Since this isn't excatly a rules question I write the following here:

What really a bothers me in starship combat is the lack of talents needed to direct the fire. It's only based on the characters BS. For example: 'wooden-eye Bob' from feral world X is great at throwing stones and spears. He can't fire a lasgun witout the -20 penalty because he doesn't have the required talent. However he's perfectly at home when directing the fire of an imperial cruisers macrobatteries which by the book "require a crew of dozens, if not hundreds to operate."

Directing the fire of modern artillery must require quite a bit of training. I can't even guess what kind of calculations and specialized command language one would need to know when directing the fire of a starships weapons.

I know that there are playtersters reading the forums and what I'd like to know is: Was it ever even thought that if there are talents required to fire normal weapons, such talents might be in order with larger scale starship weapons? At the moment this really seem like a really big flaw rules-wise.

It's also interesting that the skill used to operate a ships auger arrays and sensors is the same that you use when trying to discern if somebody is lying to you. And that starship concealment is used by the same skill as finding a hiding place in a dense jungle. These issues could also be solved by creating appropriate talents, which in turn would widen a skills use to starship scale. Or that in order to use a ships sensors or to conceal it, one would need first the skill to operate the vessel. Which would basically mean that if you do not posses Pilot (spacecraft) skill, you couldn't use your concealment skill to hide it.

This is something that crops up in other games. Basically, if you put an 'entry cost' on contributing to starship combat, then characters who haven't chosen to pick up those skills and talents will essentially be stuck sitting around watching while the Void Master has all the fun. Any RPG involving starship combat is similar - if acquiring the skills needed to be involved in starship combat is difficult, then only those for whom it is their theme will bother, which in turn means that everyone else just gets bored during those starship combats.

It ends up being a matter of overall design (do you want to be inclusive, or exclusive, with this area of the rules?) rather than specific detail.

tuomorinne said:

Do you know what the words "Scrutiny" and "Concealment" means?

By default, these two skills cover a wide variety of different methods, activities and applications. Scrutinizing something can both include carefully monitoring read-out's from an auger array, and carefully keep watch for signs and bodylanguage of someone who is lying.

The same goes for concealment. It is used to... well "conceal" things in general, not just yourself but other objects or people as well. So it can be used to either find a good hiding spot for yourself in a dense jungle, but you could use the same skill to hide an entire guncutter in the same dense jungle, or even hide an entire starship in an asteroid field.

It makes perfect sense...

It makes perfect sense...

Does it make perfect sense that a SETI tech specialist or a Navy sonar operator is the best person to read the participants of a conversation to detect motives and falsehoods? Or going the other way, an expert poker player can read the faces of the other players quite easily - and this somehow means he can operate sensor systems?

I can follow why they did it in the game, but I can't accept that it makes "perfect sense" in any way.

However, being able to notice the subtle tells on someone's face to show they are lying, and noticing the subtle shifts in a magnetic field on a sensor screen that show that a ship is hidden behind a moon aren't that grossly different. It's probably not even the characters doing all the working of the sensors, rather than checking over the output, both of which are different from the other. You could know how to operate the machinery without knowing what the output means, and visa versa.

N0-1_H3r3 : I understand that the designers wanted everybody be able to participate in starship combat. However the fact that there are talents to use the most basic of weapons but no talents required to use starship class weapons is just plain silly. When all the career paths in RT are expected to operate on starship enviroment, it would have been possible to give each career access to starship weapon training talents in different ranks. This way different types of characters would get these highly specialized skill in different ranks of their career paths. I also think that there are enough different types of actions mentioned in the rulebook, so that characters who wouldn't be able to direct the fore of a starships weapons could defenetely contribute to the battle in another way.

Varnias Tybalt : Even though english is not my native language, I suppose I know the meanings of 'concealment' and 'scrutiny'. Actually I just checked them from the OED and noticed that there were quite a lot more meanings to them than I previously knew. However I think I know what they mean in the RT concept.

In my opinion the problem is that the setting of the game allows these very general skills to characters from technologically primitve backrounds. When these characters can conceal themselves they surely couldn't conceal a starship. By this I mean that to conceal a mile long ship in spacke it's not just "find the biggest astroid and go behind it", you would have to know a lot of different things from starship enigine signatures to local space anomalues in astroid fields. Therofore just finding the biggest rock and croutching behind it wouldn't simply work.

The same would go for the scrutiny. If you're not adept at operating sensor units or even reading the data (or even reading in general) they output, you surely cannot perform any viable scans of the nearby space.

