Question came up on char-gen:

How do you get "trained" in advanced skills at character generation?

Can you use "specialization" points for trained instead of wasting them on specialization?

E.g. Making a Reiklander River Boatman. Spent (3) points to get (4) skills and (2) specilizations. Where does "trained" fit in there for his Tradecraft (Seaman) advanced skill?

jh

I wouldn't use specialisation points, I'd use a normal training slot. Eg, 1 slot for acquiring Tradecraft (Seaman), 1 slot for training it. Leaving you 2 training slots, and 2 specialisations for other stuff.

The way we work it is that you spend 2 of your four point to get trained. First is to acquire the skill while the second point is to be trained in it. We keep specialization as such and they are lost if the PC does not train any skills.

So for an initial character at generation by the rules you could spend 1 creation point on acquiring an advanced skill, and then spend 1 more creation point to train in that advanced skill and then finally spend 1 specialization point to specialize in the newly acquired, newly trained, advanced skill?

I wasn't sure about that after reading the rules. It seemed to me that since you can only train a skill once a rank, that the training it took to learn it, might be all you could do until you ranked up.

Am I the only one who thought that way? It seems like it made a little sense from the perspective of it being an advanced skill no one started off expert in it, but I can see the other way as well. I was looking at it for a guy wanting to run a RatCatcher and be expert in Animal Handling.

Acquiring a skill is not considered training with respect to the rank limit. That is clarified in the errata, check it out. As the others posted, you have to pay on skill "point" to acquire an advanced skill and then another to train in it.

Note that Tradecraft is a pretty weird skill since it covers basically everything from blacksmithing to entertaining. If you go strictly by the rules any level of skill in Tradecraft lets you do trained checks in all Tradecrafting areas, thus you do not acquire/train Tradecraft (Seamanship) but rather Tradecraft. Then you specialise in Seamanship.

From what I've gathered the skill is more tradecrafting on an abstract level (as in how do I run a succesful business, administrating customers and employees, knowledge of trading routes and such things). I think it makes sense to require a specialisation to make actual crafting/entertaing/seamanship/whatever? checks while the skill itself can be used for the abstract stuff above.

My question is: May you spend a creation point to acquire an advanced skill - then spend another creation point to "train" the skill, and then spend a specialization point to specialize in one aspect of the skill - ALL done at character creation time?

Tang86 said:

My answer is: Yes.