Monthly Archives: March 2013

Rats for the Cure 2013

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Rats for the Cure Banner

Somehow, I missed that this year’s Battle for the Cure was scheduled for April 6 until just a few days ago.

It’s something that I look forward to every year, so I signed up and immediately got a bug up my ass about painting something new for it.

I’m a long way away from having a pink unit, much less a pink army, but a new model’s certainly progress, right?

Anyway, I’ve had the BaneLords Blunt-Claw model in my bits tub for a while, so I pulled him out, put him together, stuck a Bloodletter banner on him. Nothing fancy at all.

Rats for the Cure Warlord 1

Rats for the Cure Warlord 2

Rats for the Cure Warlord 4

Rats for the Cure Warlord 3

Hadn’t really thought through that it’d be basically a fat, gross naked mole-rat, but it is what it is.

I’m quite pleased with how the freehand on the banner came out. That’s probably the best freehand I’ve managed yet.

2013-03-31 16.51.53

Kickstaller

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State of the Kickstarter

Is there anything more depressing than really looking at the state of the Kickstarter campaigns you’ve contributed to?

Look at all that red. Ugh!

Some stuff has gotten closed out but certainly not enough and barely any of it on time.  I mean, the results of Swords & Wizardy are great, but dang: they showed up five months late? Zpocalypse turned up a full six months late.

I’ve got high confidence about some stuff: W20 (very surprised to realize it’s several months late), the sundry LotFP campaigns will be worth the wait and will show up eventually. They keep posting stuff to 1650, though Sigmar only knows when I’ll have it in my hands.

Other stuff I’m less confident about: I fully expect the Jorno portable folding keyboard is vaporware at this point, and that Scott Starrett has ripped a bunch of people off. I’ve been pissy about Tectonic Crafts for a while. In fact, mid-post, I realized that we’re fast approaching a full year since the campaign funded without any sign of shipping… so I requested a refund. (I requested a refund for the Jorno as well, but it sounds like people are actually getting them from ArchyDan while Starrett has gone as quiet as Maliszewski but without the tragic context.)

It’s shocking that I still go anywhere near Kickstarter: I threw in for Hell Dorado (which I honestly have low expectations for, given that the only thing I can think of when it comes to Cipher and Hell Dorado is how badly they screwed up in bringing it over), and I’m eyeballing Sails of Glory (which is something I might play with my father, once).

Is it unfair that I really, desperately need Reaper to ship my Bones this week? I very, very much want them to break the cycle. They’re shipping stuff now. If it doesn’t get here this week, it’ll probably be less than a month late. For crowdfunding, “less than a month late” is exemplary punctuality… but man, I want a green row to break up all that red.

Where I’m at with 40K

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Rogue Trader Cover

(In which your humble author posts something lengthier than a quick picture that doesn’t include railing against Big Google.)

No Wednesday Workbenches for the past couple of weeks due to a confluence work travel, an ongoing pet crisis, and hitting the eject button on Google wherever I can.  I’d say “sorry” about that, but really: even if I had done them, they’d look remarkably like the last two. 

That’s not surprising, because upkeeping the hobby blog is part of how the hobby shakes out for me.

Things haven’t been totally dead on the non-hobby-blog hobby front, though: progress on Sammael and the Ravenwing Librarian has been steady if slow.  I’ve had a couple of kits in my assembly bag for a few weeks now, though I’ve only just started getting to them.

I have to cop to feeling more than a little overwhelmed, though: Dark Angels just came out in January, and I’m only just getting around to them while Daemons dropped what feels like days ago and now it looks certain that new Tau will be shipping before my next paycheck.

Very much too much of a good thing.  All of my armies (I don’t count the assembled but generally unpainted Orks) are getting updated all at once is a good problem to have… though I’m sure that in three years, at the bottom of the update cycle, I might feel differently.