MILLANDSON: I agree with your comment. but if a person doesn't understand the data he is receiving from the sensor, he can't make any assumtions based on it. Therefore an illiterate person for example would have serious probelms operating a modern computer. A Feral- worlder would propably have similiar problems when trying to understand sensory data from a starships augers.

Generally I have no problems with the fact that starship operations are linked to skills one can use in other situations as well. I just feel that you should have an appropriate talent to extend the use of these skills to starship operations. This could be a talent that most careers in RT get in fairly low ranks, but when transferring characters from DH for example it would be taken as an elite advance.

Well, there's nothing stopping you from making a talent, but I think it would be a bad idea. Not only does it penalise players who want to focus elsewhere, it makes suprisingly little sense given the concept.

Each of the RT classes are quite elite, they've spent a lot of time on starships already and have at least a passing familiarity with certain components. With the possible exception of the missionary, each class has a good reason to know how to work an auspex.

If you do want to make a ship-skill talent, I'd give it to RT characters for free. Maybe a DH acolyte would suffer the drawbacks, but it's hard to imagine an explorator, seneschal or navigator meeting a starship's machine spirit for the first time in session 2.

Finally, it'll REALLY annoy your players. These talents would be so vital that they couldn't get away without them, so from their point of view you've taken away a good chunk of their starting EXP, to make them god at things the rules-as-written say they're already good at.

tuomorinne said:

Therein lies my personal rationalisation of things. It's not really Wooden-Eye Bob who's firing the weapons. It's not even one weapon being fired, probably hundreds. The BS bit is simply a poor, though I suppose effective, abstraction of whether Wooden-Eye Bob has had enough sense to pay attention when this stuff is done before. His BS contribution could be representative of him adding his meagre or extremely specialist expertise to the proceedings. That 'single BS test' by Bob isn't representing the same BS use as is used for Bob throwing his spear. Rather it's his basic knowledge of ballistics, his idea of where obvious weakpoints in armour or where the 'traditional place to aim' is. He can add this in. By the same token, if Bob is a senior character, but BS inept, him intervening with his BS 24 is sensibly representative of him giving out confusing orders or simply getting in the way of the 'dozens, if not hundreds' of crew who do have all those specialist talents and skills.

When push comes to shove things like Tech-Use, Logic and Command throw up far more glaring holes in the system than 'lacking the appropriate talent'. Coordinating weapons fire on a starship shouldn't be a BS test unless you're directing Torpedoes or a Nova Cannon, or taking direct control of the firing protocol of a lance-turret! Instead, by all 40k-ish-reasoning, it's a simply Command test. "Weapons, fire on that ship!" (and therein the BS tests would be on behalf of the hundreds/thousands of actual gunners, Tech-Use tests to reload things properly, Logic and SL(Astro/Numero) tests to make sure the senior administrators are directing the guns to the right target and so forth....)

If the GM is willing to be a bit more inventive and in-depth with their starship combat and a bit less 'action packed quick' with space-combat, you could have a whole gaming-session taken up by the crew running about command decks, rushing down to the weapons bays, directly lining up weapons personally by hand to execute truly tremendous 'killing blow' shots which are timed in concert with the rest of the ship's weapons decks. Once the GM knows which characrers are available and what they can do skills-/talents-wise, I think there's a huge remit for doing really fun 'high detail' ship combat but without being stuck making endless, boring, repeditive 'essentially sequential' tests. Lots of opportunity for cool RP within the abstraction, but if you don't want to high-detail RP engagements and opt for a quicker, more snappy starship fight: I think the rules do that alright .

Saying things like 'perfect sense' is asking for trouble, but you can see the elementary logic and abstractions folks are using.

Taking the OP's original note onboard though, I think there's a fair case for permitting characters to pick up sensible talents related to more detailed starship combat. Being intimately familiar with, say, Ryza pattern macrocannons could easily allow you to, say, replace BS with Tech-Use. Or something like that. It doesn't deal with the 'Wooden Eye Bob can fire lances' problem, but then personally I'd assume that Wooden Eye Bob would've already learned a few of these skills. Writing that 'he only knows how to fling spears' is simply oversighting the rules as they are. It's implicit in that case that the rules don't accomodate such primitive eejits and that, if you think your character is a complete tech-luddite, I doubt he's actually a sensible RT character. Which is to say: it's not something that the RT 'rules' really are designed to have generated.

Though I could be mistaken...

HappyDaze said:

Skills like Scrutiny and Concealment doesn't imply any sort of education, so you're examples are moot.

