The Permanent Talents thing is a little confusing. It is only addressed in one paragraph on p.88 under Talent Trees (where they aren't even described with a term, merely as "marked with a red light"). The actual mechanics (you don't lose the ability to use these Talents if you abandon the Talent Tree you earned them in) are easy enough to understand, but difficult to find.

Further, on the Talent Trees themselves, the same Talent will vary whether or not it has such a Permanent red tag with no obvious rhyme or reason.

It is also not addressed whether or not a PC loses the lower purchasing cost of the Career Skills associated with a discarded Specialization. A min-maxing player would quickly note the value of purchasing and discarding a Specialization early on just to get a future discount on the 4 Skills associated with it. The cost is made up in just 2 Skill Rank advancements, even if it was an out of Career Specialization.

What if someone returns to a Specialization they once discarded? Do they have to buy back all the Talents they once had? what about the Permanent ones -- clearly they can't benefit from buying them a second time? These are clearly unusual cases, but they should be considered.

Finally, on p. 65 in the final paragraph of Acquiring New Specializations , the paranthetical note about where the three Specializations limit comes from is confusing, unnecessary, and reads more as a philosophical design explanation than actual rules content during character creation.

The way I'm reading these, if you buy a talent that doesn't have that little red bar and you later drop the specialization, then the talent's gone and you're out the XP. So even if you later buy back into that specialization, you'd have to re-buy those lost talents.

Sounds rather harsh, but it also helps curb the likelihood of power-gamers trying to "cherry pick" their talents from various specializations, much like how D&D3e all but encouraged players to only take the initial few levels of a prestige class and then either hop back over to a main class or take a couple levels in another prestige class.

That's probably also why some versions of talents (particularly the 5XP and 10XP entries) don't have the red bar but the later, more expensive versions do have them.

The current rule for adding a new specialization talent tree after a character already has three is extremely cumbersome. They should either have a three tree limit or just make adding more than three prohibitively expensive. Doubling or tripling the cost of entry and all talents should do it.

I disagree. It could use more than a single line of text describing its effects.

What you describe would only serve to make the Human "bonus" in-career specialization even worse.

schubudha said:

I agree with you and would lean towards higher costs the more you buy. I also find the fact that a ranked talent can be both permanent and non-permanent confusing, I can see a logic to losing some ability when you switch out specialisations in a talent but feel that it is cumbersome.

cetiken said:

Check the errata - Humans don't have that benefit anymore, they just get 1 rank in 2 different non-career skills now.

Check the timestamp. It was true then.

cetiken said:

I know - I was just pointing out that that isn't an issue anymore.

Losing a few ranks when leaving a specialzation makes sense to me. You still know it but you're losing your edge as your focus is elsewhere.

What happens when you buy back a specialization you previously had is not clear. Do you start fresh? Even being able to select permanent talents again? Can you do this immediately--abandon and then buy it right back?

If the number of talent trees a character could have were unlimited it would also make Dedication unlimited. If this is an option it should be costly.

usgrandprix said:

I think that once you abandon a specialization, all those non-permanent talents go poof. And if you buy back into that specilization at a later date, then you'd need to re-buy all those talents.

So I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn't discard a specialization until you're absolutely sure you're done with it

Donovan Morningfire said:

Amen! I think this is how it works.

I totally agree, that when you leave a specialisation you should maybe lose some of your edge, but at the moment it is a nightmare to keep track of it. Take Doctor - Surgeon appears three times, if you follow one path you could take it twice and have it as permanent, another path and only one instance would be permanent, same with Bacta specialist. Maybe the character sheet could be modified to include two columns - number of ranks permanent / number of ranks non-permanent.

CharlieBananas said:

Just speculation, but it almost seems as though FFG half-expects players to have printed out the talent tree charts from the book and use those to keep track of which talents they've purchased.

Yeah I've not had a lot of time, but I was going to design a blank talent tree sheet, the player would then right in the path they've taken and talent name/page number and permanent non permanent. I'll try making a pass at it next week.

LINK So here is the blank sheet, you write P for passive / A for active in the diamond, the talent name on the dotted line, and put a tick for permanent in the circle or a X if it isn't. try to keep it simple.