I really dont see the RT characters at Rank 1 being equal to Rank 5 DH characters. I would expect a Rank 5 DH character to have more skills and a few of them at +10 or even +20. The only edges a RT character really gets are the increased starting characteristics and a bunch of equipment. But if you a naked Rank 1 RT character off in a pit fight with a naked Rank 5 DH character (or other contest of sorts) I fully expect the DH character to be more versitile and competent.

The one thing I think RT epic fails at is careers, they are just so bland and boring.

The Hobo Hunter said:

One of the biggest problems with DH is the lack of options available to starting characters. You can't really differentiate your character in character creation due to the lack of skill choices. If I was to start a new campaign I'd let my players each an additional 3 skills from their Rank 1 list for free, just to give some depth to their characters.

This problem goes away with experience, as each character starts to develope unique traits, but it's something that should have been considered from the beginning.

I think one of the problems with RT is the universal talents. They are a tempting purchase, but they suck up a lot of xp that could be spent on more interesting abilities that would help define your character. "Knows how to use pistols" isn't as interesting as "is charming, knows forbidden secrets of the warp, can sprint real fast, disable security systems and is jaded".

Peacekeeper_b said:

I'd sort of hope so, in DH you can come up with a fair variety of backgrounds and elite advances for characters, worst comes to worst you can house rule access to other's so there is some 'characterisation' in what a player can do to fit a background story. The biggest hurdle I've found with RT is the backgrounds themselves are very restrictive and for the most part not very interesting or detailed. It'd be much more interesting to have maybe a 3-step background from a world of origin, a selection of background training packages, (which you can vary to suit to maximise your role or give you versitility) and a much more variable equipment load-out, I understand the rudimentary nature of 'why' it is made this way in the book to be new player friendly, but I've never been overly fond of class and level based systems.

macd21 said:

DH background packages say 'sup for Rank 1 differentiation.

Agreed with you on Universal talents though. It makes sense for an ex-guardsman arch-militant to know his way around every gun in the segmentum; it's another thing for a secluded astropath to do the same thing. Universal talents have their place with certain careers and certain characters, but overdoing them to the extinction of 'normal weapons' training was a bad move IMO.

The Hobo Hunter said:

Yeah universal weapon training just add to that vague feeling of blah I get when it comes to Rogue Trader PCs

The only thing that disappointed me in Rogue Trader was the class system. To remedy it I would do several things.

1. Bring all the characters skill level in line with DH. Who says the wealthy and powerful have to be skilled?

2. Make each career sixteen ranks long.

3. Divide each career into two or three branches to create more diversity.

4. Add access to way more skills for each class. There are certain defined roles in a typical player group. Each class should have the ability to meet one of them within reason.

5. Abolish universal skills. They sound good on paper but end up starving the system. Besides they distract from realism not to mention player achievement.

6. Limit the total amount of profit factor and ship points to 50. This means that the players can start out with either transports, destroyers, or frigates. I believe this is necessary in order to let players work for their cruisers. After all what fun is it to start out with the biggest gun in the game at level one?

7. Get rid of advanced untrained skills in character creation and just make them schools. Once again these sound good on paper but when your void born void master doesn't benefit from being raised in space you know something is wrong.

8. Redo starting equipment. I would like my players to start out with less powerful weapons and more ones that beget their status. Surely not every noble knows how to use an ancient plasma pistol?

9. Redo starting skills. There should be a level of customization in choosing your starting skills like in DH.

10. Get rid of the starting acquisition each player gets. I see no reason to increase their power level right at the start. Half the fun in these games is getting the stuff.

My ultimate goal in gaming is to make my players feel like they have accomplished something other than gaining a few pounds from eating potato chips each time we finish a session. Just giving them things in the beginning detracts from this. Call me the devil, but it makes them happy.

I think it works so much better if you just remove the starting skills and talents and make these "careers" alternate career ranks for rank 3 Dark Heresy characters.

Scum, Arbitrator, Guardsman, Adept to Rogue Trader

Arbitrator, Assassin, Guardsman, Adeptus Sorosista (Militant) to Arch Militant

Arbitrator, Scum, Guardsman to Void Master

Cleric, Adeptus Sorosista (Hospitaller) to Missionary

Adept, Adeptus Sorosista (Dialogous) to Seneschal

Tech Priest to Explorator

Imperial Psyker to Astropath Transcendent

Navigator becomes a NPC only career/race or becomes a origin instead of career.

