Background Skills

[BP]

During a discussion about the Medic skill level, which encouraged a re-read of the Character Creation Skills and Background Skills [Core pg 6]:


The homeworld background skill levels seems slightly out of balance. Take someone who lived on a Vacuum world for their first 18 years. Giving them automatic Vacc Suit skill seems quite reasonable - but it seems that they would have a level commensurate with an expert more than one who is just 'competent in using that skill, but has little experience.' [Core pg 6]. Likewise for several other world characteristic based skills (though some others might also need to take into account Tech Level).

Since many players quite enjoy the character generation phase of Traveller (especially MGT), and skills can inherently be hard to come by, fleshing this topic out more might be beneficial...

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Living on a Vacuum world doesn't mean you use a Vacc Suit every day.

You are taught at an early age how to don a vacc suit for emergencies. But you live in a dome or tunnel and may never have actually had to put a Vacc Suit on except in drills in school (and who takes those seriously anyway?).

While it is POSSIBLE that you would have a higher skill level, how many High School seniors do you know that could be an automobile race car driver? All of them have Driver 0, but how many would you claim were really SKILLED in driving? Most seniors are very computer savvy; but ask them to write a program or hack in to the internet and they wouldn't be very successful. They are competent, but not really SKILLED.

Same for the Vacc Suit. They can put it on in an emergency and know how everything works and use the emergency patches. But, they are not really SKILLED in using it.

That's how I interpret those Background Skills. They know the basics and might be able to get an entry level job using those skills, but they are still just learning.

 

[rust]

In my water world setting the colonists receive Athletics (Swim) and
Seafarer as homeworld skills of level 0, because even those colonists
who rarely leave the seafloor habitats will have learned at least that
much of their world's cultural skills.

Higher levels of those skills can then be gained through the connection
rule, the setting's skill package and / or the character's career, so that
each player who wants his character to have a better homeworld cul-
tural skill than level 0 has a very good chance to obtain it.

 

[BP]

Thanks Rikki Tikki Traveller and rust!

Actually almost mentioned Zero-G for Asteroid as an issue till I realized such worlds would likely have Grav Plates (dependent on Tech).

Guess I need more sleep before posting!

 

[Klaus Kipling]

Athletics is one that should definitely be available to anyone. It's not as if sport isn't a common pass time for adolescents.

 

[rust]

Athletics is one that should definitely be available to anyone. It's not as if sport isn't a common pass time for adolescents.

Indeed. I just treat Athletics (Swim) somewhat differently in my setting
because it includes basic scuba-like diving, and I did not want to intro-
duce an additional skill for that.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Athletics is one that should definitely be available to anyone. It's not as if sport isn't a common pass time for adolescents.

There may or may not be an OGL product coming out in the near future that looks at Background skills and offers up some alternatives...