Seem really out of place compared to the rest.

As I've mentioned in another topic, Gunslinger and Blade Dancer should go into respective talents at rank first level. Streamline it more.

Specialization, Hatred & peers though are VERY peculiar.

It seems to me that they should not be granted just based on EXP cost- there should be something else associated with them.

Before everybody jumps at me and mention that you could easily get those in DH 1.0 Using exp, I humbly disagree.

They were associated with ranks & alternate ranks, which represented your association to cults and sects and groups and all sort of flavor that helped justify all of the talents you got- something that's missing this time around.

Not to mention, Specializing for the sake of remembrance seems WEIRD for some reason. I Cant quite put my finger on it but.... There's something off here, maybe the Exp cost for it? Maybe the fact that its too vague?

I am not sure...

I really like the Specialist Talent and it's interactions with Skills - also the fact that basic Remembrance covers all kinds of common knowledge. It's not exactly intuitive from the perspective of older edition, but it seems to work quite neatly. It's really nice considering how vague skills are. Can my Warrior with Specialist (Imperial Guard) test his -10 Tech Use to operate that device? If it's something that would reasonably come up with his IG training, yes he can, but he won't be able to squeeze anything out of that hab-block automatic climate adjuster.

I'd also like to point out the description of the Specialist Talent mentions that a satisfactory explanation should be had for taking any particular specialty, so that is covered already.

You don't think they could be better streamlined - or at least get their own category, closer to skills than talents?

I would call them "Specializations" for those, and Ultimately put in peer and hatred as "elite advances" rather than "General talents"

I know this seems like an irrelevant quibble, but I think that its important to try and be an intuitive as possible.

They don't interact with the rest of the game like the other, actual talents, so I don't think they should be qualified as much. I still feel as if there's something missing to them, perhaps likely due to the lack of flavor of character creation? I am not sure, I will ponder it some more and see if I can come up with something more concrete .

I guess it's a quibble I just don't share. It's actually very intuitive once you dismiss all comparisons to the previous system. Think of it as a two-dimensional chart for describing your competence, where increasing skills adds raw power and the Specialist Talent(s) dictate the broadness of application.

And again, it's very neat that a Specialist Talent granted by your Background choice, combined with how you can attempt tests of all Skills at -10 unless the GM vetoes, easily answers the question of what your character can and cannot attempt and solves the old system's issue of e.g. a starting Guardsmen having no clue about a lot of things a member of the Imperial Guard or PDF should be at least basically trained at.

I am surprised they didn't add the "Talented (Sub-skill)" Talent. while they were at it so that people could further specialize in skills, which are rather lack-luster compared to the talents [though a necessary part of the game].

Would that be too much to keep track of , you think?

It would allow for considerably more diverse characters though.

I am surprised they didn't add the "Talented (Sub-skill)" Talent. while they were at it so that people could further specialize in skills, which are rather lack-luster compared to the talents [though a necessary part of the game].

Would that be too much to keep track of , you think?

It would allow for considerably more diverse characters though.

Nah, it seems to me like a roundabout way to reintroduce the 1e DH skill bloat to a system that's meant exactly to get rid of it.

Remember that characteristics go up to eleven in the new rules, and various skill rolls are ascribed to various characteristics. That's how character diversity seems to go this time around.

That's a very good point actually- with that in mind, I will have to see how the first test session goes on Sunday.

AHA!

I finally got it!

My problem with this, which I Couldn't quite place!

FORBIDDEN LORES>

A rank One character with access to a specialty knows, by RAW, Forbidden lore. Can you imagine? Your rank One and your an "expert" on your organization, or the Inquisition, or Daemons and stuff.

Unless by GM Fiat, all forbidden lore start off at -30, requiring two skill upgrades and two stat advances to be used relatively effectively then.

Or maybe specializations can be tied to specific ranks before you can acquire them? That would allow elite advances to give you access to specializations faster- and would represent having access to this information trough organisation and groups and special training.

Or am I am going back to DH Bloat?

Actually, take a moment to re-read the Forbidden Lore sub-section of the Remembrance Skill: you cannot make Forbidden Lore Tests unless you have the relevant Specialist Talent.

Yes, I know- but once you get the specialist talent [and some people start with a couple], you can already start rolling it rank One.

And technically, you can go ahead and buy "specialist daemonology" rank 1 as well.

Rank seems to be a purely metagame concept in this edition. It's not like DH where rank 1 Tech Priest is a Technomat, and Rank 8 is an all-powerful Magos. That never made much sense anyway, and makes even less sense now that no character creation choice is meant to hard-code any particular social standing into the rules.

