.

So with your starting XP you basically distribute it between your characteristics, skills and talents. Right now it looks like you spread it around pretty evenly, so you'll be really good at your Rank 2 skills, and your social talents will help you out a lot there, too. You'll probably have a hard time with most Brawn-based skill checks. Normally when I make a character I'll forgo putting extra XP into skills or talents and I'll put everything into characteristics. It tends to work out really well that way, since I can invest my XP into the cheaper talents and skills later on during play. This time, of my 120 XP, I put 90 into characteristics and the rest into talents.

Hmm.. I feel like I haven't really said anything useful in all of this. It's hard to give notes when there isn't really a wrong answer! Some alternatives you could think about would be to start off with a 4 Presence, but don't put any XP into upping skills to Rank 2 yet. You could move around 20 XP to raise your Brawn to a 2, which would help a few of your stats.

Oh! Since you'll be social, you should know that Discipline (and thus the Willpower characteristic) is used for sorting truth from lies when people lie to you (and resisting being persuaded by those lies).

I hope any of this was helpful!

This made me think of one of my players, who had a Trandoshan named Balkk. Balkk got killed, and so he made a droid named B4-LK afterward. We took his little Trandoshan miniature and wrapped it in aluminum foil.

Crazy robot with kitchen knives...

This is terrifying to me!

Yeah- I was leaning towards upping some more characteristics and dropping some talents. Lemme see where the numbers fall.

I generally go for spending just over half my starting XP on stats

I've submitted my guy and put him in the library. I'll wait until others have taken from the cache and then grab anything else I could use (sidearm, other binders, grenade, more stimpacks). Only if they aren't taken already, though. I've got what I absolutely need. :)

Mine's up too: Ishala Marh