One could easily rationalize that reading sonar read-outs and determining who's lying in a conversation is just the application of the same mindset and method of concentration, only that it is applied to different disciplines (the sonar operator is going over read-out's looking for spikes in sound patterns and other telltale signs that reveal whatever he/she is looking for, the lie-buster is looking for other sorts of telltale signs in the timbre of someones voice and their body language). Basically, Scrutiny is the active skill of looking for and spotting something's that is out of the ordinary and interprate what these things mean.

Basically the same thing that both the SETI tech specialist or the Navy sonar operator and the poker player are all doing.

One issue here is that Voidmasters don't get Concealment or Shadowing. Ever. Given that Pilot (Space Craft) is the skill used when you hide in the middle of a fight, I don't see why you'd use a different skill when you're hiding before a fight.

tuomorinne said:

Essentially, there are four Perception-based skills, which collectively should cover everything you'd want to do with Perception:

• Awareness, which is the main one that covers most things, including spotting things that have been concealed,
• Search, which is a more in-depth, time-consuming rummage around to find things that Awareness can't or didn't spot
• Psyniscience, which covers all psychic observation
• Scrutiny, which covers observing and interpreting all those little details that aren't necessarily hidden, but which are not inherently the kind of thing you'd notice normally.

Beyond that... so what if a character's background is a primitive one... the character starts with a healthy chunk of experience and a number of choices on the Origin Path that suggest that he's come more than a little way since his days of bashing rocks together to make fire. The game assumes that the characters are, as standard, possessed of a basic understanding of how to contribute to the running of a starship, in much the same way that the game assumes the characters will have a starship to run.

tuomorinne said:

I don't think anyone of us really do actually, since the skills in both Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader includes a wide variety of activities, methodology and execution, some of them not even listed in the rulebook at all (but might have a few examples released in the future). Dark Heresy did this, first by listing the skills in the rulebook and give extremely broad and vague hints to what the skills could be used for. Then they released Inquisitors Handbook, and provided even more hints and methods to use the different skills already listed.

The philosophy behind it all being that if a particular activity isn't covered by the rules in the book, it is up to individual interpretation exactly which skills would be needed to execute a certain task. Meaning of course that many skills will cover a broad variety of uses, and Rogue Trader have just confirmed this by listing skills such as Scrutiny (that used to be a skill mainly used to detect if a person is lying or finding something that's out of place) for use when reading augur array reado-outs and interprate what these read-out's mean.

Apparently, Scrutiny (at least in Dh and RT) wasn't just a skill about detecting if someone's lying, it was about detecting things that are "out of place" in general, and can be applied to a wide variety of different disciplines.

Sort of like "Tech-Use". It's a very broad skill, including many different activities, from fixing starship engines to programming computers.

And this is a great philosophy, because if they were to go into exact detail about every skill, then we would need a dedicated "skillbook" the size of your average phonebook to cover exactly every skill in the galaxy with it's own set of rules. We'd also need character sheets nearly 50 pages long to be able to write down exactly every skill that even a starting character would have.

So I'd say, let's all be thankful that the game developers are trying to keep a reasonably good balance between abstract descritions and detailed descriptions of the skills. Also I have a hard time seeing how the game would actually be improved by going out of ones way to specify exactly what every skill does in the game.

tuomorinne said:

The thing is, it isn't explicitly stated that it's actually the player character doing the augury or "hiding" of the starship sitting by the controls of an organ sized computer pushing buttons and crunching numbers. In fact, there are plenty of indications of pretty much every kind of action you can do in strategic combat is a group effort, executed by a large group of NPC's in concert with the Player Character who is overseeing the extended action in person.

So Scrutinizing augury readouts and hiding a Starship could just as well be about having dozens of specialized sensor operators and servitors crunching all the numbers and reporting all the readouts and interprating them all for the PC to understand, then the PC is the one who will take all the reported factors into account and decide what to do based on what all the sensor operators and servitor number-crunchers are telling him of their immediate surroundings.

The same goes for pretty much all extended actions that can be used in starship combat. The Pilot for instance wouldn't be completely controlling the vessel on his own, he would be aided by plenty of servitors and crew-ratings that are monitoring important values and calculating trajectories, checking how the plasma engine is doing etc. etc.

The same goes for Tech-use when "Aiding the Machine Spirit" and doing Emergency Repairs. One single Explorator couldn't hope to do all that on his own, he has got whole work teams under his command that he orders to do what needs to be done.

