Hi Dark Heresy fans,

This week, my designer diary talks about some new character abilities in Ascension, with a special bonus of an additional Ascension wallpaper (#2 of 4). Enjoy!

I heard about this in the D6G interview, but thanks for posting this. The concept or Paragon Talents and Mastered Skills makes a whole lot of sense. Very glad to have a system like that in there.

I guess all that's left for the designer dairies now is a look at the new psychic (and the enhanced psychic power system), some of those big scary monsters from the adversary section, and then maybe - if you feel like being nice to us - a look at some of the new equipment, and maybe letting us know if Ascension has the rules for Terminator Armour.

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

Or some more of the Paragon/Master groupings and perhaps what other nifty things that these others can do, you know, some more specific specifics... maybe. You know, if Ross runs out of things to update us on, it'd be a nice thing to wet our apatites with.

So I guess that Ascension will bring us a new charactersheet as well?

Maybe with enough space for all entries? Not like RT or DH -.-

It sounds interesting and is probably the best means to keep all those skills and talents at a resonable number. Like the Weapons talents in RT. Not sure if I will like every mastered skill sets though. The example they give is a prime example of this. Contortion as general Athletics Mastery? I'd liked contortion as one of those unique skills and now everybody is going to get it? Probably with a nerf to its uses?

In RT I have a love/hate relation with the universal weapon talents. It makes the exploreres more smilair and I fear that this system will do the same thing with the DH classes.

Odium said:

I've never had a problem with the current sheets

But on Dark Reign, Ross said that they would have a new sheet, one designed with the Masteries, etc, in mind.

No idea if it'll be satisfactory to you though, we won't see it until it's released.

I disagree,

IMO, Fewer broader skills is much superior to lots of specific skills, If you want Contortion to be different its better to have a specialisation system. Its more characterful (the Player chooses) and takes less space.

Anyway, why would it be nerfed? These are masteries, for characters who are incredibly awesome at those skills, not jack of all trades.

Agmar_Strick said:

I could NOT agree more. The massive amounts and shear walls of stuff for characters to buy, each with it's own little thing was one of my groups biggest dislikes of the system, especially when they started hitting mid rank 7 and 8. It was simply too much to have to remember and keep track of. Beyond that, and to counter the fear that eliminating or condensing skills and talents will homogenize characters: Stuff dose not make a character. How they use Stuff dose. Two characters can have the same Stuff, but use their Stuff far differently from one anouther. That is what makes them different and unique.

As for the need of nerf, apparently you need ALL the skills listed plus spend some more XP to get the Master Skill thingie. How many characters have Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge, and Swim all in one character? Not a single one from my games have went for all those and if they go for them all just for the Master Skill and what it could give them to their acrobatic abilities, why fault them? Hell, if a character had every one of those skills, it stands to reason they are VERY physically focused and should have some funky special skill/ability to show this incredible physical prowess that they've built up. Not only that, but a player who collects all those skills obviously sees their character as some kind of crazy athletic twisty supper ninja to begin with. Don't punish them for that vision, reward them for taking swim ;-)

Agmar_Strick said:

I like the specialistion idea. That would deal with most of my doubts about the master skill sets.

So one of the arts in the preview is a Vindicare Assassin stalking an Eldar Farseer. "Love can bloom"? You are evil, evil people there at FFG

While I appreciate the game reasons for reducing the number of skills, I find it hard to reconcile within the story. It becomes hard to justify that a character has 'Master Knowledge' and suddenly knows literally everything about everything. You run into situations where a character has the Trade skill which means they can make ANYTHING, which is highly unrealistic.

However, consolidation of already attained skills into single skills isn't a bad thing. I prefer that just because I have knowledge doesn't mean it's the same as someone else, just as not every athlete is a decathalon champion.

I'm not sure how well these mastery skills will work though, you've still got to remember what skills each one represents, which is worse than just remembering the skills individually.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Remember that Lore skills don't purely cover 'what the character knows', but also their ability to find out more - if that were the case, then Scholastic Lore wouldn't be usable as an Investigation skill (which represents research - if possessing a Lore skill meant you knew everything about a subject, then there'd be no need for research), nor would the skills ever be tested against. Having every Lore skill does not represent omniscience; afterall, there is still room to fail a skill test. A hypothetical Sage with a hypothetical Scholastic Lore Mastery skill knows a lot about every subject... not everything, but a lot... and is sufficiently well-read that he can try and research anything he doesn't know. Given that characters possessed of such knowledge are not unknown in 40k, I find it difficult to complain about the potential for a character who is a master of obscure and arcane lore.

