Handling Skill Explosions

[Sir Brad]

ATM I'm GM'ing a couple of characters that have picked up lots of -0 Skills and close to increasing a bunch of their existing skills. we are using a more challenging version of the MT improvement method. so far the characters have advanced roughly as they would if still in Terms with picking up new -1 skills or improving old skills (both of these chatterers have bean played for years of RT), but have bean acquiring lots of -0 "Almost" skills.

part of the problem may be the characters are normally part of One-on One Games so they are doing a lot of stuff fore them selves so picking up lots of experience since their is no division of Labor you get in a party. it worries me that this "Term" characters that have largely conformed to the skill progression you would see in an advanced character generation are about to get a big dump of skills like you would see from someone who has had a successful term of School Assignments.

should I be worried? if all the Skill Advancements drop at the same time a lot of skills favorable advancement modifiers will drop to +/-0 so it will be again a long time before (likely years of game time) these skills advance again. some of these skills the characters have bean working a long time to improve where others just get a hell of a lot of use in the characters normal travelers.

 

[aramis]

Remember: MT is self limiting for leveled skills because of the Int+Edu skill-levels limit.

As a house rule, For PC's, I generally limit 0-levels to Int+Edu skills for "free", then the next Int+Edu count as 1 from your experience limit.

I've had a few too many Vilani PC's....

 

[Sir Brad]

one is a three term Scout (6C9EC8) with six years of Travelleing under their belt

the other is one term military (7A8EDA) with over a decade worth of Travelleing behind them

both characters spend a lot of time hitting the books that has jacked up their Edu's and if their improvement rolls start coming in big time they will be pushed to near the limit of their (current) combined Int & Edu but not over (more so the military than the Scout).

 

[Mako]

If it becomes a concern, have them list them in order of proficiency that they'd like to maintain.

As mentioned, there are limits.

Also, people tend to get rusty, if they don't use them regularly, so as in the first sentence above, if they want to use a skill that's not in their top tier of them, you could always negate it. They won't like it, but people do forget things, and/or lose skills - just look at Tiger Woods, and his performance, or lack thereof on the golf course.

Perhaps, if desired, and they want to re-attain some proficiencies they've neglected, let them do so at a faster rate that normal, e.g. perhaps twice as fast to re-learn something, or get that muscle memory back.

So, as the GM, if you think it is becoming a problem, you can probably easily remedy the situation, if needed.

If you don't want to be the bad guy, make them roll dice to see if they can retain their skills, with appropriate negative modifiers for weeks/months/years of neglect.

 

[rancke]

Or you could ignore the game rules and allow them to maintain a realistic number of skill levels¹. It's not like the rules do a good job of maintaining game balance anyway.

¹ Or even the unrealistically high number of skill levels that protagonists of adventure stories commonly have. :devil:​

Hans

 

[Sir Brad]

some of the skills they have picked up have bean of the "I need to learn this because their is no one else around to do it for me" type where others are skills that kept coming up so they kind of learnt themselves, the new skills have stopped coming up but those they have have just bean collecting Advancement Mods. each only has a few skills at -2 but lots of skills at -0 & -1 (more -0's than -1's)

Education has come at a regular pace, but no mater how much Cardo and Resistance training they try all that Gym time just isn't paying off

 

[rancke]

some of the skills they have picked up have bean of the "I need to learn this because their is no one else around to do it for me" type where others are skills that kept coming up so they kind of learnt themselves, the new skills have stopped coming up but those they have have just bean collecting Advancement Mods. each only has a few skills at -2 but lots of skills at -0 & -1 (more -0's than -1's)

So consider what makes for the most fun to play and decide based on that. Also, ask the players what they prefer.


Hans

 

[Nick H]

I'm with Aramis on this one: The Int+Edu limit works well, the 2 AT's per skill per year limits rapid progression and the study time for a new skill is good, providing the Ref keeps a check on number of hours spent in study. For example, my players would want to study about 10-12 hours a day whilst in Jumpspace but I limit their study time by saying they have shipboard maintenance duties as well (just like real astronauts spend most of their time making sure the craft is working) and they have to have recreation time as well. So between 4-6 hours of study a day during downtime.

 

[rancke]

I'm with Aramis on this one: The Int+Edu limit works well, the 2 AT's per skill per year limits rapid progression and the study time for a new skill is good, providing the Ref keeps a check on number of hours spent in study. For example, my players would want to study about 10-12 hours a day whilst in Jumpspace but I limit their study time by saying they have shipboard maintenance duties as well (just like real astronauts spend most of their time making sure the craft is working) and they have to have recreation time as well. So between 4-6 hours of study a day during downtime.

