This thread is for discussing Skills/Talents and the Aptitudes to which they are connected.

I kick it off by saying that Common Lore should perhaps be "Intelligence, General" instead of "Intelligence, Knowledge". Yes, it makes sense that a Lore skill is connected to Knowledge, but this is supposed to be "Common" Lore, so knowledge that is readily and widely available. With the current Aptitudes only very few Specialties could get "Common" knowledge at a reasonable price. This becomes especially ridiculous with skills like "Common Lore (Imperial Guard)" and "Common Lore (War)". Apparently, a Sergeant needs to invest quite a bit of time and effort to understand the organization he is a leader (however low) in.

What I'm seeing is the..,lack, so to speak, of basic skills, and by that I mean the skills with a characteristics and General as Aptitudes.  There is a few (trade, acrobatics, athletics, scrutinize and linguistics), but a few skills that used to be basics no longer are, things like awareness, dodge, logic, charm, inquiry.  Granted, you only get a -20 to your roll now and you can get a skill up to +40 now, but some skills that are able to be used naturally by everyone seems to be 'niche' skills out of reach of most specialty.

Braddoc said:

I agree there should be more skills with a General aptitude descriptor.  There are a lot of skills which should be a little bit easier to acquire.  The -20 for untrained is much more painful than the old "basic skills at half" if your characteristic score is under 40, but seems to allow for you to test most skills now, as only the 4 specialist classifications need be known/trained.  I am still waiting to really get a chance to test the system more extensively, so I cannot give a credible read on if it seems to work alright or not.

-=Brother Praetus=-

I'm running into objections with the way certain skills were merged. Gambling, a thing that anyone can do untrained, got merged into Logic of all things? Demolitions actually got split up between Security (traps) and Tech-Use (setting bombs). I'd argue Demolitions needs to be its own skill more than ever.

To be fair, gambling really is completely dependent on a person's ability to calculate odds and statistics. If you're not applying some sort of logical pattern recoginition or equation while you are gambling, then all your going is guessing at random.

Varn said:

That entirely depends on the game in question - for some games your social skills and 'poker face' are far more important than your actual intelligence and logical ability. I think having Gamble as its own skill and having it use Int/Fel at GM discretion would make far more sense.

Similarly i agree that Demolitions shouldn't have been axed - it may not have had much use in previous 40k games but we finally have the Imperial guard, the masters of ordnance, and suddenly they all have to be trained in lock picking and using computers to be able to use demo-charges and artillery? Doesn't make much sense to me…

My group and I arrived at the conclusion that Awareness, especially, either needs to be Perception+General OR every PC should start with it, but keep it Perception+Fieldcraft to determine how difficult it is to raise beyond the basic level. If you're meant to be the kind of people who might survive your first year in the Guard, basic battlefield awareness and not being ganked by Eldar should be a pretty common skill!

 You need better than starting awareness to keep from having an Ranger make a called shot to your melon and splattering your brains over the landscape. Dem Eldars is neaky gitz.

Fenrisnorth said:

Between high unnatural Agility, chameleonine cloaks and high Stealth skill, a ranger could be pissing on top of your standard issua flak helmet and you'd still fail to notice him no matter how high your Awareness is.

 UA doesn't help you win the opposed check. and conceal is all or nothing; but yeah, good Stealth, high AGI, and Chameleoline does kinda give them a +120% or so to their roll.

Compared to others like Finesse or Fieldcraft, "offense" seems rather lacking in what it affects. Can't really even say its a generalist combat thing…

Fenrisnorth said:

It does, actually… just not in an immediately obvious manner. Unnatural Agility helps you win the opposed check, it just doesn't help pass the Stealth Test.

Assuming, like the Dark Eldar in the Black Crusade book, that an Eldar Ranger has Unnatural Agility (3). With the Agility of 50 and Stealth +20 translated from their statblock in Creatures Anathema, and the +20 from a Chameleoline Cloak, they've got a basic 90% chance to pass a Challenging (+0) Stealth Test by itself… but the overwhelming majority of Stealth Tests are Opposed by someone else's Awareness.

An average Guardsman on patrol, trained in Awareness and with a single advance in Perception, has a 36% chance of passing an Awareness Test.

If both successfully pass (just over 32% of the time), then Degrees of Success are the first port of call to determine who wins. With Unnatural Agility (3), the Ranger gets a bonus Degree of Success, so will score a minimum of 2 DoS on a pass, and a maximum of 10. The Guardsman can score a minimum of 1, and a maximum of 4. If Degrees of Success are tied, then the tie is broken by the highest Characteristic Bonus - the Ranger has an AB of 8, compared to the Guardsman's PB of 3, so the Ranger wins all ties here. This means that the Guardsman needs to roll a 16 or less (3+ Degrees of Success) to have even the slightest chance of success if the Ranger also passes, and only if the Ranger's roll is particularly high.

The Ranger's chance of sneaking past the Guardsman successfully… 78%. Removing Unnatural Agility knocks that down by about 2.5%.

The Guardsman's total chance of spotting the Ranger, all else being equal… a little under 6%, which includes the odds of him passing and the Ranger failing. If the Ranger lacked the Unnatural Agility, that would go up by 2-3%. It isn't much, but it's something.

Admittedly, it matters more when the difference between the two tests isn't quite so extreme, but it still has an effect.

Still, Guardsman being a little more attentive would help their survival chances a lot. Especially as every PC is going to buy Awareness anyway, because c'mon, man, Awareness.

Of course, we all know the best way to spot Eldar is Psyniscience, since their entire species is made up of psykers, even if they're weak ones.

Night10194 said:

Interestingly [and off topic], all eldar have roughy the same psychic strength. They are simply taught to repress it since the gift is dangerous, making most seem weaker than they actually have the potential to be.