Hellebore said:

I'm amazed how, not having seen them in use, so many people seem to know how mastered skills/talents will work and have already dismissed them.

As for reconciling within the story, how do you reconcile a character learning a language, or a scholastic lore? If you extend that to its logical extent then i'm sure it will be easy for you to reconcile.

We were just told how they work in the design diary. If that isn't how they work then they really shouldn't have written a design diary explaining it that way.

It is far easier to reconcile someone learning Tallarn "you read a book on how to speak Tallarn' than it is to learn every trade skill that exists - "you apprentice yourself to 20 different trade masters for the next 50 years to learn everything you need to know about every trade." The more you bundle into one skill, the more of a jump it is to give it to a character. It is far easier to reconcile that a character learned Tallarn in their spare time than it is to have them learn trade mastery over all trades. Like I said, very few people are Decathalon masters. Most athletes are specialists in a single area. Athletic masters are extremely rare and take years of training

It's all about degrees of knowledge. The fewer skills the more of the sum total of knowledge that exists you character will know when they get only one. I get forbidden lore and now know ALL forbidden lore, all xenos, all warp, all mechanicus.

Reality certainly does not follow the D&D bland skill path. Even a normal DOCTOR doesn't have 'Universal Surgery Mastery', a soldier doesn't have 'Tactical Mastery', a Teacher doesn't have 'Teaching Mastery'. You don't learn everything there is to know about a field just by being in the field. You learn by increments, receiving more and more over time. A scientist becomes a specialist in one area. To actually KNOW a field of study requires years of learning. You can read a book and learn an overview of the area (common lore) but you can't actually KNOW the field unless you've studied all its various researches. Denying this is true is simply denying the reality of the way humans learn things.

It also reduces variety amongst characters. This character is a hive world arbitrator and received Trade Mastery whilst this character is a void born Scum and received Trade Mastery - they can both build exactly the same things in any field. The chances that both of them learned the same things is so ridiculously small.

But, like I said, I can see why it was implemented, I just hope they don't go back and rip out all the variety in the skills when they redo the system. So long as it's just a collection of skills that you've already mastered, it's effectively a Synergy Skill that grants an additional bonus to all the similar skills in the group. But if it's just a case of 'Athletic Mastery' - you mysteriously master every facet of the human body then it will make the story harder to tell. It's a case of focusing on the GAME and ignoring the story.

The system is built on incremental changes, you can generally buy an upgrade every session. It is very easy to believe that someone can learn something every session when it is a realtively small thing, but the larger it is, the more all encompassing it is, either the more expensive it is and the more sessions it takes to learn, or you are left with characters spontaneously boosting multiple areas in 2 Days of game time, every 2 Days (or however long the sessions go for within the game world, which I doubt will be regularly months at a time). Imagine if they just did away with stat advances and just let you take 'Agility Mastery' and you instantly got +20 to agility. It would be same disconnect.

IF they cost more (which they probably will given that Universal weapon training costs 500 in RT) then you are left with a slower advance amongst characters, maybe once every two or three sessions, which breaks up the incremental improvement that the system has.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Except that's not what I said. You're making a lot of assumptions - see my below point.

Hellebore said:

I've not seen trade mentioned anywhere as being available as a mastered skill. If it is, then I'd agree with you (with regard to trade), however until that happens you're building your argument on a hypothetical premise. It's a non sequitor that just because Ascension has mastered skills, trade will be one of them.

As for the rarity and years of training. This is Ascension we're discussing, characters are not a.n.other acolyte. The careers in use are Vindicare Assassins, Inquisitors and Primaris Psykers. They're not bob the guardsman who did a little athletics when he was younger. Instead it's Bob the Inquisitorial Storm Trooper who has gone through a transition package to reach an ascended career. The first preview posted mentions 'However, this event does not simply happen overnight! It may take many months or years of special training...' I think it's safe to say that these are not intended to be average characters, and the power level is well above that of Dark Heresy's Acolytes.

The only assumption I made was that all the skills and talents would be boiled down to differen mastery skills and paragon talents. It's certainly how it was described. If they've not reduced ALL skills and talents to that then that's different, but it didn't come across that way.

Certainly if you're starting a character as an experienced one these sorts of things would be GREAT, because it saves having to write down dozens of skills. But that's just for starting ie you start with trade mastery, athletic mastery etc. It wouldn't be realistic to go from 0 experience in the area even IF you're an experienced character to 100% in one advance.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

You've also assumed that people will be able to buy them straight off without owning the abilities that comprise them, going from having nothing to having everything in one go.

