Shadowrun 1E was was probably the first 'modern' game I played, D20 and Traveller before that (and T&T, Take That You Fiend!) so I am always biased towards something like their Skill cascade posted in the other thread, it left an impression on me. In that respect I admit I house rule a lot, I have treated the specialised skills like Engineering to be the characters main job, and just have a -1DM to the others, sometimes with an increase in difficulty, but I try to be gentle there, especially if the players give me a reason no to, I like a good creative story/excuse. Electronics specialties can work the same way, just be a little harsher on difficulty if the start trying to hack an Imperial Cruiser.
Letting a single character chain a difficult Mechanic check into Engineering is an nod to the players using spit and duct tape to get things done, sometime the by the book repair just gets done a bit creatively/cheap until you get to a starport with the Cr needed. I keep track of all those repairs that they fail to redo properly, because they tend to break again under duress. It does make the Engineer a lot of agency about their character.
I also allow Pilot1 or higher to have effective Eng0 just for the purposes of spinning up the Jump Drive, call it Bridge Operations if you like, same with a very basic Sensor sweep when you first come out of jump. That is a bit further from RAW.
Even further, and I admit very arbitrary, I split Science into Social and Physical, with a -DM within a group and no jumping between groups.
Letting a single character chain a difficult Mechanic check into Engineering is an nod to the players using spit and duct tape to get things done, sometime the by the book repair just gets done a bit creatively/cheap until you get to a starport with the Cr needed. I keep track of all those repairs that they fail to redo properly, because they tend to break again under duress. It does make the Engineer a lot of agency about their character.
I also allow Pilot1 or higher to have effective Eng0 just for the purposes of spinning up the Jump Drive, call it Bridge Operations if you like, same with a very basic Sensor sweep when you first come out of jump. That is a bit further from RAW.
Even further, and I admit very arbitrary, I split Science into Social and Physical, with a -DM within a group and no jumping between groups.
