Hi I have been a Fantasy Flight game player for years and have a few of the Role Playing games including Grimm, Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Warhammer and Deathwatch. My question regards to Rogue Trader which I think is a misprint or a complete misinturpitation of the rules for that game. In Dark Heresy and Deathwatch in the start when create your character you start off with which planet type is your character from, in both Dark Heresy and Deathwatch it is sort of straight forward if you begin on a Hive World in Dark Heresy you start out with the skill speak language(Hive Dilect) in Deathwatch you only start with skill based on your chapter. In Rogue Trader it is where it gets complicated and I have not seen anything in any of the forums that makes any more sense out of it. Ok, let us say you start of your character generation and start of on the same type of world as you did in Dark Heresy a Hive world. Ok, here is the difference that makes no sense you gain the skill speak language (Hive Dilect) as an untrained skill. Later in the book it talks about using untrained skills at half of your attribute and rolling anyhow. Just about all of the skills in Rogue Trader can be used as untrained skills without it being mentioned in your planet of origin. Why would you put in the two books that are the closest, Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader the same concept but make Rogue Trader's skill untrained. What is the point, if you can use it untrained at half your attribute bonus anyhow, why even mention it. I believe Fantasy Flight made a typo and just will not admit it, it is in other worlds other than Hive too, like Forge born you get Common Lore (Tech), and Common Lore )Machine Cult) as untrained Basic skills. What is the point? When you start your profession you get starting skills and then ones you can buy up to 500 xp points for a first level character. Say I took Rogue Trader as my profession ok, here is what you start out with as far as starting skills: Command, Commerce, Charm, Common Lore(Imperium), Evaluate, Literacy, Scholastic Lore(Astronomy) and Speak Language(High Gothic and Low Gothic) Now my character advancements lets me choose a wide variety of skills that I can take, but let us say I wanted to take Hive Dilect as a trained skill instead of untrained, well it is not in the list. It does say that you can ask your game master to allow such training saying I lived on a Hive world for 20 years, so I should have that as a trained skill, but that is left up to the game master. My point is, if they put it in the start of character generation in Dark Heresy and made it a trained skill why is it not a trained skill in Rogue Trader. I guess it would be fine if you did not buy all the books for the Warhammer 40k series and have that to compare with. But I have been a Space Marines fan every since it came out by Games Workshop. It makes it confusing to starting players when you have stuff like this in the start of the book. So can someone at Fantasy Flight who actually helped make the rules tell me what the deal is with this. I am under one notion to either ignore the untrained skills in character generation or make them trained skills to start. Of course there is the other option and not even have them in there if they say untrained at all. Cause an intrepid character could say in and adventure where you go to a planet he was raised in and say I should be able to speak this language I was here for my first 20 years of life and role play it that way. Can someone there give me a clear and comprehensive understanding as to why this was made so complicated, took a couple of hours with my gaming group to come up with an agreement on how to handle it. I chose to make the skills trained instead of untrained skills. Thanks.

Fredrick Keith Stenzel

WALL. OF. TEXT. Hurts Eyes!

It is unfortunate that each new system is slightly different but...

Check Page 74 of RT Core. it explains that:

Only BASIC skills can be used untrained unless your ORIGIN path or Career states otherwise under RAW.

Go to Page 75 Core Rules. Each Skill with BASIC next to its name in the list can be used at Half Characteristic untrained. Advanced skills require training unless your ORIGIN path or Career states otherwise under RAW.

RAW is Rules as Written.

Its how the cookie crumbles in RT. I have allowed my players to have a 'precursor' career as DH careers for a certain amount of XP to fill in the gaps of training (especially to allow them to get multiple melee attacks at Rank 2 if they couldn't already).

Your answer was useless, you are talking about basic skills and advanced skills, that is not what I was talking about. The rules say all Basic skills can be used untrained with the use of half the governing stat. I understand that. My problem was, why do you give in the start of character generation an untrained skill from a planet, such as from page 20 of the chore book: My point being why would you ever be given an untrained skill in character generation when you can use untrained skills without them ever being given to you. I think they should either have been skill given to them or they should gave other skills in their place. It does not make any sense to give you an untrained skill at all in character generation. Maybe an untrained advanced skill, not a basic one as below.

Forge World Characters

First off, down boy. Second you should read his post and the pages he indicated.

Now, simple answer is guess what the skills they are giving you are advanced skills that you get to treat as basic untrained skills. Without which you wouldn't even be able to roll a skill test using them.

Common Lore (any) is an advanced skill which means unless you have it trained, or can treated it as a basic untrained skill you don't get to roll.

What this means is you have some knowledge of these things growing up on a forge world. It comes with the territory, but you have no "official" training in on the subject.

Also, if you had read his post or even bothered to look at the page numbers he referenced you would know that. So I think you are a lot more useless than his post.