Dark Angels

Ravening Biker

I’m pushing ahead with the Dark Angels. I’ve already got the models, after all.   This is what I’m building towards:

Ravenwing – 1850 points

HQ
Sammael – Corvex
Librarian – Bike, Level 2, Force Axe

Elites
Terminators x5 – Power Fist/Stormbolter x5, Cyclone Missile Launcher
Terminators x5 – Power Fist/Stormbolter x5, Cyclone Missile Launcher

Troops
Ravenwing Bikers x3 – Veteran, Plasmagun x2
– Attack Bike – Heavy Bolter
Ravenwing Bikers x3 – Veteran, Plasmagun x2
– Attack Bike – Heavy Bolter
Ravenwing Bikers x3 – Veteran, Plasmagun x2

Fast Attack
Black Knights x5 – Huntsmaster, Grenade Launcher x1
Ravenwing Darkshroud

Heavy Support
Whirlwind
Whirlwind
Vindicator

I’m not certain about the list or anything; this is just what I’m building towards.  We’ll see how it shakes out if I ever get out to the store.

Chaos Daemons

Chaos Beastmen

I’m skipping Daemons. For now. I haven’t gotten halfway through the book, even. I think they’ll be a lot of fun, and when I do come back to updating my list to a renewed Maximum Khornination, I’ll enjoy it… but I just can’t get caught up in it now.  TOO MUCH GOING ON.

Tau Empire

Farsight

Tau, on the otherhand…

The Tau Empire was my first 40K army. I won’t claim that I ever knew what the hell I was doing with it but it’s definitely got a place in my heart.  For the past what, year? two? I’ve said that I want to come back to them and have been waiting for a new book.

Well, it’s here, so it’s go time.

No clue what I’ll do with it beyond start from scratch with a paint scheme very much like my original one (which I think had some really good choices in it) but updated. I’ve learned a lot since I returned to the hobby (was it seven?) years ago, and I’m looking forward to applying it.

Orks

Orks

The Orks aren’t going anywhere. I’d be really excited to get back to painting them, except Games Workshop seems pretty determined to drown me in new stuff I need to play around with.  

I do have a list for them that I’m pretty happy with. It’s seen some play, but not nearly as much as I’d like. Since this post turned into a my-state-of-40K, I probably should vomit it out.

Orks, 1750

HQ
Warboss – Warbike, Power Klaw, Attack Squig
Big Mek – Kustom Force Field

Elites
Lootas x7
Lootas x7

Troops
Shoota Boyz x30 – Stikkbombs, Nob w/ Power Klaw, ‘Eavy Armour, Bosspole
Shoota Boyz x30 – Stikkbombs, Nob w/ Power Klaw, ‘Eavy Armour, Bosspole
Nob Bikers x5 – [Power Klaw x1], [Big Choppa, Bosspole], [Big Choppa, Waagh! Banner], [Big Choppa] x2

Fast Attack
Dakkajet – TL Supa Shoota x3
Dakkajet – TL Supa Shoota x3
Warbuggies x3 – TL Rokki Launcha x3

Heavy Support
Killa Kans x3 – Grotzooka x3

(Finally, it’s a good thing to start doing actual posts; it’s a great way to shake out how direly I need to update the CSS on this sucker.)

If you see something, save something!

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Evernote

I used to use OneNote, desultorily, to keep some notes and, like, format them and stuff. Nothing aggressive in terms of data capture; just kind of a place that I’d sometimes into which I’d put data and sometimes out of I’d pull data.

About a month ago, I dropped OneNote for Evernote and started aggressively dumping anything and everything I thought I might want to return to into it.   This is entirely a side-effect of it being so much easier to put information, meaningfully, into Evernote.  Because it’s so easy, I’ve been that much more aggressive.

I’ve felt pretty dang good about this.

“Interesting? Bam– saved!  Save it all, Search knows its own.”

Why is this relevant to the blog and interesting to you?

Today, I saw this post by Old School Terminator.

Old School Terminator is going into the pyre alongside our community page, about 150 of our old posts, a few smaller features and (for the time being) our other authors.