My players didn't train once the campaign had started, so I can't say how the limit works in such a case. My main problem with it is that it's unrealistic. I'm especially annoyed by the inability to portray one of the most common character types in fiction: The dim-witted combat monster. So you've got an Int of 2 and an Edu of 2; why would that prevent you from learning combat skills? The other bit of unrealism is a bit more subjective. I don't think that a real-life person with an average intelligence and an average education would be able to fit all his skills into 14 levels. I realize that others may disagree, but that's how I feel. (And I'm not alone. When the DGP people did writeups of themselves, they all had a lot of skill levels, several of them going over their limits).


I've talked about my fix elsewhere. I divided skilles into physical, mental, and practical and gave physical skills a limit of Str+Dex, Mental skills a limit of Int+Edu, and total skills a limit of Str+Dex+Int+Edu (i.e. practical skills could be counted against either of the other limits).


Hans

 

[Sir Brad]

Oho I limit study time, but one character has no ship to keep, but they waste so much time in the Gym but has a nasty habit of picking up jobs where she has to train (DI, Jump School Instructor) or really racks up the Flight Hours (in the case of her Ships Boat Skill), some of her advancement Mods have bean racking up for a decade of game time (since late 09 IRL).

the other has a robot sidekick to help out around the ship (a Type S), but still works hard and studies hard they would go out of their tree otherwise, a lot of their advancement modifiers have bean racking up for around five Game Years (3-4 years IRL), their Scouteness means they are always doing odd stuff, I was tempted to just jack up their JoT at one point till they settled on around a dozen skills they would use on a regular basis.

 

[Condottiere]

Skill levels can be seen as caps, rather than current capability, which has to b honed back up.

 

[Nick H]

The solution to the dim-witted combat monster's skills is that he has one or two at a good level and a heap of level 0 skills. That way he can use his STR and DEX to give him bonuses.

 

[mike wightman]

The Int+Edu skill cap was a solution to a problem that didn't exist. I have never used it.

Provided your PCs are gaining skills at a rate comparable to character generation then nothing is broken.

I also go for lots of level 0 skills either learned during prior service or picked up during actual play - it doesn't brake the game either.

 

[rancke]

The solution to the dim-witted combat monster's skills is that he has one or two at a good level and a heap of level 0 skills. That way he can use his STR and DEX to give him bonuses.

A combat monster usually has several combat skills at high levels. You can't do that on four or five skill levels.


Hans

 

[Sir Brad]

The Int+Edu skill cap was a solution to a problem that didn't exist. I have never used it.

Provided your PCs are gaining skills at a rate comparable to character generation then nothing is broken.

I also go for lots of level 0 skills either learned during prior service or picked up during actual play - it doesn't brake the game either.

They have bean gaining skills at around the same pace as Advanced Character Gen characters would if still in terms, the Ex-Military in their past ten game years and picked up skills hear and there (some she no longer uses), but has otherwise bean on the slow side in picking up -1 skills, but those spins through Commando school kind of blew out her -1 skill tally.

the DD-Scout has has a steadier rate equal to a good rate of in term progress for a Scout, apart from their fat bank account (working through Adventure 0) and multitude of -0 skills you could mistake them for a normal 4 term scout who owns a Robot and got the free skill from book 8 for owning a Robot.

but now things are risking getting silly.

 

[Nick H]

Geez, are you talking about a heap of combat skills at levels 3-5? With the Str and Dex bonuses on top of that? That would be overkill in my game.

 

[rancke]

Geez, are you talking about a heap of combat skills at levels 3-5? With the Str and Dex bonuses on top of that? That would be overkill in my game.

No need to go that far. Longarm-3, Handgun-3, Knife-3, Unarmed-3. Drop one of them to reflect the blind spot some combat monsters have, and you still need nine skill levels even if you don't want to give him any secondary niche, like driver or mechanic. But, yes, most fictional combat monsters would easily need a skill-4 or skill-5 to emulate them properly.


Hans

 

[ovka]

What does it really hurt to have a combat monster with 7 different weapons at skill-5? The character can only use one weapon at a time.

I used to routinely roll up characters with Computer-7+. Scientists were great for that. My characters had the ability to hack into virtually any planetary/corporate/starport/governmental/military database and get whatever information our group needed. At first, the GM tried to hand-wave things and forbid it. Later I convinced him to give me the bare minimum of what I was looking for plus an adventure seed he could use down the road.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[nobby-w]

The Int+Edu skill cap was a solution to a problem that didn't exist. I have never used it.
...

Also, given that it's trivial to blow that cap with the Book 4-7 or Megatraveller CG systems it will probably screw with most characters generated by anything other than the B1/S4 systems anyway. As you say, solution to a non-existent problem.

 

[Sir Brad]

The Military character started with 7 levels of skills across five skills, is now up to around 20 across a dozen over a decade of game time later. with about 7-8 new levels about to drop.

the Scout started with 10 points of skills across 9 skills, half a decade later it's 14 across 12 with 12-15 about to drop.