Remember, the ships in WH40K aren't "The Enterprise" in Star Trek, where gathering sensor readouts is just a matter of having one guy sitting by a control panel and pushing a button. The bridge of even the smallest vessels are crewed by dozens and sometimes hundreds of people and servitors with their own specific tasks, and their common goal is to interprate and report every piece of information they gather to the commanding officers (the Rogue Trader and his associates on the vessel) in a manner where they won't have to do too much number crunching and other esoteric thinking on their own, but simplified enough so they can make snap decisions.

So even if wooden eye Bob doesn't know much about starship engine signatures and local space anomalies in asteroid fields, he would have scores of NPC advisors, sensor operator, slaved servitors etc. that do know about these things. It's up to wooden eye Bob to assimilate all their different statements and decide what the best course of action will be and then order them to execute the action in question.

Alos, I'd just like to say that im not just pulling all of his out of my ass right now. There are plenty of indications in the rulebook that this is how actions in starship combat take place. I hope it all makes more sense to you now.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Don't forget that the difference between Awareness and Search is that Awareness is a passive skill that measures exactly how much you keep track of your immediate surroundings, while Search is an active perception skill used when you are actively searching for something.

I've always found it to be a pretty important aspect to point out in order to get the players to understand what those two different skills are used for, so I hope you don't mind me putting in a word.

Varnias Tybalt said:

No, not at all - it's a valid point, and one I may not have made clear in my previous post (I thought I'd covered it with "time-consuming rummage" to be fair, but apparently not)

Seems to me that for most of these (Sensors, Communication, and so forth) that Tech Use would be the most appropriate choice for default skill.

And for firing a barrage of weapons, Command comes to mind. But adding a single talent is not some XP sink that PCs would hate. First, as stated previously, many careers would already have Starship Weaponry as a talent (Void Master, Arch Militant, most likely Rogue Trader and Explorator) and if they dont have it immediately available they should have it as a Rank 1 or Rank 2 option (see the other thread of too few stating skills and talents at rank 1).

So at most, perhaps the Seneschal, Astropath and Navigator may have to buy the proper talent, for a mere 100XP.

But again, it is really only a issue if you want it to be one. Personally, I think I would want that.

Peacekeeper_b said:

If it actually was the case that he PC doing the relevant extended actions was actually the one sitting by a console or terminal crunching numbers, pushing buttons and flicking dials. Which they don't...

Wouldn't an easy way to know if a character has access to the starship-side of a skill be the Trade (Voidfarer) skill? What if some actions were resolved on the lower of two skills, like firing starship guns being the lower of BS and Trade (Voidfarer) and sensor use being the lower of Awareness/Scrutiny/Search (depending on how you're using the sensors - passive reception/checking for anomolous readings/active scans) and Trade (Voidfarer)?

I'd say no, since barely anyone gets Trade (Voidfarer), so unless they got it via an Elite Advance, they wouldn't get it at all.

The system is designed to allow pretty much everyone to do something during space combat, and I think they do a pretty good job of it.

There came so much good points and opinions since my last post that replying individually would be quite time consuming. I'll reply here to everybody in general:

I also agree that most careers in RT should be familiar with starship skills at very low ranks. It was very well pointed out that this should come for the character during the origins path. Then there are of course void-born who have ever more reason to know how to operate starships. However I still feel that some classes should be able to benefit more from their starship oriented beginnings. I disagree that adding a few talents would annoy the players, since this would basically be a couple of talents to purchase with xp. And there are a lot of vital skills you need anyways (like dodge, literacy etc) so a couple of essential talents to get involved in the starship operation shouldn't be a problem.

I understand perfectly that a person directing the fire of a ships batteries or using the auspex arrays, isn't actually doing the things alone. I personally think it's great that the space combat is group effort oriented. However, as one needs the command skill in order to lead the 'hit and raid' action, one should also have a Starship weapon training talent to direct the fire of ships batteries. As people have pointed out, it's a group effort. Still the leader is required to know how the system works and what actions are best in different circumstances. If everything would be translated through advisors and slave servitors, then why would the characters BS be used in the test. He would simply be a 'rubber stamp' to agree to the best course of action laid out by his underlings. In order to truly direct the fire, or pilot a starship, or aid the machine spirit, the team leader needs to get the most out of the team and the equipment he's working with. Therefore he needs to know how things work. Otherwise he's really not in charge but a puppet.

I would also like to point out that Navigation skill has actually been devided in three different skills: Surface, stellar and warp navigation. So the rules make a distinction between surface and stellar with this skill. All the different weapon training groups are also different talents, although the new universal group has risen, which I really do like. Why do the rules make a difference in these examples, but not in concealment, scrutiny or weapon training talents when concerning starships?

