Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader

[Mathias]

Before you get started on the skills and talents, give me a chance to wrap up the Pathfinder Bestiary project. When I first tried writing DH files, I ended up running into a wall in terms of how to set the advancement costs of abilities. I actually went a ways down a path that doesn't turn out to work, so I'm afraid it'll be easier to restart than to remove those mechanisms.

Okay, here's an overview of what needs to happen for skill and talent advancement in Dark Heresy, in Hero Lab's terms.

In Hero Lab, information can only be stored on something that has already been added to the hero. If you take a rank in your Career, that rank needs to tell every skill and talent it could add what XP cost it's offering them at. In order to do so, the skills and talents have to have been added already. There's a mechanism in Hero Lab called shadowing that's designed to handle this sort of thing - a shadow copy of every skill and talent is present on every character, but any scripts on those skills/talents (like Sound Constitution adding an extra wound) won't be run, and they won't be displayed in any of the lists that the user sees. The copies exist only for the purpose of storing the fact that you can take the +0 level of this skill for 100, the +10 level for another 100, and the +20 for 200.

I'm afraid I won't have time until I'm finished with the Bestiary (hopefully around the middle of next week) to organize the ideas I've had floating around in my head about how to store the XP cost information.