Although I totally grok burnout, I don’t really understand the decision to go back and delete content that you’ve previously released. It’s out there, it’d done: I fail to see how the decision to stop writing correlates to the decision to remove what one’s already written.

It’s not my content, though, so I don’t really get an opinion, I suppose.  It’s a shame, because OST and DFG has really been a solid blog full of neat stuff over the years.

Where I’m going with this is: when you see something you think might be useful, save it.  Don’t bookmark it.  Don’t assume you’ll be able to Google it up later. Just capture that info in a tool (OneNote, Evernote, PDFs, whatever).

Links aren’t for forever.

Switched to WordPress!

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So, obviously, the move from Blogger to WordPress has gone very smoothly.

Content was pulled over without a hitch.

I’ve clearly got a lot of layout & look-and-feel stuff that I still need to do, but that’s just a matter of sitting down and powering through tweaking the CSS.

Need to find a good slideshow plugin. Also, a good blogroll plugin.

In a perfect world, I’d love to find a utility that would parse through all of my posts, download the images from Picasa Web, then upload them to my blog, updating the image references. Such a thing should be technically feasible, but I certainly don’t know enough about WP (yet) to know how to do something like it. Am I the first person to want to do this?  Does such a tool exist?

Also, I’ll have to ping out to blogrolls to make sure they have my updated feed.

Then: Blogger goes down and gets a redirect to here.

 

Responding to Google Reader’s Immanent Shut-Down

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In not-mini-related news, Google is killing off Google Reader on July 1. Reader’s a key tool in how I use the internet (in the past I’ve asserted that if you don’t use Reader, “You’re doing the Internet wrong”), so I’m pretty steamed about it.

I’ll get over the BLINDING RAGE this news inspires in me, but what I hope I don’t get over is the lesson this represents: do not over-rely on a single service that might be arbitrarily dropped. This is why Lifehacker suggests you get your own personal domain for e-mail; sure, people can reach me at gmail.com, but what if something happens to Gmail? I can point rushputin.com to whatever I want it to.

What if something similar happened to Blogger? I’m fast approaching my fifth year of blogging on WarpstonePile; it would be devastating for that to just vanish in a cloud of smoke one day.

Now, you might never expect them to kill Blogger; but then, I certainly never expected them to kill Reader… and with Blogger, there’s an active movement within some groups (the OSR) to shift discussion out of blogs and into Google+ (which I’ve never thought wise).

So, it’s a good thing I own WarpstonePile.com. You are accessing this via WarpstonePile.com and not WarpstonePile.Blogger.com, right? One is future-proof, the other, very not-so-much.

So: over the next few months, I’m going to try to transition as much as I can out of the Google world and into something else. I’ve been a .NET developer for what’s fast approaching a decade: I’m already dependent on Microsoft to meet my technical needs: why shouldn’t I rely on them for e-mail, for example?

I doubt I’ll be wholly successful: I don’t know of an alternative to Authenticator (which everyone should use for everything they can use it for). I’m already getting heartburn from trying to move to Firefox out of Chrome.  I’m going to try, though, and in doing so mitigate the risk inherent in overly relying on a company with a proven record of taking things that work away.

This is important: as a result, I fully expect to transition both this blog and my considerably less active RPG-focused OwlbearStabbings out of Blogger and into WordPress over the next few months.

  • This could get a little dicey around here. They might look bad, they might go up or down, or not work correctly. There might be a wagonload of broken image links. Bear with me on all of that.
  • Make sure your links, etc, all refer to WarpstonePile.com and not anything with Blogger or BlogSpot in the address. My domain will go to wherever this blog’s new home is. The Google-centric URL will continue to point to Blogger, which will eventually get a “Hey, I’ve moved!” and nothing more.
  • I really appreciate your patience in this.

Wednesday Workbench

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Not much progress from last week. Painting this big ass hunk of metal without rubbing said paint off of the model is slow-going… not to mention that free time’s been pretty scarce this past week.

