Seeing as they’ve been such a popular topic since Ross’s designer diary mentioned them, and there are a lot of different ideas about what people are expecting of, and thinking about them, Ross has given the playtesters permission to talk in a bit more detail about Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents.

When work was beginning on developing Ascension, the folk at FFG created a pile of rank 8 characters, to get a better idea of what characters would be like when they were at the stage from where the Ascension rules would take over.

One of the obvious problems with such characters was the sheer number of skills and talents that were listed on the character record. Finding a way to streamline these lists was the philosophy behind Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents.

I’ll discuss one example of each to illustrate how they work.

The Mastered Skill that has already been mentioned is Athletic Mastery, so let’s stick with that one. Athletic Mastery covers the skills Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge and Swim. The Mastered Skill appears on the career advance tables, and if you spend XP to buy this advance, the character then counts as not only having all of the associated skills, but also having all of them at +20. You can then remove all of those skills from your character’s skill list, and replace them with the single entry ‘Athletic Mastery’.

If a character already has all of the associated skills at +20, from buying them individually through their career, then you just assume that the character has Athletic Mastery, remove all of the individual skills and replace them with the Mastery skill.

You don’t get any extra benefits for having a Mastered Skill over and above what the skills themselves allow you to do; it is basically a means to streamline and condense the information on your character sheet.

Yes, it does allow characters to become proficient with a whole whack of skills all at the same time, with a single advance purchase. But each Mastered skill occurs on the advance tables only for careers to which they are suitable, and you can therefore assume that the character will already have some talent in or inclination for the skills that the Mastered skill covers, so it’s not like the character overnight develops ability with skills they have never had any interest in before.

Paragon Talents are similar. Each includes a number of Talents, which the Paragon Talent replaces in order to save space on the character sheet. You can also gain a Paragon Talent either by buying it from the advance tables, or by simply having the associated Talents already then replacing them with the Paragon Talent.

A lot of the Paragon Talents though, offer an extra ability or advantage over and above what the Talents it is composed of provide individually.

For example, one of my favourite Paragon Talents is Storm of Blows. This Paragon Talent includes the Talents Ambidextrous, Dual Strike, Lightning Attack, Swift Attack and Two-Weapon Wielder (Melee).

Taken as the RAW presents them in Dark Heresy, having all of these Talents will allow you to wield two melee weapons, getting three attacks with one of them and a single attack with the other, with a –10 WS penalty for doing so. Alternatively, you can make a Dual Strike, combining two attacks into a single strike: as Dual Strike uses a full action, you cannot get your extra hits from Lightning Attack in the same round.

There are a few extra bonuses you get from having the Paragon Talent. Firstly, you suffer no WS penalty for two-weapon wielding. Your two extra attacks for Lightning Attack while also two-weapon wielding aren’t for one weapon only; you may divide your four attacks between your two weapons as you please, making two attack with each weapon if you want. The other big advantage offered is that you can use two of your attacks to make a Dual Strike, and still get the other two individual attacks on the same round; you can even use your four attacks to make two Dual Strike attacks on the same round!

There are several other Paragon talents that offer a similar ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ effect.

Hope that helped to clear up the mystery a bit, and shows that Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents are a worthwhile feature of the Ascension rules.

Savage said:

No. I disagree. Your well thought out and information filled post, while appreciated, only goes to prove that these "package" deals are not innovative, worthwhile or even interesting. They are simply a collection of skills and talents added together for ease of creating "higher level" characters and for ease of book keeping, but still require the player to know what skills they cover, what talents they cover and what each of those skills and talents do.

Unless we get a complete skills and talents book or chapter in a upcoming book, I will still have to flip between Dark Heresy, Inquisitor's Handbook, The Errata and The Radical's Handbook to see what all I can do with each and every skill and talent.

As for the "special rules bonus" for Paragon Talents, it sounds more to me like a clarification or "mini errata" on how the similar and related talents work together. Instead of ditching the talents that are very similar and streamlining them, they just "merge them" at level 9.

I am not a play tester, I am also not part of the FFG design team for the 40K games, nor am I part of the team for what should go in the sneak peaks and designer diaries. What I am is a fan of the game who has played it since it first came out, has extensive history with its sister game WFRP (1E and 2E) and love the game as it is (more or less).

However, if I was able to give grades to some of these efforts, I would definately give this a D-, and that is only because some of the other factors in the book sound pretty nifty.

Paragon Talents and Mastered Skills, epic fail.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Then clearly you've got a different definition of errata than I do. The description given for Storm of Blows does bring together a lot of similar talents, yes... but the ability to make multiple Dual Strikes as a single action, or to freely allocate additional attacks from Lightning Attack to either weapon used are advantages - they're not standard features that any character with those talents is capable of doing.

