Natural Talent

Natural Talent

At character creation, every character gains natural talent in their bailiwick skill and one additional skill. Natural talent allows players to re-map the chosen skill to the ability modifier of their choice, instead of the modifier normally used by the skill. This allows each character to demonstrate strength in one particular area, regardless of their character class and primary ability scores. For example, a durable character might Intimidate people using their constitution, cracking knuckles and popping the ligaments in their neck menacingly. Alternatively, a very intelligent person might Intimidate people based upon their intelligence, assaulting their foe with a barrage of cold, hard facts. The result is the same in either case.

Players are encouraged to choose skills which normally use an ability modifier in which their character is particularly weak, converting it to their strongest ability modifier instead. It is recommended that skills which already make use of your second-highest ability score, or even your third-highest, might be less important to remap via natural talent, than the one which uses your worst (or second-worst) ability modifier.

Bailiwick skills which are not available to your character class may not be selected as your natural talent. Only skills which you are allowed to put ranks into may be selected.

If you choose to have natural talent in one of the skills which have specializations (i.e. Knowledge, Perform, Piloting, and Profession), you only gain natural talent in one specialization for that skill. Getting all knowledge skills, for example, would require twelve different natural talents, one for each of Arcana, Deep History, Dungeoneering, Engineering, etc.

Skills in which you are naturally talented never suffer an armor check penalty, even if the chosen ability modifier is STR or DEX.

All characters gain additional natural talent skills at character levels 11, 21, and 31 (note that this is only the same as class level if you don't multi-class or dual-class). They can also be acquired via some racial traits, or the Self-Improvement rules.

Special: You can also expend a natural talent on a skill which is already a natural talent for you. If you do so, instead of remapping the skill to a different ability score, a result of a natural 1 is no longer considered an automatic failure for skill checks made with this skill. Furthermore, you can never fail a skill check in this skill by 5 or more. In such a case, the result is always treated as having failed by 4, no matter how badly you actually rolled (or how high the difficulty of the check was).