That, of course, assumes everyone who plays RT also plays DH, which is by no means the case.

Some of you say it's just a cop-out, but elite advances work fine.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Personally, I would be interested to see these alternate ranks worked up. I would suggest adding Adept to the list for Void Master as, for some unfathomable reason, Adepts are great pilots. I'd suggest Navigator as an Origin and an alternate rank/elite advance package.

MILLANDSON said:

If you're going to use elite advances extensively why bother with the career path system at all?

LuciusT said:

Career paths are the things that characters train for as a natural extension of who they are... Elite Advances are indicative of everything else that happens to them - extra-curricular activities, the consequences of unusual encounters, and new opportunities. The two are not mutually exclusive, particularly as Elite Advances should come at a greater cost than the easier (but more limited) options within a character's natural advance scheme, though whether that additional cost is in xp, time, or something else is a different matter entirely.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I disagree in that, IMO, any advance a character takes should be a consequence of their activities, encounters and opportunities. Fundamentally, the idea that there are advances you can just take that have no relation to what you are doing is one of my major objections with the career system. Why should a Rank 2 Void Master be able to get Pilot (Spacecraft) +10 if he's spent the entire adventure walking through the Undercity? Why should it be harder for the same Void Master to get Common Lore (Underworld)? It's like the old D&D characters who spend three sessions doing nothing but fighting goblins only to come out of it suddenly being more skilled at picking locks, when they didn't pick a single lock in the whole adventure. It makes no sense.

If you're going to include a mechanic that allows you to get advances because of what you do , it makes no sense at all to me that you can also get advances that have nothing to do with what you've done, just because you created a certain type of character.

LuciusT said:

MichalKP said:

Both examples assume that the experience a character gains is the only thing that benefits them in terms of training and personal advancement. This is true in mechanical terms, certainly, but in regards to the actual background of the game?

A Void Master spends an entire adventure - a period of what, a few weeks? - walking through the undercity, yes... but he's spent years being a pilot and all around master of starships. It's who he is, where the foundations of his training lay, and what he'll be doing the majority of his time. It's easier for him in general to expand his capabilities as a pilot, because that's what he does. Learning something separate from his day-to-day duties requires additional time and effort. It isn't a matter of "oh, I spent 20 minutes fighting feral servitors in the depths of the ruined hives of Cerberus, and gained 200xp for it; I should put that into my servitor-fighting skills" - experience gains aren't divided up like that, and character growth is similarly more a matter of relative familiarity, with the career path being filled with things that the character, by the definition of his career, will be more familiar with and thus more able to improve in.

The things you learn as part of your job are distinct from the things that you learn independently of it; the former are a natural extension of things you have already learnt as part of your job, the latter are not. The characters, during downtime (that is, the time between adventures happening, the time taken to travel from world to world, etc), won't simply be inactive lumps of hypothetical meat - they'll be training and practising and doing their jobs such that advancing in things related to their normal duties is easier than learning things that aren't.

My issue with Elite Advances is the lack of any hard real rules for them. Too much GMs fiat and not enough true balance or examples. If they would have a harder degree of "RULES" for it, then it may be fine, but for now its too random.

For example, they could list rules for prices an elite advance cost if that skill or talent is available at a later Rank for your career, as opposed to a skill or talent never available. A list of suggested feels based on the characteristic of the skill, the rank it is available, whether it is trained or untrained, basic or advances, and so forth. As opposed to taking a skill that is not on your advancement ranks at all.

It seems almost from the first supplement (Inquisitor's Handbook) that the designers (be they FFG or BI at the time) were working their way backwards from the current rules. First with Background Packages and Alternate Career Ranks and Elite Packages and then with Campaign Packages. And when Rogue Trader came out, it was back to a even more basic and generic career system.

At least the careers in Dark Heresy eventually branched into different directions.

I see the argument of "thats they way their training has hard wired their ability to learn" as a really bad and poor excuse, a smoke screen of sorts that doesnt hide the fact that at its heart this is a Level and Class system that limits your character, quite a bit.

