Just started playing this game and really enjoying the system so far (3 sessions in).
Anywho, I started the game and gave the players the ability to xp up 5k and have an extra couple of life points to play with. It is probably a lot and that’s fair, it’s honestly just a way for our group to have some strong characters to begin with and allow us to see how it all flexes.
The issue I see is where I’ve got someone hyper focussed on something (hacking in this case but it’s really applicable to any skill) so they’ve got expertise up to 5, focus up to 2 and ability score of 14 which means that the character passes all hacking skill checks on a 19 or lower.
Now I get I can do things to make that skill useless (like don’t let them use the hacking skill) but is there a way to deal with this other than just increasing the difficulty of the checks?
That starts the PCs out as superheroes regarding their core competency.
Infinity PCs are VERY competent even if created without any extra XP and extra Life Points.
And if you hand out XP as per the recommendation in the core rules, they will raise to a few thousand XP in a very short time and become as competent as anime superheroes, very, very, VERY hard to challenge at all.
This is the power creep most Infinity GMs know and try to remedy using house rules.
I would recommend starting a group of PCs at the competency given by the core rules as written, not handing out any starting XP bonus and especially not any additional Life Points, as those could lead to so vastly overpowered starting characters that are extremely hard to handle from the start of the campaign.
Considering that a PC will earn about 100 XP per hour of time played in a session, that would be about 400 XP in a 4 hour session, if all the time was actual play time, not eating, chatting about OT things etc.
You awarded them 5000 XP, that is the equivalent of 50 hours play time, so about 12 to 13 sessions experience gathered. If you calculate it that way, you see why your PCs are so insanely powerful. You wrote you have played 3 actual sessions, plus the 12 “virtual” sessions of free XP, that amounts to XP gain worth of 15 sessions, that is nearly 4 months of weekly play. Usually, the published short Infinity campaigns like The Cost of Greed or Quantronic Heat will be completed in that number of sessions.
So so see what kind of strong power-up your PCs got out of that.
Still, I would talk to the players and restart the group at “normal” 0 XP abilities right out of character creation (and disallow the most overpowered augmentations and LHosts also).
Honestly when I was setting the thing up I was thinking it was going to be a short campaign just to get used to the rules more than anything.
My group is one to hyper focus on things and is prone to be flagged as power gamers more than anything which was why I gave them so much xp. The aim has always been to have them restart but wanted to get a feel for the system to begin with.
I haven’t really run any combat yet but I’m planning on a combat scene pretty soon. I guess we’ll see how super focussed they are then.
I’d like to take up the topic. My player’s characters are quite strong in the areas they’re operating and I’m having a hard time giving them a challenge.
For example, one of my players plays a hacker with INT 14 and a hacking skill of 5. With a neural hacket socket, she always has 3d20 available for any test, so even if I demand a difficulty 5 test, she only has to spend 2 Momentum and the chances are still very good that she still manages to chew through every cyber security system. And she hasn’t even branched out her talents yet
What are you guys doing to make the obstacles a bit more challenging?
You may also assume that the hacking roll will be successful. The player will be happy but the GM put challenge elsewhere like the hacking needs to be an inside job on a closed network and the hacker has to do an infiltration first. Even an interview for a job can be fun ti do. I’m sure that your hacker isn’t the party face.
Increasing the complication range works well too. The more dices are rolled the more interesting things could become…
Increasing the complication range really seems to be one way of making things a bit harder, but I can’t over-use this method. The idea to link the hacking to something else is also useful. Although the party hacker also is quite good in social situations (Personality 11 + Persuade 3).
The goal of increasing the complication range is to increase tension, power creeps roll plenty of dices confident on their skills, increasing the difficulty doesn’t help, increasing the complication range mean that even a success can be a complication too and make them wonder if buying dices worth the risk. I used it with parsimony but it works well. And of course you have thought about if ahead of time, it’s written in your scenario with the consequences of a complication so you don’t have to spend threat for it, Some times I spend threat on the spot to increase complication range but it’s more rare, most of the time it’s a consequence for a nat 20 that had made things harder. I’s also a way to gain threat if you need some more.
Making unfamiliar rolls is a way to make things interesting for power creeps, from time to time make them talk their way out with children, make them survive in the wilds and avoid being lost and that includes climbing trees, pilot something archaic, be creative and fun.
And just in case your power creeps doesn’t worry about threat level, Reinforcements and Reversal of Fortune is a very effective way to spend Threat and make them think more on next game.