I’m done with the Librarian, though; the power-axe I’d been waiting on showed up earlier today (along with paint for the Leviathan and the Daemon Codex).

Speaking of which; that’s going to be some processing to do, there.

Complicating the Simple: Replacing the WFRP 2E Career Progression

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One of the things that came up last session was that the WFRP 2E career system doesn’t really jive with what I’m doing with the game.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the flavor the career system brings to the table and, were we doing a more urban or sandbox-style game, it would probably fit like a glove.  Instead, we’re doing a more traditional murderhobo (or, rather, “We’d be murderhobos except we’re so terrified of being killed by other murderhobos”) style game (which is by design).

Now, I know that the career system is part of the whole point of WFRP, but I don’t really care. We’re using the WFRP 2E system because I’m extremely comfortable with the system, having played in a Dark Heresy (its descendant) game for probably longer than any other game at this point. (Exalted might be a close second, but I doubt anyone would claim that it has a system one would describe as “salvageable”. Ideas, absolutely, but the not system as a whole.)  So, I’m comfortable with it. It’s flexible, does what I need it to do, and gets out of the way.  That’s what we want, right?

But when the PCs are sprinting away from danger and trying to find a safe place to not be murdered or eaten by bears… none of those careers really matter. They’re all Vagabonds.  Before that, they were Militiamen and Camp Followers. Before that they had lives doing stuff for which the Career System was useful.

There are a couple of fixes for this:

  • Just roll with it. Stick to the RAW, let everyone switch into the Vagabond (or similar career) if they’re so inclined. One PC (the Noble!) did that a few sessions ago.
  • Fiat them all to be Vagabond (or similar career). “Guys, all of you have just exited your careers to one of the following careers. For free. Am I not merciful?  Am I not merciful!?“
  • Do something complex and strange but more open-ended that’s a riff on how Only War handles advances.  What?
(Because the first two options are negligibly easy and probably advisable: let’s put them aside. I’m going to talk about what I cooked up in terms of the more complex approach.  What follows is probably a terrible idea, but sometimes it’s fun to just overcomplicate things.)

Only War came out a few months ago, and I’m really digging its approach to the 40K RPG system.  Instead of the weird class-based but also pseudo-level, pseduo-skill buy system that works but is awkward and initially kind of confusing, it makes things very open-ended.

Players still pick a career. Instead of coming with a list of advances open to that career (or a list of lists of advances, as with the other 40K RPGs), they come with some special abilities (not germane) and a list of aptitudes. Aptitudes are meta-abilities; what a career is good at. A Medic’s Aptitudes,  for example, are BS, Int, Per, WP, Fieldcraft, and Knowledge.  Every advance  is associated with two aptitudes: how many of those Aptitudes character has determines what the advance costs the character. Medicae is Int and Fieldcraft; a Medic who has both Int and Fieldcraft pays less for Medicae advances than, say, a Weapons Specialist who has the Fieldcraft Aptitude but not the Int Aptitude.
Characters can (generally) take whatever advances they want… but XP costs encourage them to take advances in things that the character at which they should be good and not things at which they shouldn’t be good. So… sorta like the WFRP career system, but less of a straight-jacket (“You’re a Fisherman, you are incapable of knowing Etiquette.”)
Of course, the 40K Skills and Talents aren’t quite the same as the WFRP Skills and Talents, and mapping those WFRP careers to the Aptitude list…  Fortunately, the day after the session I needed to be mentally pseudo-active while vegging. Doing that sort of thing was exactly what I needed that afternoon.  Here are the results.

At a high level: characters still roll their starting careers. They get their skills and free advance as per the core book.  Based on their career, they receive a total of six Aptitudes (some of which are automatic, some of which may be selected from a list) that determine how my XP different advances cost from that point going forward.

If you’re interested, all of my work in assembling this can be found in this spreadsheet.  This is basically the scratch paper I used to make sure stuff looked reasonably like what the career system promoted.