You dont get to build the character you want, you get to build a character the way FFG sees you character options.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Horse-pucky.

One, if the void master has spent years as pilot and all around master of a starship shouldn't those skills already be represented on his character sheet rather then be skills he gains during play.

Two, you're assuming a certain play style that includes this nebulous downtime during which the character improves or develops skills they did not have before. Your assuming the existance of these "day to day duties" in which the character improves.

Ultimately, you're hard wiring into the mechanics things that dictate how characters should be played and developed. It's wrong.

LuciusT said:

Are you as good at your job as you will ever be? Is there absolutely no room for further improvement within your chosen field of specialisation?

Tell me at what point you realised that you had utterly fulfilled all your potential within the limited domain of your career...

LuciusT said:

So what, then, do character do during the weeks of travel through the Warp, for example? Do they just sit around and do nothing ? Or don't your characters go anywhere or do anything except engage in adventures; no sleep, no food, no toilet breaks, no travel from place or place or mundane tasks to perform, just non-stop running and fighting and adventurous things!

Quite frankly, assuming that the characters do a variety of mundane things behind-the-scenes is, IMO, a far easier assumption to make than the spontaneous generation of skills from the completion of incidental tasks, which is what you're suggesting. Allowing for months or years of downtime between sessions also allows adequate time for characters to learn any skills they might choose to obtain without those abilities springing fully-formed into the character's repertoire without so much as a pause to think about it, and avoids the common RPG issue of a character going from nothing to rivalling the greatest and most ancient of characters in ability after six weeks of adventuring.

I'm rationalising the system, yes, but I'm entirely comfortable with this rationalisation and the way it works within my games. Just because you've decided not to try, doesn't mean the system can't make sense. If you don't want to make the attempt, because you're fundamentally opposed to something that is superficially a class/level system, that's your problem, not an issue with the system.

First, I freely admit that when my best argument is "horse-pucky" I'm on weak ground...

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Acutally, that's a very good point and one that goes to heart of my objection.

In1996, 1998, 2003 and 2007 I reached a points in my chosen path where my skills equaled or exceeded all that was required of me. I had no further need to improve within my field because my work made no demands on me beyond what I could already do. I changed jobs each of those times in order to find something new that would actually challenge me. Ultimately, I have become self-employed... partly in order to define my own challenges rather than having my growth held back by my career.

So, in my experience, the day to day work of a career does not cause ones skills to advance... at least not beyond a certain point. You become good enough to do what you need to do and no better. In my life, real growth has come from the extraordinary challenges that occurred quite apart from my day to day life.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Actually, I have often seen games that are non-stop running and fighting and adventurous things. I've quite enjoyed them. That said, of course, during "down time" characters do things...

I'm actually a big fan of a game called Ars Magica, which has a large part of it's advancement and play rules dedicated to so called "down time." Within those rules characters define their main activity over a period of 3 months and gain xp based on those activities. They gain very little xp for "day to day" work (which most characters must spend half the year doing), gaining 2-10 times as much for truly dedicated study and practice. Even then (because of a pyramidal advancement scheme) advancement can be very slow once a character has reached the level of professional competence. Also, Ars Magica is an open skill based system with advancement only respected by being able to find a teacher good enough to learn from.

Really, coming off that system (which I was actually running before I started my current Dark Heresy campaign), I'm very open to the idea of "development in downtime" but again, in ArsM that development is defined in play. You get better at Swordfighting because you spent 3 months fighting in Normandy. Whereas, in Rogue Trader (or Dark Heresy) there is no real rational offered for career advancements. Your Rank 2 Void Master can suddenly pick up True Grit just because it's on his advancement list. What part of his everyday duties as pilot of a starship results in this guy suddenly being able to shrug off wounds that would maim lesser men? Where is the rational for that?

