Does the reduction of difficulty apply to "bonus career skills" aka your 4 skills u get from specializations? Does the Marshal in my game get the reduction from Ranged Light? Or does it only apply to the Scholars base skills. For that matter if he then specs into another specialization would it apply to the 4 new skills from say... hired gun maurader?

Also I'm pretty sure u can, but a player in my game is convinced you can't get signature abilities outside of your initial class. Aka my Marshal specs into Marauder and gets all the way to the bottom.. can he get Last Man Standing?

Thanks for replies!

No, he can't. You can only get the signature abilities from your initial career. You can buy into any other spec you want, but signature abilities are only for the original career you took at chargen.

Edit: I'm only responding to the sig ability portion of your question. I'm not sure of the answer to your first question.

Can you post the text for Unmatched Expertise, please? I don't know what book it's from so I can't help you without knowing what it says.

As for signature abilities, sonovabith has it right: you can only take the signature abilities of your career. Marauder is a specialization of the Hired Gun career. So if you're a Marshal (I don't even know what class that is, I don't have the new book) as your first specialization, you're a member of whatever career the marshal is a part of. Since it's not in Dangerous Covenants I'm assuming it's not a Hired Gun spec.

Sorry, but no last one standing for your Marshall.

-EF

Unmatched Expertise applies to "career skills".

This means the eight skills designated "career skills" by your career, plus the four skills designated "bonus career skills" you get from any specializations you've picked up.

"Once per game session as an action, the character may spend 2 Destiny Points to reduce the difficulty of all career skill checks he makes by one, to a minimum of Easy for the remainder of the encounter."

There's an upgrade "Superior Reduction", "Once per session while Unmatched Expertise is active, may reduce the difficulty of one non-career skill"

I think Progressions is right, I just wasn't clear if new specializations became official "career skills". Kinda crazy that you can drop the diff of ranged Heavy or even Lightsaber attacks. Other upgrades, allow you to drop the diff by 2, and allow u to make it as low as Simple difficulty. I guess not too much more powerful then some of the other Sig abililites and Colonists needed some lovin, any other thoughts on any of this?

Unmatched Expertise applies to "career skills".

This means the eight skills designated "career skills" by your career, plus the four skills designated "bonus career skills" you get from any specializations you've picked up.

"Once per game session as an action, the character may spend 2 Destiny Points to reduce the difficulty of all career skill checks he makes by one, to a minimum of Easy for the remainder of the encounter."

There's an upgrade "Superior Reduction", "Once per session while Unmatched Expertise is active, may reduce the difficulty of one non-career skill"

I think Progressions is right, I just wasn't clear if new specializations became official "career skills". Kinda crazy that you can drop the diff of ranged Heavy or even Lightsaber attacks. Other upgrades, allow you to drop the diff by 2, and allow u to make it as low as Simple difficulty. I guess not too much more powerful then some of the other Sig abililites and Colonists needed some lovin, any other thoughts on any of this?

Page 93 sas that "[t]hese skills now count as career skills for the character…". As for reducing an attack roll, it does cost an action two destiny points, and is only once per session. Is it powerful? Yes, but that's the point of signature abilities. Be bad-ass at what you're good at.

-EF

I see our Doctor/Scholar with Brawl as a career skill (from Well-Rounded) poking everything to sleep...

Oh good, my brain doesn't feel quite so stupid now, since someone else asked more or less the same thing I did!

Don't feel bad, Desslok, I was thinking the same thing. It's hard to wrap your head around getting something so cool for your Politico character!

Don't feel bad, Desslok, I was thinking the same thing. It's hard to wrap your head around getting something so cool for your Politico character!

What is uncool about Supreme Inspiring Rhetoric? O.o

Don't feel bad, Desslok, I was thinking the same thing. It's hard to wrap your head around getting something so cool for your Politico character!

What is uncool about Supreme Inspiring Rhetoric? O.o

Nothing! But Unmatched Expertise has so much awesome attached to it.

