"Pre-Career", University and Service Skills.

[Belisknar]

If a traveller starts off with university as their first term option, are they simply throwing away their chance to get all 6 service skills from their first career?

It's unclear whether this is the case or not. If you go with the Military Academy, you come out with all 6 of the service skills for the branch you are training for.

This becomes a non-issue if university is taken in term 2 or 3.

So, if I roll a character and they go to Uni, Graduate and then join the Agent Career... Should my Traveller

1. Gain all 6 Service Skills as normal since it is his first career and the University is counted as "Pre-career" in terms of gaining service skills.

or

2. Pick a skill from the Service skills since this is his second term of Character Creation and the first term was used to train up in Uni?

 

[-Daniel-]

Not to be too picky, but the basic training does not say anything about your first term.
Quote;

Basic Training - For your first career only, you get all the skills listed in the Service Skills table at Level 0 as your basic training. For any subsequent careers, you may pick any one skill listed in the Service Skills table at Level 0 as your basic training.

The bold added by me.

So if we follow this, the "Pre-Career" does not count as a career. Thus your first career might be your second term, and as such you would still get all your Service Skills at level zero.

At least that is what the rules seem to say as written right now. 8)

 

[Belisknar]

Not to be too picky, but the basic training does not say anything about your first term.
Quote;

Basic Training - For your first career only, you get all the skills listed in the Service Skills table at Level 0 as your basic training. For any subsequent careers, you may pick any one skill listed in the Service Skills table at Level 0 as your basic training.

The bold added by me.

So if we follow this, the "Pre-Career" does not count as a career. Thus your first career might be your second term, and as such you would still get all your Service Skills at level zero.

At least that is what the rules seem to say as written right now. 8)

That's actually the way I look at it and the way I have generated my characters who have gone through university.

That's specifically why I put the quotes around Pre-Career and listed the examples in the order of the traveller getting the skills coming first.

I'm fully in favor of gaining the service skills. However in another thread I read someone talking about choosing from the service skills table, in the first career after University, and the question of clarification in the rules came to mind.

 

[-Daniel-]

I'm fully in favor of gaining the service skills. However in another thread I read someone talking about choosing from the service skills table, in the first career after University, and the question of clarification in the rules came to mind.

I am a large fan of first reading the rules as they are written and see what makes sense by them before adding my own rules to the mix. As such, the rule clearly stats first career not first term. Now if someone wants to house rule that the pre-career university counts as the first term, that is their right. But I would not do so at my table. :mrgreen: