FASA Games, Inc.

no thoughts here? yeesh, my stuff must be really bad.

I love the idea of combining talents that are repetitive. I've done the same thing in my game with Disguise Self and Mimic Voice, rolling them together into "Disguise." It takes two talents to impersonate someone? Really? Even in a high intrigue game, this seems silly.

I'm also toying with the idea of changing armor defeating hits to:
1. Armor defeating hits don't render armor completely useless. Upon scoring an armor defeating hit, the target's armor rating is halved, rounding up (or maybe rounding down, I've not fully decided.) Shields are excluded from this - there are already rules for going around shields, and this will also encourage the use of shields. Then the attacker's damage is rolled and applied. This gives normally "soft" targets at least some armor to resist the damage, i.e. magicians.
2. Regardless of damage rolled, the attacker will always deal a minimum damage equal to their damage step. This is to combat the "awesome attack roll, horrible damage result" scenario while still allowing for the chance to roll up on damage.

For example:
Greta the Ork has a 20 strength (Step 8) and is using a Spiked Mace (Step 6) for a total of Step 14. Martin the Wizard is wearing Hardened Leather Armor (5) and is using a Footman's Shield (3) for a total of 8 armor. Greta scores an armor defeating hit, but oh noes, she rolls poorly on damage, scoring only 10 points. My proposal means that she instead deals 14 points of damage (her minimum).

Alternately, Greta rolls well on her damage - 25 points! Nice! Fortunately for Martin, his armor still absorbs some of the damage. His Hardened Leather's rating is halved to 3, but he gets his full shield rating of 3. So, he reduces the damage by 6, and takes 19 points.

If you make the minimum damage the Damage Step, then you will never do below average. All that is left is that, or doing better than "normal". I don't know if that is the intention or not. If so, carry on.

When combining multiple talents into one, you might also want to look into consolidating what are basically the same ability. A prime example for this is Astral Sight. There is the Windling ability, the talent, and the spell. Each of them works a bit differently. For convenience, all of them should work just like the talent. Compensate the Windling by giving him a higher rank for example.
Another example are skills vs. talents. As discussed on this board in different places, a inherently magical talent should offer additional benefits over the skill, but the general mechanism should remain the same. Ideally, there is only rule block for let's say Climb. A first paragraph describes the basic functionality, and a second paragraph states what the magic powered version allows that the mundane one does not (e.g. climbing on slick surfaces, on the ceiling,...). You might also want to reevaluate the numbers for skills. In an attempt to create less powerful versions of talents some of them became very lackluster. For example, jumping allows the person to jump its result in feet (compared to yards for the talent). With a good dexterity step of 7 and a skill rank of 3 this results in an average jumping range of 3 meters, which seems to be rather low, especially for the taller races.

I really like this concept. Though, it would probably require a slight rework of Talent Knacks as they would be much more important and abundent. And there is the danger of condensing too many talents. For example, you could come up with a single "Combat" talent and knacks for the various fighting styles like "Melee", "Unarmed", "Missile", ... . Personally I think this would be too much.
(the extreme case would be a single "Discipline" talent and all other talents reduced to knacks for this master talent ).