Voidborn Be Smart

[didgeridoo1980]

I am trying to learn the RPG system. If I understood correctly if you create a voidborn character you basically can dump the fellowship stat to 0. Am I wrong? Isn't it overpowered?

[Ammo Donkey]

You misunderstood it.

A stat in Rogue Trader has two parts. First is the attribute itself, and then there is the attribute bonus it provides, which is the stat divided by 10, rounded down.

Say you have an intelligence of 27, that would make your Intelligence bonus 2. If you have a buff that boost your intelligence by 5, your intelligence attribute would be 32 and your int bonus would be 3. If you had a buff reducing it by 5 instead, your intelligence attribute would be 22 and your int bonus would remain unchanged at 2.

Be Smart lets you use your Int bonus instead of your Fel bonus. It does not let you use your Int attribute instead of your fel attribute. So if an ability does fel bonus extra damage, Be Smart works. But if an item has a requirement of, say, 30 fel, and you have fel 20 but int 40, Be Smart does NOT allow you use it.

Skills all key off of the attribute, not its bonus. So Be Smart does nothing for skills.

It should also be noted that you have very limited options to reduce your attributes during char gen. I don't think it's possibly to get any stat below 20, at least not with the char gen from beta.

[Balekai]

What 40% Unga said. Also here's an another discussion on it over the last few days:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2186680/discussions/0/3934517363288493812/

Be Smart is useful for like a Grand Strategist character because the class uses Intelligence bonus a lot, while also using Fellowship bonus. Most Grand Gestates are going to be derived from Officers as a T1 Archetype, which almost solely uses fellowship but synergizes perfectly with GStart ability wise.

So having all your fellowship bonuses in abilities using Intelligence instead, will allow you to concentrate on 1 characteristic when you would be upping two (Fellowship and Intel). This will be at the expense of base Fellowship checks as a characteristic (which will suckish with no investment) and the skills associated with it (which will also suckish), if you min/max with Be Smart. You will be good at any intelligence skillchecks. but you won't be the prime face of the group.

Also Grand Strategist "Zones" use the highest Intelligence or Fellowship bonus of any Grand Strategist in the group for total bonus when using Strategems or whatever. So having one "Be Smart" GStrat with insane intelligence and one "Normie" fellowship based Gstrat with insane fellowship, would likely be optimal.

For an MC that still wants to use high persuasion/coercion/commerce skills but take Be Smart, would have to just be less skilled in those and not min/max, or hope there's an item in-game that switches some/all fellowship skills to intelligence. there was already an item in the beta that made Imperium lore switch to using Fellowship as a base characteristic.

[jmvbento]

BS also doesn't help anotehr thing, that are characteristic tests - those test directly against your characteristic, and BS does not sub Int for Fel on those.

Originally posted by Balekai:

Be Smart is useful for like a Grand Strategist character because the class uses Intelligence bonus a lot, while also using Fellowship bonus. Most Grand Gestates are going to be derived from Officers as a T1 Archetype, which almost solely uses fellowship but synergizes perfectly with GStart ability wise.

Officers use Fel+Will, meaning you're going to be sucky for the first... 2 levels, IIRC (unless you go Psyker, which needs Will, so you'll be less sucky), but then you can take BS as your first talent and not suck as an Officer. And then you hit 16, go into Grand Strategist and then just watch all your career abilities double-up with every stat boost, because they're Int+Fel which becomes Int+Int, so now you're a single-stat build (take Know-It-All at Exemplar, which is probably a waste of a talent on someone who's likely to almost never be attacked - thank you, Distracting Zone -, but just for the lols).

The Fel-based skills ARE an issue (my biggest, not concern, but sadness about this build is that my Persuasion is gonna be all sorts of meh), but you can always just increase one (maybe 2, if you're feeling daring) of your choice at every skill up opportunity, which might mitigate the issue.

[MossSnake]

Originally posted by Gak:

You misunderstood it.

A stat in Rogue Trader has two parts. First is the attribute itself, and then there is the attribute bonus it provides, which is the stat divided by 10, rounded down.

Skills all key off of the attribute, not its bonus. So Be Smart does nothing for skills.

This does not seem to be the case. Saying the 'Bonus' is only the Skill/10 seems to be incorrect, and can apply to other applications of the stat, including in skills.

Right now I"m playing a character with Be Smart, 50 int, and 30 fel.

When I go into my character sheet and look at the Persuasion skill details, this is waht it shows:

Skill Value: 65
Illustrious Glory +5
Characteristic Bonus [Intelligence] +50
Archtype Advancement [Officer] +10

It's clearly keying it's attribute bonus off of my Int stat, not Fellowship, despite Persuasion usually being a Fellowship skill. When I look at the Persuasion sikill details on any of other companions, they show a Characteristic Bonus [Fellowship] on that line.

[stax]

Be smart completely replaces FEL. Even resolve is based on INT when you have that talent.

[Ammo Donkey]

Originally posted by MossSnake:

This does not seem to be the case.

You responded to a post from Novermber 2023, the ability has been changed since then.

But an ability bonus is still calculated the same way. If you have an int of 50, your int bonus is +5. That hasn't changed. If an ability states "add int bonus to damage" you do 5 extra damage, not 50 extra damage.

Be Smart now replaces Fel completely with Int, though. Not just the bonus like it used to. That HAS changed.