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skill points

flykiller

SOC-14 5K
it has always bothered me that skills such as pilot and navigation are acquired as easily as shotgun and airraft. perhaps someone has done this before, but here is a brief description of a skill point system designed to make easy skills relatively easy to obtain and difficult skills relatively difficult to obtain.

traveller skills are divided into easy, medium, and hard.

easy skills are weapons, vehicle operation, vacc suit, 0G combat, equestrian, forward observer, brawling, and/or other such.

difficult skills are pilot, navigation, medical, gravitics, naval architect, survey, computer, and/or other such.

medium skills are all the rest.

to acquire (easy skill) 1 requires 1 skill point. to subsequently acquire (easy skill) 2 requires an additional 2 skill points. to subsequently acquire (easy skill) 3 requires an additional 3 skill points. etc.

medium skills require 2, 4, and 6 skill points for skill levels 1, 2, and 3. etc.

hard skills require 3, 6, and 9 skill points for skill levels 1, 2, and 3. etc.

players may "buy" (or referees assign) skill levels as players acquire skill points.

players obtain a certain number of skill points for each tour served - say, 6 points per tour, or whatever the referee decides.

referees may also award skill points based on character stats, innate talents, home world origin, education level, college, or in-service schools attended, or as experience points.

example. a character is sent to engineering school, and allowed 4 skill points. he may elect to obtain electronics 1 and mechanical 1, or he may obtain electronics 1 and apply the remaining 2 points towards electronics 2. he will need 2 more skill points to obtain electronics 2.
 
In CT the "worth" of a skill is balanced by the other dificulties of the character generation tables.

You want a space skill like pilot, engineering etc? Join the scouts, merchants or navy.

You'll get more skills in the scouts, but risk a short career ;)
Gaining a commission in the Navy is difficult, so most characters will miss out on many extra skill points, and your career could easily be cut short by reenlistment failing.
The problem in the Merchant service is to get promoted once commissioned, so again you will miss out on bonus skills.
 
the careers vary in difficulty, yes, but the skills are still treated the same, as are higher levels of any given skill, and I was hoping to break this up.
 
Are you working with LBB 1? Or the later Books? I've found it difficult to obtain high skill levels with Book 4 (I tend to run ground-heavy campaigns) unless you run into the 3 to 5 term PC, and I think that the others are similar.

However, when using LBB 1 or the Traveller Book, I can't say that I really experienced this issue, as I maintain an eye over any character that gets generated by one of my players. ("Your Artilleryman knows Starship nav? You'll need to explain that - well - or it becomes Land Nav...")
 
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