For starters: the Aptitudes

Aptitudes
WS T WP
BS Ag Fel
S Int
Offense Defense Finesse
Engineering Larceny Perception
Animals Leadership Social
Knowledge Magic Wilderness
General

Each of the Characteristics gets an Aptitude. Then, there are broad Offense, Defense, and Finesse Aptitudes; these should, I think, be self-explanatory.  I tweak the other OW Aptitudes to make them more WFRP-appropriate. Psyker becomes Magic, Fieldcraft gets split up quite a bit, Tech becomes Engineering, for example. General is a catch-all; everyone automatically has General.

Then, I match each Skill and Talent with a pair of Aptitude.  This was easier than I’d have expected: Characteristics were a straight-pull over while every Skill is already associated with a Characteristic (and, therefore its Aptitude), and the second Aptitude was, for the most part, obvious.  Talents were a little trickier, but worked themselves out.

Characteristics
WS WS Offense
BS BS Finesse
S S Offense
T T Defense
Ag Ag Finesse
Int Int Knowledge
WP WP Magic
Fel Fel Social
Attacks WS Offense
Wounds T General

Skills
Animal Care Int Animals Animal Training Fel Animals
Charm Fel Social Blather Fel Social
Command Fel Leadership Chanelling WP Magic
Concealment Ag Wilderness Charm Animal Fel Animals
Consume Alcohol T General Dodge Blow Ag Defense
Disguise Fel Larceny Follow Trail Int Perception
Drive S Animals Heal Int Knowledge
Evaluate Int Perception Hypnotism WP Finesse
Gamble Int Social Knowledge (*) Int Knowledge
Gossip Fel Social Lip Reading Int Perception
Haggle Fel Social Magical Sense WP Magic
Intimidate S Leadership Navigation Int Wilderness
Outdoor Survival Int Wilderness Performer (*) Fel Finesse
Perception Int Perception Pick Lock Ag Engineering
Ride Ag Animals Prepare Poison Int Knowledge
Row S General Read/Write Int Knowledge
Scale Sheer Surface S Finesse Sail Ag Wilderness
Search Int Perception Set Trap Ag Engineering
Silent Move Ag Larceny Secret Signs (*) Int Knowledge
Swim S General Shadowing Ag Larceny
Sleight of Hand Ag Larceny
Speak Language (*) Int Knowledge
Trade (*) * General
Torture Fel Finesse
Ventriloquism Fel Larceny

Talents
Acute Hearing General Perception Quick Draw Ag Finesse
Aethyric Attunement WP Magic Rapid Reload Ag BS
Alley Cat General Larceny Resist Chaos Wp Defense
Ambidextrous WS BS Resist Disease T Defense
Lore (*) Int Knowledge Resist Magic WP Defense
Armoured Casting WP Magic Resist Poison T Defense
Artistic Int Finesse Rover General Wilderness
Contortionist Ag Finesse Schemer Fel Social
Dealmaker Fel Leadership Seasoned Traveller Int Social
Disarm WS Offense Sharpshooter BS Finesse
Etiquette Fel Social Sixth Sense WP Perception
Excellent Vision General Perception Specialist Weapon Group Int Finesse
Fast Hands WS Magic Stout-Hearted WP Defense
Fearless WP Defense Street Fighting WS Finesse
Flee! Ag Defense Streetwise Fel Larceny
Frenzy S Offense Strike Mighty Blow WS Offense
Keen Senses General Perception Strike to Injure WS Offense
Lightning Parry WS Defense Strike to Stun WS Offense
Linguistics Int General Strong-Minded T WP
Magic WP Magic Sturdy S Defense
Master Gunner BS Engineering Sure Shot BS Offense
Master Orator Fel Leadership Surgery Int Knowledge
Meditation T Magic Super Numerate Int Engineering
Menacing S Leadership Swashbuckler Ag Finesse
Mighty Shot BS Offense Trapfinder Ag Perception
Mimic Fel Social Trick Riding Finesse Animal
Orientation Int Wilderness Tunnel Rat Ag Finesse
Public Speaking Fel Leadership Wrestling S Offense