Thing is, while we've been shown what these Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents are (that is, what mechanical function they perform - it's useful shorthand to say that X new ability encompasses the A, B and C talents, because we already know what those do... but I wouldn't expect a supplement to be written that way, and I know I couldn't get away with writing a supplement that way), we've not seen how they're presented, which is equally important, and seems to encompass a good deal of your criticism of them (having to refer back to the rulebook to use them... which, frankly, is a bit of a non-argument, IMO. It's a supplement... of course it requires the use of, and refers to, the Core Rulebook).

Savage said:

Thanks for the write-up.

Question: let's say you want to take Athletic Mastery.

1) You already have Climb +10, Dodge +20, Acrobatics +10 and Swim at +0. You don't have Contortionist.

2) You have all the skills as taken, and Dodge at +20.

Would the xp cost for taking Athletic Mastery differ for the two scenarios? Basically what I'm getting at is: do you get a benefit from having bought skills at higher skill levels earlier? Or do you 'lose' whatever xp you sunk into these skills? Will someone with every skill but one at +10 pay the same as someone who only has two of the skills at all?

Awesome, thanks for the write-up; something like this for Mastered Skills was one of my bets, and I'm not disappointed that this is how it turned out to be .

High-level play is always going to be more complicated and need more familiarity with the rules, so something like this makes a lot of sense - despite what others here say.

Really looking forward to this book.

So Mastered Skills are exactly as I'd described them in the original thread. The one thing that mollifies me somewhat is that they will be so far down the progression that the other skills will have been mostly collected already. I have less of a problem with a character possessing 3 of 5 skills some at +20 others with no plus and then jumping straight to the mastery skill as it does make some sense that those skills will combine to produce the other ones.

So long as a character can't go from 0 to perfect in every skill I don't have a problem with mastered skills, altbough I'm not sure how much ease of use it will give as you'll still have to know the skills anyway.

I assume it would look something like:

Athletic Mastery (Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge and Swim)

Which takes up one line as opposed to five lines. And as we would know the skill is at +20 for being Mastered we can get that from the sheet without too much trouble.

It's really just condensing the information.

I've recently been thinking about the 'group' skills (knowledges etc) and streamlining them slightly by having Knowledge as the base skill and learning each skill as part of that which means the mastery level will be the same for each skill in the group (ie if I have knowledge +10 and the knowledges imperium and arbites, then they are both at +10). It's a little abstract but easier to keep track of.

Hellebore

N0-1_H3r3 said:

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Maybe, yeah, I see a little what you are saying. And I will disagree, it is not a non-argument. It is a valid point that the skill descriptions have spilt over 3 books and extra rules for talents in the errata.

And as a personal opinion, I would rather the skill/talent bloat be fixed by removing redundancies such as two different styles of multi attacks that work off having a similar talent pool. I would rather see the attack charactertistic brought into the game as it is far more simpler for me to use a foe and know he has multiple actions by looking for the bold letter A followed by a # then to look through a bunch of (how did that one poster put it?) "EYE BLEEDING TEXT" LOL.

As I said before, overall I love Dark Heresy as a system, there are just things I dont like and at present, I dont like the direction Acension may be going in.

Its a wait and see moment, as the book isnt out, we dont have the advantage of seeing the finished product and the designer diaries are not helping clear up these IMPORTANT factors. Maybe we will get a real preview soon.

Hellebore said:

Our group has simply bunched together a lot of the knowledges. The 10 common lores are now 5 e.g. We found that a lot of the knowledges are just too esoteric - using 100 xp on a skill you might use once in an entire campaign feels pretty wasted. In addition we don't have an Adept in our cadre.

I know others disagree with this approach, but I've always found the role-playing games with broader knowledge skills to be more practical, if less realistic. The most extreme example would probably be the World of Darkness setting with its 'Science' skill (not sure if this still applies in the last edition), which was a bit TOO broad.

Nihilius said:

Perhaps ditch the different lore ategories, such as common lore and scholastic lore and just have LORE. The difference between the lores then become a test difficulty modifier. Common lore knowledge would be at +10 or +20, scholastic lore at -10 or-20 and everything in between would be general knowledge, but not too open.

I suppose Mastery skills to cost the same as if advancing the individual skills to +20 (at whatever it costs in the standard career path) then converting it to the corresponding Mastery. That would be consistent with the statement that every skill at +20 can immediately be converted into the Mastery skill (if the career allows the Mastery in the first place). Also everything else would be stupid (and not just save space but leak XP and lead to a lot of GM arguing to undo the learning of skills to +0 in order to then get the Mastery... or perhaps that is to be part of the transition).

There might still be some problem with taking alternate ranks to get/advance skills cheaper. That's a GM call.

If I have to write down on my character sheet what a Mastery skill encompasses in order to know what it does (as in "Athletics (Acrobatics, Climb, Contortionist, Dodge, Swim)") it may as well be just "Acrobatics +20, Climb +20, Contortionist +20, Dodge +20, Swim +20, Athletics +20" with Athletics having the prerequisite of the other skills and giving its extra uses with the skill.

I don't see what the problem is honestly.

