Hey all,

A quick search didn't find anyone discussing this, so maybe I am missing something. But does anyone else feel like clones got the short end of the stick?

In particular comparing clones with naturals.

Suppose you are building a clone. The first real choice is do your starting skills go in your career or out of your career?

If they are in your career then they are worth 30xp so if you compare clone with natural you could build a natural and buy 2 skills at rank 2 and your natural would have:

+1 wound , +1 strain, +5 xp, +2 out of career skills and ready for anything instead of underestimated. Now underestimated isnt bad at all, but i dont feel its even close to worth all the stuff the natural gets. And even if it were, the fluff of the clone is an ordinary person "albeit in perfect health... unerring precision... an improvement over normal people". Wheras the actual rules indicate that they are strictly worse than normal people; but fortunately get underestimated because they are strictly worse than normal people.

Now suppose the skills you choose are out of career. Now the natural can purchase those two extra ranks, again for 30xp, and you end up with:

+1 wound , +1 strain, +5 xp, and ready for anything instead of underestimated. Which is slightly better, although it feels weird that to get the most out of clone you have to choose two skills to be highly trained in that are at odds with your career. Still I cant imagine ever playing clone as written. I suspect they might have written it to balance against a 110xp natural and then upped the xp on natural and forgotten clone.

Of course the other big thing is people might want to be a clone so they can just be a clone. But I dont see why people should be penalised for that.

So what are peoples thoughts? Am I wrong? Any suggestions for fixing? Anyone got any insights I am missing? Does anyone know of a better place to discuss this?

I just logged on specifically to ask this same question. I don't see how getting 2 rank 2 skills (a 20 point expenditure in career, 40 out including the +10 for rank 1 in two non-career skills) is worth the 35 xp difference between them and one less strain and one less wound point.

I can only guess that they're expecting Underestimated to come up very frequently by having the clone choose a specialty that leans towards opposed checks (social, hacker, etc).

In sheer XP terms, 2 ranks in any two skills is worth 30-50 XP (depending on if those skills are career or non-career skills) whereas 1 rank in two non-career skills is worth 20 XP. This means that the Clone is ahead of the Natural by 10-30 XP based on skills before accounting for other aspects.

<facepalm> Can't believe I didn't read that as they get rank 1 AND rank 2 in two skills. I was thinking they had to pick a rank 1 skill as a career skill then could take the next as rank 2. Didn't realize they could get 2 ranks in any two skills (plus all career picks).

Now it makes sense. Thanks for the clarity HappyDaze.