I'm still on the fence in regard to the crafting specialization stuff. I get wanting concealable armor, but I'm tempted to vote for machining or something so that we could make ridiculous meme guns to patch our difficulties with ranged combat.
If you want meme weapons, buy the weapon charm.
Principle Provoking Onslaught is a 3-dot unfavored charm so 12XP. Its expensive, but it will give you a scenelong weapon that you can call up, reload and dismiss at will. Pistols, machineguns, bandolier of grenades, chainsaws, flamethrowers, bazookas....if it's a modern mechanical weapon and manportable you can summon it, reload it, and dismiss it.
Ultimately, Im not too worried about the mechanics of Crafting. Even unfavored specialties are only -2.
We favor Crafting, so we cant botch, and its cheap to buy extra dots in the favored Ability.
From the front page, its 3XP to go from Crafting 3 to Crafting 4, and 4XP to go from Crafting 4 to Crafting 5.
Its the thematic/story implications that I am focused on.
We would be really bad with guns due to Firearms 0.
Buying Skinned Alive speed Charms and By Rage Recast repurchase to go 195 m/s and just rushing down people and invalidating their ranged efforts sounds better to me.
There ARE a bunch of things where a single dot dip would have been/is sensible; Firearms is one of them.
Im still a little surprised that we didnt think to buy 1-2 dots of Medicine during chargen in order to know how to perform first aid/stabilize ourself and our allies in case anyone gets shanked.
Gonna need to find 3XP for Medicine 1.