Don't feel bad, Desslok, I was thinking the same thing. It's hard to wrap your head around getting something so cool for your Politico character!

What is uncool about Supreme Inspiring Rhetoric? O.o

Nothing! But Unmatched Expertise has so much awesome attached to it.

We're so good, we don't just make it look easy - it is easy....

The hard part about this game is realizing that "career skills" is the term used for skills you know. It seems like a goofy term when you learn skills (don't have to pay the extra 5xp) from other places than your career, such as from new specs or the Well Rounded talent. In other games, career skills may be referred to as known skills or proficient skills or something like that.

In other games, career skills may be referred to as known skills or proficient skills or something like that.

In games where skills are divided between "ones you can easily acquire and ones that are harder to acquire (via whatever "buying" mechanics the game uses) they generally name the classification after the title they are using to separate character abilities...

Such as "Class", "Career", "Occupation", "School", etc. Thus "Class Skills", Career Skills", "Occupational Skills", "School Skills", etc

This is just a generality though. I have no doubt I'm forgetting a laundry of games that do it differently or even reversed from what I just said...

Finally got my hands on this book. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else, but is there a typo in the Unmatched Expertise tree?

There are two boxes for the "Activation" improvement to the ability, and both say "Activate Unmatched Expertise as a maneuver instead of as an action." Now if they were on opposite sides, it might be understandable, but they're linked and you have to pick up both in order to get to the "Destiny" box.

Is there any point to having this upgrade twice? I'm thinking the second one should say "Activate as an incidental" instead of "Activate as a maneuver" a second time.

EDIT: Upon further reading, this does appear to be a mistake in the text within the tree itself. The more detailed text description on the same page does indicate the second upgrade means it can be activated as an incidental. Carry on, nothing to see here.

Finally got my hands on this book. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else, but is there a typo in the Unmatched Expertise tree?

There are two boxes for the "Activation" improvement to the ability, and both say "Activate Unmatched Expertise as a maneuver instead of as an action." Now if they were on opposite sides, it might be understandable, but they're linked and you have to pick up both in order to get to the "Destiny" box.

Is there any point to having this upgrade twice? I'm thinking the second one should say "Activate as an incidental" instead of "Activate as a maneuver" a second time.

EDIT: Upon further reading, this does appear to be a mistake in the text within the tree itself. The more detailed text description on the same page does indicate the second upgrade means it can be activated as an incidental. Carry on, nothing to see here.

And this is why I feel how FFG name some talents is, for lack of a better word, stupid. If they wanted them to be ranked talents they should've written the short text as something such as "Activate Unmatched Expertise quicker than an Action" then have the long description written as, "The first time you take this talent you activate as a maneuver and the second time as an incidental." As they currently have the talents written, they should've been named two different things. Activation: Maneuver and Activation: Incidental. As it is published, talents with the same name lend themselves to copy/paste errors when writing the book, which is what happened here.

The more they publish the more same named talents will become a headache. I'm going to assume it'll be an issue for FFG, assuming they store all talents in a data base for them to sift through when writing new material. They would need to track talents by title and what tree they belong to. For example: I'm not sure if Activation shows up on more than one tree, but I know Destiny does. Destiny is not a ranked talent. The rule is that you can only take an un-ranked talent once. What happens if you take two signature abilities with Destiny? Can you only take Destiny once, because they have the same name? Can you take it for each tree because they are different talents, you need to read the description to see that they are different? It's confusing and I don't believe they mention that signature ability talents are only applicible to the signature ability trees that they are attached to.

Force Powers are worse, although they almost get a pass because they are Powers, not Talents. Move has Control in the tree three times and each instince of Controll does something different. It's confusing to talk about these upgrades, because they have the same name. One could even argue that you can't take more than one Control upgrade, because you can't take the same named non-ranked talents more than once. But these are Powers, not Talents so I guess it's ok. Just super confusing. I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been more copy/paste errors like this.