My group has now been playing for 8 months and have started attainling levels where some problems that were not apparent from the begining are now showing up.

The game is largely a game of solving mysteries, crimes, and plots. The most important skills to a party would seem to be social skills that allow them to conduct said investigations. Yet Charm, Decieve, Scruitiny are all realitively hard skills to come by in this game. Combat skills even for an Adept are not... I know this because our Adept of all people has killed three demons with melee weapons. He still can't talk his way out of any situation.

As I was looking for a character class that might be a good canidate for the teams "Face" (see the A Team) I figured perhaps Scum would fit the bill nicely... he come's with Decieve and Charm at Rank 1!

Awesome, my scum with lie your knickers off.. Rank 2.. he's Decieve +10.... and then I discover he'll never get better at lying... something you'd consider paramount to a criminal until, get this RANK 8!

Fine, I'll take another approch, I'll charm them I says... RANK6 before I get a +10.

Well at least in a hive of scum and villany I should be able to be the group BS detector? Nope Can't tell the truth from a lie until RANK 5. Scum can't lie and they can't tell when someone is lying to them... sounds more like my naive Adept, not my career criminal.

Well maybe I'm being hard on the scum... maybe the Priest just never gets skills like this?

Well my cleric is no liar. At least not until Rank 2, and he's not the scum's equal if falsehood until Rank 4... but in the end he has a +20 at Rank 7.

He's also no charmer, Rank 3 to charm, Rank 5 to be better than a Scum and Rank 7 before a scum is left commenting... man he's good.

And last my Cleric becomes much more worldly than the Scum at Rank 3 where he can start to figure out someoen is lying to him... as he slaps my scum on the back and says... dude I can't believe you fell for that... you are such a sucker.

Turns out that while my Cleric is not as good as the Scum at things the Scum out to be really good at right out the gate... he turns out better at the trade than the scum faster. Then again you may have a similar view of the cergy as me and consider them to be scum of a differnt cloth.

My real point is that the skill selection in this game seems odd comparred to other games. It feels like a talent tree from a video game, but not very well thought out. There are no characters that stand out as the obvious choice for anything, such as th group leader or primary investigator because skills are all over the place and random.

This is a meer observation, and other people may have another take on it than I do. Maybe you have some insight I do not?

It's the problem with choosing Scum as your career- generally they are underpowered at higher levels. But thankfully, there are plenty of alternate careers for Scum that can make them more useful. See Book of Judgement for some ideas.

There are no characters that stand out as the obvious choice for anything, such as th group leader or primary investigator because skills are all over the place and random.

That's exactly what I like best in this game !

Everys Career has enough versatility to ensure that it never will be useless.

For example, in my last campaign, the Arbitrator was the "Face", with his high fellowship and e good mix of Social Skills, untill he was "killed" by a Slaught's weapon and had no choice but cybernetic resurection.

With so little Fellowship left, he had became far less usefull in his primary role.

Fortunally, his Carrer permitted him to shift to a more fighting role, leaving the Scum becoming the new "Face".

Note that the initial skill level is the important one - because it stops you checking on the awful penalty of 'basic skill'.

After that, yes, all right, you can't get Deceive +20 at rank 3 or 4. But you can buy a shed-load of fellowship and perception advances, which the scummer pays less for than most of his colleagues. Buying Trained Fellowship, after all, is better than an extra level of Deceive as it benefits both Deceive and Charm.

And no, it's not easy to create single-role characters. Which, I find, is good - it stops player characters being one-dimensional and allows the GM to occasionally create genuine tension by forcing the guardsman to try and bluff his way past the guards or the adept to fend off an assassin.