I'm generally getting the impression that most leadership-focused talents apply to situation were the PC:s are leading a group of a few dozen defenders, but not to their entire ship (which I find a bit odd: I would have expected more interaction between the player careers and the mass combat rules)

One example of the sort of oddities that crop up is Master & Commander p.105 and boarding combat p.215. The talent explicitly states that it adds +10 to "combat" for armsmen during boarding combat, with a reference to p.215. But when reading up on boarding it is actually one of the PC:s that make the combat rolls to determine the outcome. Besides, the talent takes a half action to activate, but correct me if Im wrong: there aren't any half actions in space combat?

I might have missed something. Any help would be deeply appreciated. Also, any further examples of disconnects between PC rules and Starship rules. Hopefully by mapping them we can deal with this problem (if it is a real issue).

Etepete said:

Remember that, while the PC may be the one making the Command test to direct the Boarding Action, he isn't necessarily the one doing the actual fighting - for all intents and purposes, he is testing on behalf of the armsmen (because they could easily perform the action without him, testing against the ship's crew quality rather than a PC's Command skill). I'd ignore the Half Action requirement for the boarding actions, etc use of this talent; it's a bonus granted to a test made as part of an Extended Action.

Details like this are sometimes caused by changes to a given ruleset during development and testing, where a set of rules changes but not all references to the previous version are updated.Other times, they're caused by inconsistencies in communication between the various people working on a given book as different sections are developed. In most instances, it's fairly easy to resolve.

I agree that these sort of inconsitencies in the rules set is basically at the level of typos. That's why I think it makes sense to go throught them and make sure it actually fits together: hence this thread.

Thank you for your reply: it makes a lot of sense. Ergo:

Master and Commander (when used during boarding) gives an automatic +10 to the contested Command test.

I'm starting to get a better grasp of how social and influence skills and talents etc fit together on the regular PC combat, mass combat and ship combat scales, and they do seem to fit together. I think alot of my initial reaction as to the system being disjointed was due to skills and talents not indicating the additional uses they play during mass and ship combat. (p.292 states that social skills can be used on units of troops as if they were individuals, which slots nicely into place and makes it all make sense). If I stumble on any more unclaritiees I'll post them here and I'd invite anyone else to do the same.

Thanks for your helpt!