bluegargantua (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bluegargantua) wrote2008-03-13 09:06 am
bluegargantua) wrote2008-03-13 09:06 am
Entry tags:
I gunned down the entire Zhodani Confederation...
...and I got nothing.
Referring to my earlier post, I went back and looked up how experience works in Classic Traveller.
If you want to improve a skill, tell the GM you're going to practice the skill. He makes a throw to see if you've got the willpower to keep it up (brilliant!). Then after four years of game time has elapsed, your skill goes up by one point. That's it. That's all there is. The lessons learned of a life of adventure mean nothing. You wanna get to Carnegie Hall, you practice.
It is, simultaneously the coolest and dumbest experience system ever.
Oh, I also discovered that all characters are assumed to have a skill of 0 in every weapon in the book. Skill level 0, just means you don't get "untrained" penalties when you pick up a weapon. Which is really kinda nice since it's entirely possible that you could go through a 20 year stint in the army and never get a weapon skill.
The wacky part is the "every weapon in the book" qualifier. The Traveller book has a surprisingly small suite of weapons in it. That skill-0 doesn't let you operate howitzers and bazookas or stuff like that. But it does mean that you can pick up any personal firearm from pistols to rifles and, more interestingly, you can use pretty much any melee weapon ever invented from clubs to rapiers to broadswords to pikes. In the far future, gym class must be brutal. You apparently also spend more time in gym class than you do in driver's ed.
What I would do (and what the next version of Traveller supports) is give people a small stack of level-0 skills based on the type of world you came from (barbarians should not be that familiar with laser pistols for example). I might further let players pick one level-1 skill of their choice (say in their first term of service). And finally, I'd probably say that Jack-of-All trades (which lets you have any skill at 0) still works, but anything you use JoAT for will only last for 10 minutes. So in a firefight, it's probably good enough, but for, say, a medical emergency, or repairing the warp drives, you better find a qualified expert in a hurry.
Fun stuff
Tom
Referring to my earlier post, I went back and looked up how experience works in Classic Traveller.
If you want to improve a skill, tell the GM you're going to practice the skill. He makes a throw to see if you've got the willpower to keep it up (brilliant!). Then after four years of game time has elapsed, your skill goes up by one point. That's it. That's all there is. The lessons learned of a life of adventure mean nothing. You wanna get to Carnegie Hall, you practice.
It is, simultaneously the coolest and dumbest experience system ever.
Oh, I also discovered that all characters are assumed to have a skill of 0 in every weapon in the book. Skill level 0, just means you don't get "untrained" penalties when you pick up a weapon. Which is really kinda nice since it's entirely possible that you could go through a 20 year stint in the army and never get a weapon skill.
The wacky part is the "every weapon in the book" qualifier. The Traveller book has a surprisingly small suite of weapons in it. That skill-0 doesn't let you operate howitzers and bazookas or stuff like that. But it does mean that you can pick up any personal firearm from pistols to rifles and, more interestingly, you can use pretty much any melee weapon ever invented from clubs to rapiers to broadswords to pikes. In the far future, gym class must be brutal. You apparently also spend more time in gym class than you do in driver's ed.
What I would do (and what the next version of Traveller supports) is give people a small stack of level-0 skills based on the type of world you came from (barbarians should not be that familiar with laser pistols for example). I might further let players pick one level-1 skill of their choice (say in their first term of service). And finally, I'd probably say that Jack-of-All trades (which lets you have any skill at 0) still works, but anything you use JoAT for will only last for 10 minutes. So in a firefight, it's probably good enough, but for, say, a medical emergency, or repairing the warp drives, you better find a qualified expert in a hurry.
Fun stuff
Tom
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All of which may help explain the unnervingly high mortality rate in character creation...
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Dave Arneson once noted that "...he [Gygax] literally had a small book on different kinds of polearms, which I regard as the ultimate in silliness. It's a pointy thing on the end of a stick!"
Sounds like Traveller took the opposite approach. ;-)
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Back in the day, I was trying to hack together an advancement system roughly based on Call of Cthulhu where at the end of a session you roll to improve all the skills that you used, but only if you FAIL an easy test. So it's hard to improve what you're really good at. Only problem was preventing newbies from streaking from Unskilled to Skill-2 in 5 sessions...
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And the thing is, the skills don't have to be uber-high to make a difference. You're almost always at 50/50 and the extra point tips it in your favor. Add in a few situational modifiers and your odds are pretty darn good.
later
Tom