Background Skills

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

The current list of background skills based on homeworld is incomplete, since all types of worlds are not represented.

OPTION 1: Allow characters with less than 4 background skills to select from the education skills if they want.

OPTION 2: Allow characters to select more than one type of Trade Category skill. For example, Non-Industrial and Agricultural are pretty common together. As long as you don't select opposites such as Hi Pop-Low Pop, you should be OK for an abstract system.

OPTION 3: Allow characters to take BOTH of the skills under the Technology skills.

For Primitive Technology, I believe that you should also add Survival 0 as a possible background skill, that gives each Technology category 2 skills to pick from.

Since the Homeworld skills are based on the Trade Classifications created during world generation, there aren't really Environment types for Earth-Like worlds (the most common main worlds).

 

[JimG]

Unless I'm misreading the v2.0 document, you can now choose freely from the various Homeworld and Education lists...

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

That's what I thought it was going to say too, but on Page 6, under the heading "Education", it states:

Education: If you have four or five background skills, then you have also picked up some basic skills from your schooling.
A formal education gives you a basic level of competence in various sciences and academic disciplines. Select from the
following list:
Admin 0, Advocate 0, Art 0, Carouse 0, Computer 0, Engineer 0, Language 0, Medic 0, Science 0.

At this point, you are eighteen years old.

For example, Morn has an Education characteristic of 8, which has a DM of +0. He therefore has 0+3 background skills.
He comes from a poor desert world with Early Stellar technology, so he takes Animals 0, Survival 0, Drive 0.

Kathya has an Education of 10, which has a DM of +1 and so gives her four background skills. She takes two skills from
her homeworld, as well as Computer 0 and Medic 0 from the list of skills.

From the sentence at the vary beginning, ONLY if you have 4 or 5 background skills can you pick from the additional skills.

Also, in the two examples, only the higher education person (Kathya) picked from the Education skills.

I agree that the INTENT is that you can pick whatever you want, but that is still not what it says.

 

[Gruffty the Hiver]

I read the text in the v 2 document as saying:

If you have 1 to 3 background skills, you get to pick skills from the Homeworld table only.

If you have 4 or 5 background skills, you get to pick skills from the Homeworld table *and* from the skills listed under Education, as well.

My suggestion would be to expand the Education list with a few more skills (add 3? 4? more skills?) and say that only characters with Edu X+ can choose from the Education list.