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.