Rules Only: Skill Bloat, Lockout & Why It Matters.

[McPerth]

That's so that your Steward 1 Pilot 1 can function as a steward while also the pilot, because he functions one level lower in both.

Unless he's Pilot 2, he cannot work as pilot if he works as steward too (as the pilot needs a minimum of Pilot 1), but your point keeps...

I don't recall mid passengers requiring a steward.

Am I in error?

Not in CT.

In MT (RM, page 82), the crew formula for stewards is 1 per 8 command creo or high passengers and 1 per 50 non-command crew or middle passengers...

In MgT, one skill level, 0 skill level included (not one steward) per 5 middle passengers

 

[SanDragon]

Thank you.

It has been awhile since I have crunched my favorite 300 ton armed merchants in MT, as well as verifying all other ship examples as my time and will permits.

 

[kilemall]

On the CT Steward question, I'm afraid a lot of your rememberies are corrupted. Either that or passengers IYTU are quite forgiving for 10,000 Cr service.

LBB2, page 23, crewing- 1 steward per 8 high passengers.

 

[kilemall]

I see someone else has noted the CotI exceptions to the gun-0 rule. Don't see why you wouldn't take the opportunity to extend it to extremely high law level worlds for character background (so everyone from there has gun negative 5 but also has a martial arts-0 sort of skill), and in any event any sort of service skill or even benefit would confer it anyway.

I have to disagree on the driver thing.

Riding animals come with even simpler 'controls'- think everyone should get Equestrian?

Besides you want some character out there, some people who were born riding ponis on the colonial steppes, floating in a vaccsuit at the home station, sailing craft from their islands childhood, or Streetwise-0/Bribery-0 learned on the hard gravways of Port Corruption to catch free rides.

And I take the 'permission' thing the other way, what you cannot do easily is as much a character defining thing as what you can do.

Fish out of water play is as good as Scotty/heroic engineering moments.

 

[flykiller]

Boom. Done. The unskilled are slow. The skilled are fast and can get faster, nobody is locked out because 'they don't have the skill', and players have their all-important agency returned to them - because that's what this game is all about - Player Agency.

universal agency? do-anything agency?

 

[kilemall]

This gentlemen and other posters have been talking about the time thing, and that's probably a pretty good way of doing things to reconcile innate human problem solving vs. skill and experience, not to mention gameplay.

I still maintain though that an Engineering unskilled person can potentially create a meltdown on reactor startup due to their inexperience, or overcompensate and flip the ship onto it's back.

Perhaps at the end of teaching themselves ship startup and launch from the crash site, the inexperienced gets rewarded Pilot-0 Engineering-0 and those still get time penalties even though it's less then no skill?

 

[flykiller]

having a skill should be very significant, and not having a skill should be very significant.

 

[nobby-w]

I agree that the cascade skill thing is outta control, was just reading some takes on Engineering and pretty horrified at the idea that one can hire an engineer that cannot keep the Beowulf running.

Why not? I've seen plenty of sysadmins that can't keep a network running ...

 

[Silverhawk]

Why not? I've seen plenty of sysadmins that can't keep a network running ...

And support techs who can't think of the simple things to check to try and solve a problem.