Talk:EotI Skills and Talents

Development Notes: Skills

General Skills

The changes made in this section can broadly be split into two categories, those made to reflect the feel of the 41st millennium, and those made to reflect the particular scope and nature of Rogue Trader games. I was also typically following the idea of ensuring that most, if not all, of the typical types of character's skills, would fall into two different attributes.

• Use Technology: This was the first skill change I decided on. It directly replaced Computer, and serves basically the same function. In name change was to keep the feel of technology being arcane, and to open it up to the operation of complex, but not computer controlled technological items.
• Commerce: This is an entirely new skill. Rogue Traders have to deal with finances and markets on a scale well beyond what most games would ever think about. Commercial transactions are also a large part of Rogue Trader, and I didn’t want to overload the Negotiation skill. Splitting off also let me give it a new associated Attribute (intelligence) making the Merchant Prince style character dependent on multiple stats.
• Medicae: 40k renaming of Medicine.
• Helm: In order to keep Pilot from becoming overloaded, and because of how differently they really operate, I wanted to split off the operation of the full sized warp ships from small flyers and lighters. This, once again, also let me associate it with a different Attribute (Cunning) which was both logical, and made the omni-pilot use two attributes.
• Navigate: For the most part, this is just a rebranding of Astrocartography, but I also wanted to roll small scale and land navigation to give this skill some relevance to both non-Navis, and for the rather significant periods of time characters are at a single steller location. Also helped lighten the load on Survival.
• Skullduggery/Stealth/Coordination: This change, more than any, really was done primarily because of the shifted focus of Rogue Trader games vs. smaller scale games like Dark Heresy. The skill list was already starting to bloat from the addition of new skills like Commerce and Helm, and at the same time, the Exploration, Mostly-legal & Macro-scale themes of Rogue Trader diminishes Skulduggery's value. Ultimately, it was easy to distribute its functions to other skills. The portion based on not being noticed moved to Stealth, fine motor skills moved to Coordination, and bypassing security moved to Mechanics or Use Technology depending on methodology.
• Survival: see Navigate
• Streetwise: I don't see this skill so much modified as it was clarified for use in the society heavy, mostly-above-board nature of Rogue Trader. It still, ultimately, comes down to knowing where to look for things in a city, and how to a lot of people a lot of questions to get information.
• Mechanics: Not a change from Genesys, but it is from Dark Heresy Genesys (and original Rogue Trader). Done in part because many of the lay-techs on voidships (and most PCs) would know how to use some of the advanced technology, but wouldn't know (or dare) try and fix, build or modify it. Mostly, however, it was done to make Tech-Priests more specialized (by absorbing more of their XP) due to the comonality of using these skills.

Combat Skills

The changes to this section are entirely based on the different scale and focus of Rogue Trader over even other 40k games like Dark Heresy or Only War. Personal combat, while definitely present and common, is not really the focus of most Rogue Trader games or characters. Furthermore, the vast resources of Rogue Traders mean they routinely use the kinds of much more powerful weapons that would only be special scenario-case situations for others.

• Melee: Combining all of Melee together was a relatively easy choice, in part because exotic nature of most melee weapons a Rogue Trader would use. I considered a heavy/light weapon split, but defining that would have added difficulty, and part of the idea was to de-emphasize combat skills. Rolling in Brawl was also logical, given how unlikely it is for a Rogue Trader character to ever actually be unarmed.
• Ranged: This one was a harder decision then Melee, but ultimately came down to the same logic as Melee above. In particular, the fact that so many Imperial pistols are just shorter-ranged versions of the longarm helps. Splitting off the heaviest of weaponry also make this combined version more palatable.
• Emplaced: I needed some kind of reasonable, defined cutoff between weapons governed by "Ranged" and those governed by the next skill up. After trying a few different options, I settled on how the weapon is moved as the main skill definer. Beside being logical and making a nice use for Suspensors and Mounts attachments, it also helps distinguish vehicle crews from the infantry. Being skilled with a battle cannon no longer makes one a rifle marksman.
• Gunnery: This skill started with Voidship cannons, where it made little sense for one's personal agility to influence the accuracy of a weapon battery fired by a thousand crewmen. Further consideration made the addition of Artillery and other system-fire / bombardment to this skill a good way to both fill it out and provide a logical cutoff for the Emplaced skill.

Social Skills

Ah, one of the hearts of Rogue Trader, and reasons I wanted to use Edge of the Empire, then Genesys for Rogue Trader. This section is kept almost entirely the same.

Negotiation: Akin but opposite of Streetwise above, negotiation wasn't so much of a modification as a limitation. I wanted Negotiation to be focused on personal exchanges rather than big institutional buying and selling. See Commerce above for the remainder.

Knowledge

This was always going to be a big section to modify and build. The nature and control of knowledge are very different in 40k than in most space-opera setting (or most setting in general). The first step, clearly, was to split the section between Forbidden Lore and Regular Knowledge.

In theory, it would have been easy to bring all the knowledge over from Rogue Trader, but that would have been an excessive number of skills for Genesys. I needed to pare it down. So I started with the Forbidden ones. Technology, Xenology, and Warp were obvious ones. It was also easy to roll Demons and Psychers into Warp – they’re all related after all. I wrestled for a while with the rest of them, trying to figure out how to combine them before I realized they were all, essentially, secrets about the Imperium itself. Also, Once I realize I could have both a Forbidden and non-Forbidden version of the same Knowledge, the just calling the catagory "Imperium" became obvious.

With the Forbidden Lores set, I started on the Knowledge. With four Knowledge-like Forbidden Lore skills already established (compared to EotE’s six total, or Dark Heresy Conversion's three) there wasn't room for much more without bloating the skill list inappropriately. Knowledge Imperium was an unavoidable choice as the most basic of knowledge, and Knowledge Education seemed like a good skill to separate the scholastically educated from the bulk of socity. For a little while I considered leaving the skills at that, then realized I should add a couple of more focused skills for the major themes of the game. I considered adding ‘Technology’, but realized that too little was known by the common population to make a worthwhile skill, plus it only existing as Forbidden helps reinforce that part of the setting. Instead, I added Astromancy for the extensive space-based nature of the game, and Warfare because there is only war. Though honestly, these last to still might end up getting dropped later.

Develpment Notes: Talents

This section was surpassingly easy. For one, it only took 22 changes total. These changes generally fell into one of three categories:

• Renaming medical or mechanical talents in order to make them sound less "Star Wars" and more "Mechanicum"
• Clarifying pilot talents to refer to aerospace craft, piloting, driving and similar.
• Removing the purely computer related talents. I considered keeping these, but they don't fit the atmosphere of 40k.