Do promotion advances count towards 6 advancement cap?

Forged in the Dark Band of Blades
1

Not that I expect my group will hit this but just curious. Do the ‘Not a Rookie Anymore’ and ‘Specialist Training’ advances count for the 6-ability cap? The reason I am asking is that the section on Promotion (pg 110) says:

A character can have 6 abilities and 20 points of actions (see page 57). If you hit either of these maximums, you can’t promote.

But if the promotion, say ‘Specialist Training,’ counts for that cap, and you get a new ability when you become a specialist, then maybe you can’t promote even if you only have 5 abilities, because becoming a specialist gets you 2 more abilities?

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I would say it doesn’t count. The BoB book offers some light:

first of all:

The special abilities in the Rookie playbook are, in general, unable to be taken as Veteran advances by other playbooks. When you promote, the Rookie ability you selected at character creation becomes part of your playbook and does not count against Veteran limits.

So at least “Not a Rookie Anymore” would not count, because it is a Rookie ability (and the selected ability of the Rookie would not count either).

And for the soldier:

You can promote to a Specialist (Heavy, Medic, Officer, Scout, or Sniper). Make a new playbook: mark one special ability of the appropriate type and a rank of the starting Specialist action.

So the fact of taking this ability makes you take one ability (a specialist) in a two-for-one way.

So it is not a hard answer, but I would say the spirit of the rule is to avoid having super OP characters in the field. If the limit is 5 abilities that should mean 5 abilities that do something. It would not make sense that the specialists you begin with are better just because they were created from scratch.

1 Like
3

Thanks. I agree that makes a lot of sense. Even for Specialist Training when you make the new playbook you only copy over:

  • Your original Rookie ability, if any
  • Abilities that happen to ALSO be in your new specialist playbook (so not ‘specialist training’)
  • Abilities you decide to keep as one of your 2 Veteran advances, which I think is clearly not intended to include ‘Specialist Training’

So this makes sense to me for both ‘specialist training’ and ‘not a rookie anymore.’ Thanks for the insight!

4

Tthe initial Rookie ability does not count as a Veteran ability, but I think without being sure that that it still counts against the total limit of six abilities.