So there’s a couple things at play with the Jack talent.
Quote:
Untrained Skill Rolls: You can normally make a Skill roll even if your character has no Skill Levels in a particular Skill. Your character’s untrained Skill rating is equal to the associated Base Attribute with a –2 penalty, plus or minus any conditional modifiers. If this lowers your dice pool to zero or less, you will automatically fail the roll unless you get some help, take more time, or spend Style points on the roll. Though most Skills can be rolled untrained, a Specialized Skill such as
Academics, Art, Craft, Pilot, or
Science, cannot be rolled without at least one Skill Level in that Skill.
Quote:
Jack of All Trades: Prerequisites: Intelligence 3
Your character has a fairly good basic knowledge in a great variety of different tasks. He could be a handyman or a tramp doing all kinds of jobs, whichever one is offered to him. He knows a bit of everything without ever having had any formal training in a field.
Benefit: Your character can ignore the penalty on all untrained Skill rolls (see p. 150). He can also make untrained Skill rolls for Skill Specializations that he does not have – in this case, however, he does suffer the –2 penalty on untrained Skill rolls.
Advanced: You can buy this Talent up to three times, gaining your character an additional +1 bonus to untrained Skill rolls per level.
So the way I read this is, Joe Ordinary attempts to leap nimbly from rooftop to rooftop in pursuit of a suspect, he has a 4 Dex but no skill points in acrobatic so he rolls 2d6 to see if he can make this jump. Jack Ordinary, the fellow with the JoaT talent would roll 4d6.
Joe comes across a pile of the Evil Dr. Caruthers papers and notes, he has a 3 Int but no training in Science/Chemistry he has no chance of figuring out the complicated notes in front of him despite his Int, Jack on the other hand could roll 1d6 ot if he had the "Advanced" skill 2d6 to figure out what the doctors notes mean.
Now it’s like 6am and my brain is still a haze but this is what it seems like to me at this uncaffinated moment of my existence. Is this how you all read it? If you bought the talent 3 times you’d negate the -2 on specialized skills but would you gain a +2 on every other skill? I think that’s not what the advanced buy is about, so no. The skill would be stupid OP if this was so.