While suddenly having some skills doesn't make a whole lot of sense (Contortionist being a good example), the system for Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents doesn't strike me as bad. It strikes me as necessary.

BYE

I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about. It's a minor feature that will make bookkeeping easier, speed up initial character generation, and might even help people familiarise themselves with the lesser used or understood skills and talents (maybe).

Peacekeeper_b said:

I gotta side with Peacekeeper_b on this one really. His above comment absolutely reflects my thoughts when I read savage's so-called clarification. The Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents just appear to be a lumped up heap of things we already have in other sourcebooks or the core rules, just creating more and more need to look individual things up. I'd rather write 5 more words on my character sheet for 5 individual skills to be honest, therefore clarifying my characters abilities for myself as the player and the gamemaster as well. No one I know likes to flip pages in the middle of the action for minute after minute.

Also, the Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents seem to be a desperate attempt to put some more rules for the rules-lawyering and 'character builder' crowd into a sourcebook which might otherwise be lacking on the part of actual game information. *shrugs* Just feels like it to me. I wonder though why there'd be need for them in the first place - the Ascension book will be stuffed with other options for characters, ascended careers, transition paths etc. etc. Thus imo we don't really need the MS and PTs, but that's just me.

A good and interesting sourcebook doesn't need many stats and mechanics at all, just awesome fluff and background material, but that's off-topic and perhaps fertile ground for another topic on another day.

Malefic Sorcerer said:

The only page-flipping that's gone on in my DH Ascension campaign was when one of the characters went to grapple someone. There's not been any page flipping in connection to their mastered skills or paragon talents and the group all like it as a system both for ease of advancement and streamlined character sheets.

Malefic Sorcerer said:

'Seems like'?

It's not. It doesn't engender any more rules lawyering. I'm not sure what a 'character builder' crowd is meant to be. I infer it's people who have badwrongfun by creating characters. Tsk tsk, naughty character builders.

Evilref said:

Refers to people who spend insane amounts of time with calculations how to min-max their characters to be. More often than not the end result will not be a character in the sense of the word, but a mere lump of stats on a sheet whose antics and mannerisms will be quite close to those of its player. Hope that clears it up for you.

I think that ultimately all of the bitching and moaning, from both camps, about the mastered skills and talents is only happening because FFG haven't told us what else is going to be in the book yet.

The book mentions being suitable for all levels of character, but also claims to be the "next step" up when you hit max rank. Which is it?

Simplifcation of rules - good.

Extra information on making badass villains - good.

Continuations of various career paths - good.

New content? - Nothing completely new and innovative has been mentioned yet. All i'm seeng is people hinting at which RT mechanics are being brought in, and frankly my entire gaming group were more than a little dissatisfied with RT. We had to wait months for it to arrive, tried to play a couple of different games and it just went nowhere. Starship mechanics were bare to say the least, and the Wealth mechanic was far too wishy-washy.

Give us more expansions like Inquisitors handbook and Radicals handbook (minus the missing content and repeated artwork pleas!) FFG.

Kasatka said:

Hey, we haven't gotten much of a look at Ascension yet. I'm sure there's plenty of new equiptment in there. After all, I think I speak for at least a few others in that another gear book wouldn't be that good at this point. We already have two books chock full of awesome new options. I might have come out in the past for support for a "Puritan's Handbook" of sorts in the past, but now I really see that such a book wouldn't be that useful, at least not at this point. Ascension looks like it will roll out a whole new and fun way to play the game. It makes sense that FFG would show us some of those new rules first.

What RT mechanics are being brought it? The only things so far that are adapted from RT is the fettered/unfettered/push Psychic system for the DH psychic rules, a move I support wholeheartedly, and Influence that works a bit like the wealth system in RT. It's still part of the DH "battle-for-mankind's-soul" world, and not the "getting-rich-beyond-Imperial-Space" in Rogue Trader. Perhaps you don't like the Starship mechanics but they're not coming up in Ascension and it looks like Influence willl be a bit different from Wealth and after all, FFG has had time to perfect that idea.

I don't quite see where you're getting the "bitching and moaning" vibe from. Sure, some people aren't that impressed but that's only because so far they seem to be about streamlining and nothing more.

To be fair, the Paragon Talents are unique enough to have a purpose outside of streamlining. As per the Berserker Talent, It looks like most of the unique talents probably greatly increase capability within a themed domain.

I'm intrigued by what Heightened Reactions is going to grant...

Slightly OT, but Ascension is now listed as 'On the Boat'. From your experience, how long does that usually mean before it hits stores?

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

About a month, maybe two especially if you're ordering through Amazon.

I wasn't too blown away with the whole I dea of packaged Paragon Talents being a "new" feature, until I saw the example of Berserker. The added special feature of getting to frenzy as a free action that you woulnd't get if you baught the talents separately. Mastery Skills sound great with the addition of the specialities to give you that extra degree of success. Characters should end up being more effective at what they do, that's all I wanted out of Ascension for my character.