Sorry for the delay that whole real life thing was bothering me. I am planning on using Supplement 4 Citizens of the Imperium but before I go into those careers I wanted to deal with skills.
I have an issue concerning the scope of skills in CT. On one hand you have Engineering which covers the use and repair of Jump Drives; Reaction-less Maneuver Drives and Power Plants and on the other you have Body Pistol which covers accuracy with a specific kind of automatic pistol. Oh, did I mention it takes the same amount of time apparently to learn both? Later incarnations of the game added more skills to the 54 (not counting the cascade skill titles only the ones under them) which I am reluctant in most cases to use.
I have been thinking on what a skill of 1 means. For most things I think a skill of 0 is what the average person has to perform their job. This is because you don't have skill 0 in everything but no skill at all. A skill of 0 is something you can do with no negative modifier whereas a no skill starts at -3 on the roll. Also I have noticed that home world skills from later editions are level 0 not level 1 contrasted with service skills. The note about default skills in the rule book describes them as "orientation to the skill by an experienced person" so it does imply some training or experience.
In an earlier post I had noted GDW seemed to making a game for larger than life adventure. Character generation doesn't seem to support this though as you get random stats and limited control of what you career is or how long it lasts. Then skills are semi-random as well with your control limited to picking which four sets of six skills you will be randomly awarded. Add to that the generally low number of skills and levels in skills basic character generations produces and it seems unlikely you will end up with heroes instead of plucky comic reliefs.
If however the average person has a skill of 0 in their job a skill of 1 becomes much more heroic. Having more experience with the D20 based linear progression it is easy to fail to see that is in no way related to the progression on a 2D6 based system. The base roll of 8+ is around 40% (I think being to lazy to look it up) for someone with a skill of 0, a skill of 1 changes it to 7+ (50%) and no skill changes it to 11+ (something under 10% I think). It also helps the GM with NPC's if you need to do them on the fly.
Lets veer off and look at TAS form 2 for the moment to bolster this premise. I am thinking of block 17 "Equipment Qualified On". This is different than skills because they are listed in the various block 18s. So what can we use this block for to add to the game? Battle Dress is in the ST game but the skill is not being covered under Vacc Suit and needing at least skill 1 to use. I have difficulty seeing the Merchant Service training it's members in use power armor no matter how much Vacc Suit training they get. So if you are a Marine (in MTU the only service that uses this) you put Battle Dress in block 17 and use Vacc Suit skill as listed, anyone else has 0 skill with a powered integrated weapon and armor system.
Also it is a way to give a skill outside of the normal gun/car recommendation. For instance the Engineering section of a starship has the chief engineer (Engineering skill 1) and J tech (skill 0 block 17 J Drive), M tech (skill 0 block 17 M Drive) and a power tech (skill 0 block 17 Power Plant). In the Engineering example block 17 is used to indicate when the skill 0 applies and when it doesn't. The skill 0 guys only avoid the -3 penalty when trying an engineering task related to their training, the J tech gets the -3 trying to use the M drive as an example.
You can use skill 0 in addition to the character improvement system in the rules. The systems available to train your character after character generation is done are difficult which they should be as it is really hard to pick up a mastery of a skill or change how you live enough to impact the characteristics. Level 0 can be used for "Starkiller is going to teach Potato Head piloting when we are on our ship" and after a period of time Potato Head get Pilot - 0 and puts Type S in his block 17. Potato Head (after escaping a bad movie) can fly a Scout/Courier with no penalty or bonus but not a Type A Free Trader. The idea is to still have skill 1 be noteworthy but let characters have some sense of advancement in an easier to implement way.
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