d20 Conversions: Rise of the Runelords

[simonh]

I do actually share your concerns, now that I think about it. The only difference that a warrior profession gets is +10, the rest is all in Free Skill Points, so the differentiation between warrior and scholar (given appropriate stats for the profession) is only going to be 15%.

I don't share the concern at all. I think it's perfectly reasonable that the difference between the best a professional at that age can be at a career skill is about 15% better than the best a non-professional can be at it. All a profession means is that this is how you make a living. That's all. Who has the better driving skill, a van driver age 20 or an accountancy student age 20 who happens to have competed in national junior race competitions from the age of 15 and started go-cart racing at age 8? These people do exist.

In america, where hunting as a sport is integral to the culture of many communities, the argument is even stronger. Plenty of kids grow up with firearms in the household and are taught to hunt from their teenage years. I have no problem with a 20 year old from Kentucky having a comparable skill with firearms as a profficient soldier of the same age having completed basic training. I think the soldier should have the edge, maybe he's from Kentucky too, but I think 15% is plenty.

I know I'm using modern examples, but I don't think the historical situation in all that different, when training was largely an informal and family affair. I'm sure it's possible to find very narrow specific examples where perhaps this doesn't apply, such as specialist skills that didn't exist in the general population and were only available through intensive apprenticeship, but that's what the Advanced Skills system is for.

Simon Hibbs

 

[simonh]

I'm not saying they can't, but it reeks of optimization. These adventurers would not have had time to accumulate all these backgrounds. We're talking 17 y.o? I might make my players 15 to start.

Unusualy skilled and experienced people with extraordinary backgerounds do exist, and have always existed. Why would you want to go out of your way to exclude your players from the possibility of playing one of them?

As a GM myself, I go out of my way to encourage them to do so.

Simon Hibbs

 

[PhilHibbs]

I do actually share your concerns, now that I think about it. The only difference that a warrior profession gets is +10, the rest is all in Free Skill Points, so the differentiation between warrior and scholar (given appropriate stats for the profession) is only going to be 15%.

I don't share the concern at all. I think it's perfectly reasonable that the difference between the best a professional at that age can be at a career skill is about 15% better than the best a non-professional can be at it. All a profession means is that this is how you make a living. That's all.

Good point. There must be plenty of NPCs out there who didn't put 30 of their Free Skill Points into their professional skill, so a PC scribe who always wanted to be a hero (and studied all the battle reports that came in, and watched the training grounds that his room overlooked, and practiced with his uncle every Wildday) could be better at combat than a terrified conscript who always just stayed in the shield wall and tried not to get into the thick of it and spent all his Free Skill Points on gambling, seduction and streetwise.

 

[Deleriad]

I'm not saying they can't, but it reeks of optimization. These adventurers would not have had time to accumulate all these backgrounds. We're talking 17 y.o? I might make my players 15 to start.

Unusualy skilled and experienced people with extraordinary backgerounds do exist, and have always existed. Why would you want to go out of your way to exclude your players from the possibility of playing one of them?

As a GM myself, I go out of my way to encourage them to do so.

Simon Hibbs

I'm the same. The free skills portion of the experience is the largest part of character generation in RQ for a reason. I think of the profession as basically providing a bonus rather than defining a character or being a pseudo class that provides their starting skills.

If a player wants to spend their free points on the skills they think will be most useful, why shouldn't they?

 

[cthulhudarren]

I'm not saying they can't, but it reeks of optimization. These adventurers would not have had time to accumulate all these backgrounds. We're talking 17 y.o? I might make my players 15 to start.

Unusualy skilled and experienced people with extraordinary backgerounds do exist, and have always existed. Why would you want to go out of your way to exclude your players from the possibility of playing one of them?

As a GM myself, I go out of my way to encourage them to do so.

Simon Hibbs

Perhaps the bottom line for me is that I'm cynical and think the players would do it for purely optimization purposes.

 

[simonh]

Perhaps the bottom line for me is that I'm cynical and think the players would do it for purely optimization purposes.

Optimized for what, being interesting? If you want to optimize for combat, you take a soldier and get the extra 15%.

IMHO Optimization becomes a problem when you find obscure manipulations of the game system that achieve effects not anticipated or allowed for by the game designer or GM. I realy don't see how 'Secretly trained at Skill X by their grandfather/a mysterious stranger' qualifies for this. It's a standard trope of adventure fiction.

Now if somehow it was possible for a character with the Scribe background to be better at combat than a character taking the Soldier career could possibly be, I'd agree that would be a problem. I have seen problems like that in complex game systems, often home-grown ones. A GM of mine way back modified the Assassin class in AD&D so that assassins were way better at toe-to-toe combat that a fighter could ever be. That was broken. But then if you were making the Ninja Assasin roleplaying game that might be fine.

Simon Hibbs