What if a Mastered Skill or Paragon Talent (which is all the skills contained therein, plus additional benefits, it should be remembered) is only available to characters that have most or all of the included skills (entirely possible for characters who've hit the end of rank 8) - that is, it's the next step of their progression, trading in lots of individual Skills or Talents for a single ability that encompasses all of them and then grants you extra things you can do as well. Certainly, that's the way it seemed to me when Ross explained them during the D6 Generation podcast - it's progression and consolidation of already-acquired abilities, rather than a great big lump of skills all in one go gained from nowhere.

Hellebore stated my objections, fears and reasoning againt the mastery skills better then I could. As him, I understand WHY it is useful to the game but I don't like it.

I can't say I've seen any mention of what these mastered skills will actually provide mechanically-wise (I've listened to the D6G interview on Ascension and don't recall it being mentioned aside from a brief overview), so again, does anyone actually know what having Skill Mastery - [big lump of related skills] actually does for said [big lump of related skills]? Please fill me in if I've missed it somewhere because I feel it's very important seeing as it's quite a core concept of a character's abilities in Ascension by the looks of it.

The only way I can see the idea of Skill Mastery working decently within the scope of DH's rules is for it to

A) Require all covered skills to already be purchased, otherwise (see Hellebore's discussion on learning a million skills overnight) and it would effectively 'punish' players for buying those skills earlier if their current mastery (+10/20) was wasted come Ascension, AND

B) Give a blanket bonus to all covered skills while allowing PCs to still use any other bonuses due to existing mastery. Again, if this wasn't the case, I would feel bad for all our PCs who bothered to boost their skills to +10/20 levels if the mastery either ignored their bonus or did away with skill rolls entirely, for example.

However, considering this, and the high XP cost I assume this will require after seeing both what FFG has done with RT and the larger-scale-application of this mastery, why would it be any better than giving PCs the option to boost their skills individually to +30/+40/+whatever levels? Why can't we just modify our charsheets to take a few extra masteries; it can't be hard and hardly any more notekeeping would be required. Add a few extra boxes to each skill bar, and remove the talents section to provide an extra page with room for a bunch of ordered talents, divided into combat/investigative/whatever blocks to make it easier to sort through them, and leave it at that.

In all reality, while I applaud the effort to attempt it, you can't realistically expect characters to advance all the way to Throne Agent status and NOT have character sheets requiring a little more notework than your standard level 1 peasant. You can certainly tidy it up and order it easier, but you can't deny they'll have a bigger list of things they can do and I don't think replacing long lists with shorter ones will make it any better. In fact, I am almost quite certain it will make it worse.

This goes back to my earlier discussion on paragon talents such as Bladedancer (or whatever it was called). How will replacing a list of talents with a single all-encompassing one make it easier on my players or myself to remember what we can call upon? Why wouldn't we just jot down what Bladedancer encompasses because we forget half the talents it replaces all the time and hate looking it up? And why would we put it down to begin with if that's the case?

I'll leave it there at that question I suppose. What is there to convince me or any other GMs/players that the idea of a blanket mastery is superior to the current model of individual advancement?

I would imagine that the listed skills and/or talents in a Mastered Skill or Paragon Talent act not unlike that of the pre-existing notion of prerequisites. Meaning that in order to get Athletic Mastery one must first have the Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge, and Swim Skills. And there is probably three levels to Mastered Skills as well, each requiring the previous skills exist at the appropriate level (i.e., standard, +10, +20) and following that I would imagine the having the Mastered Skill in essence works verysimilar to the Assistane Rule (Dark Heresy page 185). In essence reducing the difficulty by one step (or more or less, in laymans terms, you get another +10 to your skill).

As far as how it would work with Paragon Talents, I haven't a clue other then the previous stated posts of it just beinga package to list multiple talents in one entry instead of 3 or 4 or so.

The issues I see here, is it is almost akin to rewriting the existing rules to create a new RPG of the same system without making it a whole new game or 2nd edition. I think a far easier system would be to take the core character creation rules back to formula and just redo that part of the game for a Revised Edition of Dark Heresy. Essentially the two biggest complaints is that a) starting characters suck and b) rank 8 characters run out of things to buy or new levels to advance to do. Both things would be eliminated by scrapping the exisiting Rank system, but the drawback to that is it negates so much of the positive additions they made to the rank system (altenate career ranks and what not).

What I would do is allow rank jumping (akin to career jumping in WFRP 1E and 2E), expand the characteristic advances to include a +25 and maybe even a +30 level, and allow skills to go up to+30 and +40 mastery levels. I would also remove some of the excessive talents that are not really talents, and not be adding more. For example, I would move Concealed Cavity to the cybernetics section and not have it be a talent. I would have there be a talent called Mechanicus Implants Training and have under that be the electrical succour, energy chache and other Tech Priest specific talents with each one counting as an individual talent.