A couple of notes here:

  • Characteristic advances are limited to 8, except Additional Attacks, which are limited to 2. This is, more or less, how WFRP 2E caps advances: across all of the careers, you’ll never get more than 8 advances to WS, for example. Where it’s a bit lower (Int, Fel), it seems arbitrary to cap one at 7 and another at 8.
  • I tried really hard to keep the distribution of Skills and Talents fairly even. I didn’t shoot for totally even, but I did try to get everything close.
  • Sailing and such are associated with Wilderness. That’s imperfect, but it was necessary to keep things even close. Otherwise, Wilderness and a hypothetical Sailing Aptitude would be woefully underutilized.
  • Talents like Lightning Reflexes and Hardy that are really-out-of progression Characteristic advances only make sense within the context of the Career System, and don’t make any sense here.  They’ve been moved into the Aptitude table
  • I’m not interested in running a game with fantastic races right now. Just Humans. So, I’ve ignored anything Dwarf/Elf/Halfling specific.  If any of this makes sense outside of my head, it should be negligible to apply to demihuman stuff.

Speaking of Careers & Aptitudes: this was the tricky part. I ran down the list of careers and built up the list of which Aptitudes were clearly appropriate, which were maybe appropriate, and which had no place. I literally cut-and-pasted stuff into the above spreadsheet and just ticked down Yes/No/Maybe if the Advance Scheme indicated that the Characteristics, Skills, and Talents associated with an aptitude was something that was strongly present, not present at all, or present but not strongly so, respectively.