I also defentely liked the idea of a game session long straship battle. Not so that it would require a game session each time, but as a one time session to get the players more in to the feeling of space combat.

tuomorinne said:

Between Tech Use, Navigation, Command and Pilot (Starship) it seems the appropriate skills exist, its just how you would apply them. Perhaps without these skills you could still test against the actions you are desiring to attempt, but with the unskilled penalty. But with the appropriate skills you can test at full characteristic test (with +10, +20 and Talented talent as necessary) using the characteristic or skill recommended in the book?

Definately room for a more finely detaied system, which would not surprise me if it shows up modified in a future supplement.

tuomorinne said:

Really? I actually thought this was one of the weaker adds to the "system" of 40K RPGs. I would rather Weapon Talents become Weapon Skills and have +10, +20 and the Talented talent available for them, and untrained would test at 1/2 skill instead at -20.

Sense I use Rogue Trader to augment Dark Heresy, I will more then likely implement some of these ideas in my own campaign.

tuomorinne said:

Dimensional differences can have a huge impact of understanding navigation. Navigating over a surface require's a mostly 2-dimensional line of thought. Navigating in space requires a 3-dimensional way of thought (something that might seem easy at first, but when we're talking astronomical distances, things tend to become a lot more tricky).

As for Navigation Warp, it's impossible to compare it to any conventional form of navigation. A navigator trying to explain how you navigate through the warp to someone who isn't capable of experiencing it like a Navigator can, would be like trying to explain the difference between green and red to someone who has been blind from birth.

The warp is simply too exotic as a dimension to have it's navigation comparable to any conventional methods of navigation, hence why the skills are different.

Also, if you're going to plot a course from point A to point B, it will most of the time be a one man job and not something involving several people.

On the whole Navigation (Warp) note, what skill would you use to navigage through the Warp without a Navigator, using a chart?

Really? I actually thought this was one of the weaker adds to the "system" of 40K RPGs. I would rather Weapon Talents become Weapon Skills and have +10, +20 and the Talented talent available for them, and untrained would test at 1/2 skill instead at -20.

I proposed something along these lines a long time ago on the DH House Rules subforum. WS became Close Combat (CC) and BS became Ranged Combat (RC) so that you didn't have Characterictics with the word "skill" in them since they are not a "Skill" by the game's terms. Beyond that you had Basic Weapon (Bolt, Flame, Las, Launcher, Plasma, Primitive, Melta, SP), Exotic Weapon (specific weapon), Heavy Weapon (same categories as for Basic Weapon), Melee Weapon (Chain, Power, Primitive, Shock), Pistol Weapon (same categories as for Basic Weapon), Thrown Weapon (same categories as for Melee Weapon), and Unarmed as Skills.

I believe that I had gone the pother way with the Untrained Basic Skill penalty and made it -20 for all such Skills rather than at 1/2 Characteristic, but this can go either way.

I also suggested getting rid of Ranks and free-forming character development with restrictions only existing where necessary for the setting (Psykers, Techpriests, etc.).

Katsue said:

I'd say go with Forbidden Lore (Warp) and/or Scholastic Lore (Astromancy) checks at at least one step more difficult, and limit the range to maybe a day in warp (if that) before the ship finds itself vastly off course.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Lack of thorough playtest? Too much straight copying from Dark Heresy? Any number of reasons, but it is a oversight IMHO. It would have taken only a few extra paragraphs to add a few extra skills/talents for these events, even if these talents/skills were free from the start for most careers.

The skills in the game are way too broad, the fact that a psychiatrist with Scrutiny at +20 is a master of spaceship sensors is quite ridiculous. It is a position here subskills, specializations, broad skills and a few extra skills could greatly improve the system. I think most of this extends to the flaw that they use these ranks and feel the need to have some skills available only at certain levels (barring the all out catchphrase of ELITE ADVANCE) and making skills in general, fairly expensive with some being at 200 or 400XP.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Actually, inmy military experience, land navigation is as much about 3 dimensions as possible. Granted, I would go with the Stargate 7 points of reference for star navigation. But back to land navigation, not knowing how to read the map properly for contour lines and intervals makes it difficult to understand elevation and proper terrain feaures, such as cliffs, ridges, inclines and what not. Sure,walking from the house to the store may seem like point A to point B, but planning out recon route on a 2D map involves understanding the implied 3rd dimension.

My point being, well not much other then it is obvious that IMHO that the starship rules suffer from a bit of a lack of being thought out. Truth i, if o think the system is fine as is, then guess what, it is! And if you think its poorly done, well then it is as well. As I said before, chances are you will see a revised version in a future supplement.