I would also make Weapon Training a skill with the previous mentioned +10, +20, +30, +40 options for them. And I would use the point based system for characteristics found in Rogue Trader, but do something akin to Shadow Run (and now I supposed WFRP 3E), that thesepoints would also determine starting XPs, Wealth, Fate Points and use the Rogue Trader notion of TBx2+1D5+Origin Modifier for starting wounds.

Add the following two XP options at each rank for each character: Sound Mind (100 XP) Reduce character's Insanity Points by 1, Sound Soul (200 XP) Reduce character's Corruption Points by 1.

Install a more generic sounding variation of the Origin Path from Rogue Trader and you now have more diverse starting characters, more options for normal advancement and you wont be so want to spend you XPs and make new purchases at higher levels, as you will be spending the 300 or 400 XP for +30 skills and 500 of 600 XPs for +40 skills, which you have just added a bunch of new skills to by making Weapon Talents into Weapon Skills, essentially tripling (if using +10/+20) or quintupling(using +30/+40) the number of XP expendatures available for Weapon Training.

I mean, I like in Rogue Trader how if you get the same skill twice during character generation you get it at +10 or even +20 if you get it three times, and if you get the same talent twice you can get the Talented talent for skill of choice. If you are lucky you could start with Skill X +20 with Talented (Skill X), which makes you pretty bad ass and skilled at that one thing.

Which would make sense as to WHY the INQUISITOR has PICKED YOU to help him FIGHT HERESY!

After reading the master skills and paragon talents designer diary I am getting conflicting feelings regarding the upcoming Ascention book. This is either going to be AWESOME or COMPLETE CRAP. What really is fear inducing is the notion that characters may get lumped into much more generic amalgamations which will be murder on story lines, character development and individuality. Give us more options to customize and grow the characters and the stories they participate in and we have a good thing. Put them in a steam-press and mush everything together and we have a very bad thing. The impression I am getting is that the driving motivation for this is to save space on character sheets...

An Inquisitor, Interrogator, Magos, Primaris Psyker and so on SHOULD take up more space to document than a farm kid who just finished 6 months of IG training.

So now I get some generic "you are awesome at athletic stuff" "you are awesome at shooting" etc... talents and skills that lump several together. Now I look in Ascention to see what each "package deal" includes, then flip back to my DH book to look up each component of the package? Why not just give me a 4 page character sheet?

Heck, using RT as an example, why not make the special "cookies" something like the class speciffic special abilities from RT, only not so exclusive and slap an XP cost and some prerequisites on it. So let a sufficiently skilled Adept or investigation focused Arbitrator buy a "master researcher" special talent that allows them to reserach more efficiently. Allow a high ranking Guardsman to buy a "Las Specialist" special talent that makes las weapons more versatile and deadly in their hands similar to the Arch Militant; ditto for Arbitrators and shotguns. Perhaps a navy pilot variant of the Guardsman that makes weapon skill and strength more expensive but lowers the cost of agility and perception attributes?

What I want is greater customization, control over development and room to add "a higher tier of awesome" to my game. Generic, but hey it fits on two pages is a step backwards. Sure hope my fears are unfounded....

Right on Zilla. What I think is the best outcome of Master Skills and Paragon Talents would be true Skill Packages. For example, to speed upi building characters the would have predesigned "event packages" similar to the Background Packages introduced in Inquisitor's Handbook.

So for example, the package deal of "Daemon of a Thousand Eyes" cost 1000XP, grants +5 WP, Forbidden Lore (Daemonology) +10, Hatred (Daemons), Peer (Ordo Malleus), a 200 XP contact (Father Graves, the Librarian of The Collegium Scintilla Collection) etc etc....

I find that more appealling then "Athltic God" and so forth.

Besides, what they are about to present seems to conflict with the stats for the Inquisitors presented in Disciples of the Dark Gods.

I kinda assumed that the Master Skills and Paragon Talents would be like what Ross mentioned with the Psychic powers where they would sell off certain powers to gain availability to the high powered ones. Just a guess but I though you would sell back the required skills to get the Mastery skills then you would only have to advance the mastery skill. I am sure there will be other benefits of having the Mastery skills besides just being skilled with a certain skill set

Peacekeeper_b said:

Which, in my opinion, is a good ting. Those walls of mass text that make those guys (and gal) up make my eyes bleed. If I were to ever be crazy enough to try and use those stats, there'd be no way i would be able to remember everything they could do and would have to pause the game a touch every time something happened so i could go through the massive list of stuff to see if they have anything that would come into play in that given situation.