I've been running a homebrew Ork game for some time now and my players have finally managed to get themselves a ship and get off the planet they've been stuck on for so long.

I thought now would be the best time to transition them into the Rogue Trader game system since I'm really enjoying it.

Unfortunately all my players are Orks and there just isn't enough variety in the Ork classes to allow the characters to be distinct. Rather than trying to invent new Ork classes, make them balanced and useful I thought about completely throwing the class system away.

Make all skills, talents and traits (within reason) available to everyone (while keeping the prerequisites the same). This way the players can still take different roles on the ship by means of choosing to specialize in different things.

Has anyone else tried anything similar?

Am I just asking for trouble?

Will everything dissolve into madness and anarchy without the class structure to support the game system?

I did some continuation on the Rogue Trader To Only War project found here:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/75049-rogue-trader-to-only-war-conversion-peach/

And among the things I've been taking a look at is the Orks. Note that these are highly WIP.

Careers:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jJxTNfjbwodeMlSPL_uoDKrUSmobRkik0Y6Ug_eCF9U/edit?usp=sharing

Skills & Talents:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAtUM94YoONdGRqUFFaRFBUQ2g4cW9KSWZMODIwMUE&usp=sharing

Though these use the Only War system of Aptitudes, I'd guess it's pretty much what you're after.

Note though that at the time of writing, the Weirdboy Talents from Navis Primer isn't in the tables.

We've debated doing something ourselves in our group. Mostly because our players don't like being confined to just one way of doing things.

Only War's aptitude system, or what we call "Affinity", seems to be a step in the right direction. We can group Skills and Talents into what they are influenced by and you can purchase them with the requisite aptitudes/affinities.

It's a big enough project for little enough gain for us as we consistently destroy our GM's attempts at keeping things sane. But it's a nice thought experiment and perhaps an "Open 40K RPG system".

That seems very much like what I am trying to do. I made a list of all the skills I wanted in my game, and then figured on a standard price for all the skills. Disguise for instance is quite costly for an Ork to acquire but a gretchin (yes in this game you can play gretchin) tends to have an affinity for it. Now I am going through all the clans and castes to adjust the affinities as I need to.

Bad Moons for example tend to be good at the mercantile skills (barter, blather etc...) so they either start with training in them or they'll have an adjustment to the cost of the skills. I haven't even started on the talents or traits yet. I may need to look up Only war and check out the affinity system it seems to already have what I'm trying to do well in hand.

Hey guys, really great idea you've got here. I'm working on something similar with Eldar, but would love to see an Ork Suppliment come out too. Would you be oppossed SirFrog if I nicked some of your stuff?

Has anyone else tried anything similar?

Am I just asking for trouble?

Will everything dissolve into madness and anarchy without the class structure to support the game system?

Well they are Orcs… Anarchy is to be expected..

The stories I could tell...

Hey guys, really great idea you've got here. I'm working on something similar with Eldar, but would love to see an Ork Suppliment come out too. Would you be oppossed SirFrog if I nicked some of your stuff?

Certainly not, considering I nicked the idea from Gus to begin with, and really just expanded on the Ogryn Career from Only War. But do send me an email whenever you finish, I'm quite curious.