Character Advancement

[Aged_Traveller]

Whilst I cannot admit (yet) to having read and (more importantly) digested every word in the new Core Rulebook, it does seem to me to be somewhat lacking in the area of Character Advancement.

In MT, characters could advance through experience (via adventure tallys for skills, etc.) and formal training (for both skills and characteristics). In the new Core Rulebook, all I could find was a couple of small paragraphs at the end of the Skills & Tasks chapter (Learning New Skills, p.59).

In the playtest documents I have seen, the time spent training for new skills was originally calculated in months. However, in print this has been changed to weeks. I assume that this was done to speed up skill progression rather than stick to the somewhat slower Traveller "norm"?

There appears to be no mention of how to handle the improvement of the characteristics in either the playtest docs or the Core Rulebook.

Although I have only been playing Traveller since the arrival of MT (though that's now over 20 years :shock, I am quite comfortable with the concept of not having "character levels" for the purposes of advancement. However, players new to Traveller (or even RPGs in general) may not, and in all these areas the rules are more than a little bit grey.

 

[Xoph]

http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=35007

 

[-Daniel-]

Even thoguh I realise we already have a thread going for this, I do want to comment on one point.

In the playtest documents I have seen, the time spent training for new skills was originally calculated in months. However, in print this has been changed to weeks. I assume that this was done to speed up skill progression rather than stick to the somewhat slower Traveller "norm"?

I think the "slow" norm is safe.

Let's take a two term Marine I made the other day. He has 10 levels of skills. (Picked up 7 from chargen and 2 from connections and 1 from the group package). His highest skill is a level 2.

For him to increase any of his level 1 skills it would take 12 weeks worth of training. That is 3 months of in game time. Now I realize some folks play in such a way that they "jump" time. But that also happened in CT. But in a normal game that three months may take more then three months real time to play out. Now keep in mind it also says they can train in one skill only per week. So if he wants to increase three skills and we say he is working on all three over time? We are not seeing his skills increase for a long time.

To put this in context, my last game we played for eight months and in game time about a year passed. So in eight months of RPG play the character would have increased three or four skills. That is quite slow in my book. Slower then any other game I play.

Daniel

 

[AKAmra]

I'm going to go with an EXP system designed to be as close to RAW as possible. PC's get 1 EXP per game. 1 EXP = one weeks training as per RAW. Everything else stays the same, except time spent training and/or finding a teacher can be handled much more informally because the EXP system is the built-in "braking system" for character advancement.