Rank Jumping
Beginning characters in Dark Heresy are assumed to begin their duty with the Inquisition at Rank 1 (400XP) for their career. However, some individuals progress faster then others due to certain special circumstances, be it family, wealth, connections or just simple luck of being at the right place at the right time. When these circumstances arise an Acolyte can circumvent the normal rules regarding rank and spent XP and progress on to the next Rank as an Elite Advance. This advance costs 200XP and from then on the Acolyte is treated as if he was of the next Rank for purposes of Skills and Talents available for Character Advancement. Any Skill or Talent for the Rank the Acolyte jumped is still available but as Elite Advances, costing additional 50XPs. All Prerequisites for Skills and Talents must still be met as normal. In other words, the Rank the Acolyte has Jumped to is treated as an Alternate Career Rank as presented on page 52 of The Inquisitor’s Handbook.

There is no limit to the number of Ranks a character can jump, provided the GM approves of the jumps taken. Rank Jumping follows all other rules for Elite Advances as presented on page 43 of Dark Heresy and page 53 of The Inquisitor’s Handbook.

Assuming this doesn't change further rank progression (you still need 1000xp spent to earn rank 3, for example) then sure, it should be easy enough to implement. I am wondering what circumstances brought this rule into being, though. If the character is after a specific advance it might be easier to provide them with an elite advance or background package. If you jump more than one rank ahead you suddenly find yourself in the position of paying a great deal more XP to pick up the basic advances for your class.

The circumstance is twofold.

1) wanting advances available later at a earlier time.

2) the fact that the ranks have names and that to me these names reflect postition as well as skill grade. It is not unreasonable for Joe Noble to just have a rank of Sergeant given to him at an earlier time then he would normally earn it. We all know people who are in a higher position at work and know nothing of their jobs and so forth.

For the former I'd go the way of straight up elite advances. For the latter, though, it works. A noble born guardsman might become an officer immediately and gain access to special training entitled by his rank but he wouldn't have learned anywhere near as much as a veteran soldier who'd earned a promotion.

Snidesworth said:

My problem with Elite Advances is that they seem so unstructured. Its purely GMs whim. I can charge you 25XP or 250XP if i feel like it, and then charge the next guy for the exact same advance 1000XP cause I dont like him.

There needs to be more balanced mechanics. Like the cost is equal to the price it has at the rank it is available at plus 25XP per each rank differnce or something.

I mean I generally ignore all of that stuff anyway, if I think a player should have a skill they want, then have at it. I dont know, I think Im dismayed at the fact that in the end its still a level/class system, despite it looking very pretty.

Again, its a solvable problem with packaged deals and alternate career ranks and elite advance packages for campaigns (such as the one in Tattered Fates). But more official ones would be nice, or rules to create your own that arent just assumption and guess work.

IH suggests the price for a rank jumped skill is original price +50xp. so thats a good guideline.

i mean the real extra price is for the charcter to somehow justify that the get it. funded training and otherwise.

Of course, if you're mainly just wanting to give people a title, you could just do that, without any game mechanical change.

Cardinalsin said:

In general I do agree with you. It is simple to just give title and rank to people, in a game I ran last summer two of the PCs were Tranch War Veterans, both Rank 1 Guardsmen. But in the backgroudn the two PCs concocted it was decided that one of them was the Squad Sergeant and the other one of the his troopers.

It didnt really change much overall, but it was good fluff.

However, Im always put off by any system that uses titles and names to imply what a certain rank is and does (or level for that matter) and in general disdain class and level systems (be they called Class and Level or Career and Rank or OCC and Level or RCC and Level or whatever). I find them to be very shoe horned and restrictive overall. What I am trying to do with the above addendum rule is to create a more flexible rank structure and advancement system that would allow PCs to attain faster position and "ranks" without having to take the entire character generation and advancement system back to formula.

I like Dark Heresy overall, I hope some of the modified rules from Rogue Trader expand on character generation and experience enough to fix the flaws that usually haunt me. These are flaws that are not inherit in any of the stats provided for any creater, person or encounter in any of the books so far. It is only a flam, IMHO for PCs using the Rank/Career system.

I want to fix these flaws in such a way that the new rules could easily be printed out and pasted over a picture in the rule book (or even better, revised in a future edition) to open chargen/advancement into a more open system.

The idea I had to create a freer system of character generation and advancement was to use multiple 'paths' that players can pick and choose from.

So you would have talent paths and skill paths and basic stat upgrades. You could take any number of paths to create a very spread out character or specialise in one area.

There would be a Pysker and a Tech Priest path, which would give the players the relevant traits for them. These would have to be selected at character creation to maintain the background of 40k.

Other talent paths could be gunfighter, marksman, close combat specialist, Explosives expert, Fanatic, Vechile commander. Each would focus around the relevant Talents and you could select any from the tree provided you met the specialisation.

Skill paths could be Researcher, Data analyst, sociable, Investigation etc

Youd mix these up to create whatever combo you fancied. A player who has taken the Pysker path and combined it with the close combat specialist will be one scary customer but have no social skills. Or you can equally make a butterfly of social occassions by taking Pysker and Social.

A little similar to WHFRP careers. Not very fleshed out at the moment but when I have time!

Just a few of my thoughts.