Just to toss in a few points that haven't come up in the whole rationality of skill gain and what makes or doesn't make much sense:

First, who's to say that writing a new skill on one's character sheet, much less marking down a +10 for a skill already possessed, is tied to any in-game chronology? First, in any situation where a number is raised (skill goes from trained to +10 or +10 to +20, a Characteristic goes up by 5, etc) such a change will only ever be noticed and known to the players. There's no way anyone in the game world would be able to look at a character who's numbers have gone up in such a way and know that they will potentially be 10% more effective at a given task. I say potentially because, in the game reality, they may be worse at a given task, due to a night of not so good dice roles, after they get the +10 then they were the other night when they were rolling good off of their base stat. In other words, there's no way anyone in the game reality will ever know a number has changed unless it's a colossal change. If there's no way for anyone in game to know of the change, then the character could have had those numbers all along or not. Such a numerical change is effectively removed from the chronology of the game world and, as such, doesn't need to be tired to any in-game event because no one in the story or the story it's self would ever know. It only effects things in an obvious and definite manner outside of the game universe and then, the effected is only a very slight change in probability around crucial junctures... hardly something that needs to be sweated.

Skills and talents that are gained strait out which equate to a bigger character change then a 5-10% probability shift in certain areas pose a bit more problem on the outset, but usually not much of one. In the two or so years I've been using this system, I've noticed something -a lot of the advanced skills that are purchased never come up until they are purchased. In other words, it never really came up in story that Eli the Scum didn't know how to drive a quad-car until his player got the skill and, on seeing a quad-car during a mission, decided he'd take it. As it had never come up in-game until that point, it could be safely assumed that Eli the Scum had always known how to drive a quad-car. When Alessand von Rheinheart, Seneshal and decadent noble extraordinar suddenly purchased Scholastic Lore (Koronus Expanse) upon landing in Port Wander for the first time in his life, he mentioned that he had been reading about it since he was 5. His player had just added the skill to his character sheet, but, in a narrative sense, it really hadn't come up or had even been in any way important until she decided to get it and mention that he'd been reading about the expanse since he was five. Narrative-wise, he had known about the Expanse and it's wonders for some time; it's just that no one had ever asked him about it in the story until he brought it up.

Like I said, it's been my experience that skills won't come up until a player purchases the skill. If it's something a character would be forced to do, then chances are, it's a basic skill in which case, even if they don't have it trained, they still have a chance of succeeding, not the same chance as if they have it trained, but they still can succeed just like they can still fail with it trained. In that case, all that happens is a bit of a change in probabilities which rarely if ever get noticed in the game's universe. If it's an Advanced Skill, chances are, the character won't be forced by circumstances to use it (they can't even) so they won't even attempt to try and do anything in the area of said skill meaning the skill will never come up until they actually have it in which case they could have had it all along and situations in the story never came up for them to use it or they simply chose not to use it because they and the rest of the group decided on a different course of action.

Of course, there are exceptions to the above statement. If the characters are confronted with a series of Eldar glyphs and not a single one has Speak Eldar and Literacy combined, they won't be able to make the glyphs out and this would be known in-game that they had no idea what those damned things were. If they, after being confronted with the glyphs, decided to purchase Speak Language (Eldar) and have Literacy so next session they can decode the glyphs, then some rationalization would need to be made. A little creativity would solve that problem ranging from the character poring over books in the ships librarium to putting on that xenos mask of unknown origins that seem to impart an odd understanding of things that they picked up in those ruins two voyages back. Or maybe, as they sleep, they remember when they were young and tempted to riffle through forbidden books for the thrill of it, and in them, notations of the meaning of certain glyph combinations which now, upon seeing those glyphs, makes a bit of sense. With a little creativity, most anything can be rationalized and role playing is, after all, an exercise in creativity so it shouldn't be too hard at all. In the end, and the point of this, it's merely the exceptions that need an in-game rationalization, not the bulk of xp purchases. One shouldn't fret the exceptions, they will always exist.

Hell, if you really want to get down to brass-tacks, all XP systems in every RPG I've ever played or ran need to be rationalized as none of them really represent how people learn and grow in knowledge and skill much less retain and maintain what they learn. They are, for the most part, gamiest reward systems for the players (not the characters) based on the Hero's Journey model to give the player a feeling of accomplishment. If real life worked the way most all XP systems work, we'd rarely learn from our mistakes and every 90 year old man would be the pinnacle of bad-assery. So, any XP system that is any way manageable in a recreational way is going to require rationalization, whether it's a level/class based system, a free for all buy what ever system, or a get what you use system.