So yeah, your Rank 1 AdMech character can totally be an anointed Tech-Priest with at least an ability to glimpse the inner workings of the Machine Cult, and it'd be a shame if your Guardsman who spent last ten years battling Orks and bought Specialist (Orks) to show for it wouldn't know a **** thing about Orks just because all knowledge on Xenos is forbidden.

I guess looking at it from that perspective, its true that, technically speaking, you don't need to start off this game as "brand new acolytes who have never heard or seen anything before in their lives."

An Issue like the one I am describing would likely only come up if there's some sort of discrepancy between the type of game the GM wants to run and the players want to play- and the background and personal experiences of the characters generated [from a story perspective].

A "rank 1" savant which starts off with Daemonology for example but wants to play the novice acolyte that was not part of the Inquisition before, could have simply stumbled onto a daemonic excursion, read a forbidden tome somewhere that opened his mind to this new reality, or has shown some considerable interest in studying and learn the subject matter. He would roll forbidden lore tests with a penalty because of his particular situation.

On the other hand, a "rank 1" savant who wants to play a cloistered old sage who spent his entire life locked up in his office studying the subject matter and has now decided to go out and explore the world to resolve some sort of doomsday prophecy would roll it at +0, despite having the same set of skills and talents as the previous.

So its up to the players and the GM to determine the difficulty of the test depending on the campaign that they want to play in.

@Saldre: it does appear the the varying difficulty of Forbidden Lore tests are already built into the skill.

You are absolutely correct in that it's up to the GM to decide on the starting concept of a DH game: the players recruited in the first session, and may then lack such forbidden knowledges or are they already acolytes prior to the game and have already learned the dangerous lores that the Inquisition has to offer.

And technically, you can go ahead and buy "specialist daemonology" rank 1 as well.

You can't just buy a specialist talent. I read the following text (from page 122) as the there should indeed be a reason for the player to have that particular specialist, and role playing the aquisition seems to be in order.

"Such possibly forbidden knowledge should come with a sufficient tale of how the Acolyte came by this information however, either through prior experience or associations."

And technically, you can go ahead and buy "specialist daemonology" rank 1 as well.

You can't just buy a specialist talent. I read the following text (from page 122) as the there should indeed be a reason for the player to have that particular specialist, and role playing the aquisition seems to be in order.

"Such possibly forbidden knowledge should come with a sufficient tale of how the Acolyte came by this information however, either through prior experience or associations."

I see nothing that'd preclude just saying: "I'm buying Specialist (Eldar) with my starting exp, here's three sentences about how I got the knowledge involved".

Same here.

I don't like putting a lot of pressure on Veto power to the GM in terms of gameplay rule. Not all GMs choose their players, and the less "arbitrary" decisions he has to make, the better to avoid conflict.

The thing is, you're Acolytes from an enormously wide variety of backgrounds, from a Rogue Trader brat who's 89th in line for the Warrant and picked up for their wider experience with the galaxy than most, to a simple Guardsman who happens to have seen some stuff he shouldn't have and survived valorously, and everything in between. It makes sense to allow for the possibility that Acolytes might know some things well out of the common bounds for Imperial citizens, depending on how they met their Inquisitor and why they were chosen. So it feels right to allow for the possibility that a character already has experience with daemons or space-elfs or whatever.

I seriously dislike the weapon prof talents. If someone can shoot a hand cannon, why is it that they are unable to shoot a las pistol, or hand flamer just as well?

Weapons should be skilled in weapon classes rather then types; pistols, rifles, etc.

I seriously dislike the weapon prof talents. If someone can shoot a hand cannon, why is it that they are unable to shoot a las pistol, or hand flamer just as well?

Weapons should be skilled in weapon classes rather then types; pistols, rifles, etc.

I feel that, on the meta level, this is to allow characters to have universal training in some basic weapon classes while still needing to pay for the stronger ones (bolt, plasma, melta, etc.). In-game, proficiency not only means being able to fire it (that's BS or WS), but also how to take care of it, how to operate it, what are the peculiarities of the type of weapon system (like the fact that plasma overheat and can be dropped to avoid burning yourself). Most SP weapons are fundamentally the same, but an autopistol, a plasma pistol and a hand flammer are 3 very different objects.

I still however think that proficiencies should be split between the simple ones (grenade and LT should be universal or nearly so, las, SP, LT, flamme and maybe shock and chain should be cheap) and advanced ones (power, plasma, melta, bolt, launcher, exotic), the later costing 400 while the former only 200 xp.