Fancy Paint Job

Upgrade all Charm, Deception, and Negotiation checks made in the presence of the Signature Vehicle once.

Signature Vehicle

Choose one starship or vehicle with a silhouette of 3 or lower as a Signature Vehicle. Upgrade all Mechanic checks made on that vehicle.

Do they mean upgrade one dice of the pool for those skills? - Most likely.

Do they mean upgrade all dice? - Unlikely.

Is there somewhere a clear definition for "upgrade xy skill" which I just have overlooked?

I am somehow a little irritated about this, same formulation for true aim, etc

Upgrade all XYZ checks = Upgrade any XYZ checks.

Check out the actual rules for the talents. Chapter IV in the Core Rulebooks, or right after the specializations/talent trees in the suppliments. The talents allow you to upgrade the ability (the rules for which are in Chapter I of the CRB*). I think any talents that deal with upgrade either upgrade checks "once," or "once per rank," depending on whether they are ranked or not. But you can make sure of the effects by looking up the full text of the talent in the talent listings.

*Quick clarification, just in case it is unclear: when you upgrade your ability, you don't "upgrade a die," you upgrade the ability, which happens after you take skills and characteristics into account. Each time you upgrade the ability, you change a single green Ability die to a yellow Proficiency die. If there are no green Ability dice, then upgrading the ability adds a green die instead.

Thank you. So it is the ability itself that gets one additional rank.

"Upgrading the ability" is akin to "upgrading the difficulty." It might be worth a quick perusal of the Upgrading rules in chapter I.

So, it is upgrading dice.

Thanks.

This certainly is the first RPG which use no unique keywords to describe its mechanics.

In the Skills Chapter's intro they call characteristics abilities, in chapter one it seems that they use ability for your ability dice pool and in the talents sections you upgrade your skill checks instead of your ability dice (pool).

Can we start a donation page for FFG, I really would like them to hire another editor and I am willing to pay some money for that. ;-)

Ha ha, yeah my thought when reading the rulebook for the first time was that they seemed to take a pretty lax approach on terminology. I've gotten comfortable with the rules though; the game really lends itself to "GMing by gut."

I like it a lot, because now most of my rules calls are a case of, "That feels about right," compared to how it was when I was running previous systems ("Gosh, I hope I got it right!").

There is plenty of consistency in the ruleset, if you know how/where to look for it, and most implements and effects do have actual names. But it seems like this game is somehow set up to be way more accessible to first-time roleplayers (who pick it up incredibly fast, at least in my experience). Seasoned gamers, on the other hand, seem to keep looking for analogs to games they've previously played ("classes," "races," "dual-wielding," "ability scores," etc) and can tend to miss or gloss over rather important distinctions in the rulebook, which is of course a pretty dense read