Career Mandatory Optional
Agitator Int, Fel, Leadership, Social BS, Ag, WP, Knowledge, Larceny, Perception
Apprentice Wizard Int, WP, Magic, Social T, Ag, Fel, Knowledge, Perception
Bailiff Int, Fel, Knowledge, Leadership, Social BS, S, WP, Perception
Barber-Surgeon Ag, Int, WP, Knowledge T, Fel, Finesse
Boatman WS, Ag, Wilderness BS, S, T, Int, Social
Bodyguard WS, Offense, Defense, Finesse S, T, Ag, Perception
Bone Picker T, Larceny, Perception, Social S, Ag, WP, Fel, Animals
Bounty Hunter BS, Ag, Offense, Perception, Wilderness S, WP, Finesse, Larceny
Burgher Int, Knowledge, Perception, Social Ag, WP, Fel
Camp Follower Ag, Fel T, Int, WP, Finesse, Animals, Larceny, Social
Charcoal-Burner Perception, Wilderness S, T, Ag, Int, WP, Fel
Coachman BS, Ag, Animals, Wilderness WP, Fel, Perception, Social
Entertainer BS, Ag, Fel, Social S, WP, Finesse, Animals, Larceny, Perception
Estalian Diestro WS, Ag, Offense, Finesse S, T, Int, Defense, Engineering
Ferryman BS, S, Perception, Social T, Ag, Int, Fel, Defense
Fisherman S, Ag, Perception, Wilderness BS, T, Int, Finesse, Social
Grave Robber Ag, WP, Larceny, Perception BS, S, Finesse
Hedge Wizard WP, Fel, Magic, Perception T, Ag, Int, Animals, Social
Hunter BS, Ag, Perception, Wilderness T, Int, Engineering, Larceny
Initiate Int, WP, Fel, Knowledge BS, S, T, Leadership, Social
Jailer WS, S, T, Defense WP, Larceny, Leadership, Perception
Kislevite Kossar WS, BS, T, WP Defense, Leadership, Perception, Social, Wilderness
Marine WS, BS, S, Offense Ag, WP, Defense, Social
Mercenary WS, BS, Offense, Social S, T, Ag, WP, Defense, Finesse, Animals, Perception
Messenger Ag, Animals, Perception, Wilderness BS, T, Int, WP
Militiaman WS, Ag, Defense, Perception BS, S, T, Animals
Miner S, T, Perception, Wilderness BS, Int, WP, Animals
Noble WS, Fel, Leadership, Social BS, Ag, Int, WP, Defense, Animals, Knowledge
Norse Berserker WS, S, T, WP, Offense Leadership, Wilderness
Outlaw WS, BS, Ag, Offense, Larceny Int, Defense, Finesse, Animals, Perception, Social, Wilderness
Outrider BS, Ag, Int, Animals, Wilderness S, WP, Perception
Peasant T BS, S, Ag, WP, Animals, Social, Wilderness
Pit Fighter WS, T, Ag, WP, Offense S, Defense
Protagonist WS, S, Ag, WP, Offense Defense, Social
Rat Catcher Ag, WP, Animals, Larceny, Perception BS, T, Engineering
Roadwarden WS, BS, Ag, Animals, Wilderness S, Int, WP, Perception, Social
Rogue Ag, Fel, Perception, Social BS, Int, WP, Larceny, Leadership
Scribe Ag, Int, WP, Knowledge Fel, Engineering
Seaman WS, S, Ag, Offense, Wilderness BS, Defense, Perception
Servant Ag, WP, Perception, Social S, T, Int, Fel, Defense, Animals
Smuggler Ag, Int, Fel, Larceny BS, Animals, Perception, Social, Wilderness
Soldier WS, BS, Ag, Offense WP, Defense, Animals, Perception, Social
Squire WS, Offense, Knowledge, Leadership BS, S, T, Ag, Fel, Defense, Animals, Social
Student Ag, Int, Fel, Knowledge Engineering, Perception, Social
Thief Ag, Fel, Larceny, Perception BS, Int, Finesse, Engineering, Social
Thug WS, Offense, Larceny, Social S, T, Ag, WP, Fel, Defense
Toll Keeper WS, T, Perception, Wilderness BS, S, Ag, WP, Social
Tomb Robber WS, Ag, Int, WP, Engineering, Perception Fel, Knowledge, Larceny
Tradesman Ag, WP S, T, Int, Fel, Animals, Engineering, Perception, Social
Vagabond BS, Ag, Larceny, Wilderness Int, Fel, Perception, Social
Valet Ag, Int, Fel, Knowledge, Social WP, Perception
Watchman WS, Int, Defense, Perception BS, S, Ag, WP, Fel
Woodsman WS, S, WP, Wilderness T, Ag, Perception
Zealot WS, T, WP, Knowledge, Leadership S, Fel, Social

Remember, you get a total of six aptitudes. You get what’s in the Mandatory list automatically, and can then choose from the Optional list until you’ve got your six.

Now, actually pricing advances is tough. In WFRP, everything is basically 100 XP / advance. In the 40K RPGs, they’re all over the place: Characteristics (which are generally more broadly useful) cost more than Skills and Talents. The more advances you take in a Characteristic or Skill, the more expensive it is.

This makes quite a bit of sense, but dang: I like the simplicity of a common cost.  It does allow a character to rocket up to +40% WS with their first 800 XP, though. Furthermore, there’s probably an argument to be made that Additional Attacks should cost more or be spaced out more as well.  So, flat costs are problematic… but after a point, I think you just have to let go.

My inclination runs strongly towards doing 100/200/300 XP for advances that share 2/1/0 Aptitudes with the character.  This is substantially less than what things cost in Only War, but is about what things cost in WFRP 2E, as I’ve got Careers & Aptitudes mapped.

Near-term, I’ll probably collapse all of this into a Google doc (minus thought-process stuff), which will vastly help its readability.

So: that was a big f’ing chunk of something.  I’m curious as to what other people think.  I both have and haven’t put a lot of thought into this. In terms of complexity, it looks like it might be needlessly complex, but I expect that after character creation, it fades into the background.  I’m not entirely sure if I’m going to adopt it in my game; the other two options are certainly simpler, if less interesting.

Very interested in any and all thoughts and opinions.  Let me know what you think.