Hi all, On page 35 of the Rulebook under the BEGINNING THE CAMPAIGN section, Step 3 says: “Each player takes the Specialty card of their chosen Character. The function of these cards is explained below (see the Specialty cards table). I can’t seem to find anywhere an indication of which Specialty cards Jazz, Uma, Qiang and Cadin take with them on Mission 1. I assume they must do because Step 4 is “Prepare the Extraction Mission” Can anyone point me in the right direction? Many thanks in advance!
It's a poor Spanglish translation. It's supposed to be "Each player takes the Specialty cards of their chosen Character. [...]", IIRC. Basically just telling you to collect your character-specific deck. Unless i'm grievously mistaken, your supposed to have no Specialities during Mission 1 (gaining your 1st between M1 and M2, up until your last between M8 and M9, for a total of 8 Specialities unlocked). There's obviously nothing stopping you houseruling in a Speciality for each of you before Campaign start, but it isn't intended and could ease the difficulty of the early game and the campaign overall (which is, based on anecdotal evidence of others, quite substantial in parts).
My suspicion is that it’s a step that was accidentally left in from a previous iteration of the game prior to the final release version. I might house rule it, like you suggested, I like the idea :)
Hah. I just looked at the cards - Jazz's hacking device requires hacking speciality, but on first mission she doesn't yet have any levels in hacking. I know they didn't think that through, but would be funny if our 'best of the best' hacker could not use it.
Each character starts with their starting equipment (the cards with their pictures on them), and for the hacker you get the "low level" side of the hacking programs with their picture on them. For the text "Each player takes the Specialty card of their chosen Character. [...]", in the preview videos what the developers talked about were big fancy skill cards (showing the entire skill trees that the character has access to). You know, like you often see in the various dungeon crawlers/zombie fighters/etc. And somewhere along the line, they decided to just publish the charts. If you were to print out a piece of paper with the table for each of the character's skills, that would be "specialty card" that you are supposed to "take" at the beginning of the campaign. There aren't any choices here, just like in the standard dungeon crawler--you're just making sure that you have the piece of cardboard with your future advancement choices. And, in other words, that means that Jazz has the required Hacking specialty, just like the Yu Jing character has the required heavy army specialty without having any of the advancements from those specialties yet.
Well, with Jazz she at least has 'Hacker' on her character card, Qiang Gao just has 'Armored'. Though I suppose that just refers to a character class. It's obvious that since it's their starting equipment they should have all the requirements to use it, just funny that if you don't homerule something they 'technically' should not be able to use it. And that is yet another 'one time thing print' bunch of cards that is right away invalid if you stick to raw.
If you “stick to raw” you deserve everything that can possibly go wrong in a dungeon crawler. :) Especially one like this one where it appears there was slightly more enthusiasm than editing.
Like with Heavy Armor, she has the Track/ Ability, she just has no ranks in it yet to give special abilities. The device/ armor doesn't say "Hacking level 1" or name the specific power.
Makes me wonder. Obviously, right now, all the fancy hacking gear and programs can only be used by Jazz. But do we think anyone in the expansions (besides the obvious Valerya and Kusanagi) is gonna get Hacking proficiency, too?
Doubt Kusanagi will have any hacking, though 2 hackers are still very limiting choice. I just hope that most if not all of the equipment from expansions will not be tied to specific characters.