captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
(Moved over to own thread to avoid being buried)
One of the issues that Traveller seems to wrangle with is skills vs traits; in fact, just about any RPG since traveller has had to deal with this.
Without starting a basic discussion, my thought is that traveller really is about skills-in the future, science and technology tend to obviate the usefulness of Conan types (or grey moser, and obviously Gandalf), or another way, fantastic People with fantastic abiliites in fantastic situations. Which is cool. What traveller seems to present to me is Real people using Futuristic skills to overcome Fantastic situations. No need to discuss this, this is just context for my post.
I'll state that I think that skills are the essence of traveller.
I'll also state that I think abilities should allow characters to go beyond their skills, and to excel in their skills.
I'll finally state that too many pluses spoil the bell curve.
Again, just context.
Problem is, since skills and abilities IRL are really a false dichotomy (bear with me, here) the effects are hard to model, and usually in an rpg, one stomps the other. And both often stomp the Bell curve.
It is difficult particularly when looked at from a task or process perspective, ie , do I succeed or fail ?
Another way to differentially reflect the importance of skill relative to talent may be to split the effects of skills and talents between task and result, giving different wieght in the two situations.
iA suggestion to start with: when checking for effect, add only the skill modifier - including the -3 if unskilled.
The effect is that talents helps you succeed, and can be seen to have nearly equal weight, but for any outcome other than succeed/fail, skill determines quality.
If you are using talent (Dex +3) to overcome a total lack of skill (-3), you may succeed (roll 8+), but the result is very likely to be a MacGiver/Bodgejob/bailing wire and gum sculpture. (effect -3, minimum 1)
It might be good to also including the difficulty mod, perhaps capped to the skill level : that way one doesn't always have skilled people producing excellent results no matter what the difficulty. (skill 2 would get the "exceptional result 50% of the time; seems a bit extreme, speaking as having at least one skill 2 IRL).
I suggest the cap as the difficulty scale is different from the skill scale, so it won't take much for all difficult tasks to produce shoddy results,( and thus punishing the attempt to challenge oneself)
The above doesn't effect the accumulation of pluses wacking the Bell curve, I admit. I'm open to suggestions.
Comments ? [/i]
One of the issues that Traveller seems to wrangle with is skills vs traits; in fact, just about any RPG since traveller has had to deal with this.
Without starting a basic discussion, my thought is that traveller really is about skills-in the future, science and technology tend to obviate the usefulness of Conan types (or grey moser, and obviously Gandalf), or another way, fantastic People with fantastic abiliites in fantastic situations. Which is cool. What traveller seems to present to me is Real people using Futuristic skills to overcome Fantastic situations. No need to discuss this, this is just context for my post.
I'll state that I think that skills are the essence of traveller.
I'll also state that I think abilities should allow characters to go beyond their skills, and to excel in their skills.
I'll finally state that too many pluses spoil the bell curve.
Again, just context.
Problem is, since skills and abilities IRL are really a false dichotomy (bear with me, here) the effects are hard to model, and usually in an rpg, one stomps the other. And both often stomp the Bell curve.
It is difficult particularly when looked at from a task or process perspective, ie , do I succeed or fail ?
Another way to differentially reflect the importance of skill relative to talent may be to split the effects of skills and talents between task and result, giving different wieght in the two situations.
iA suggestion to start with: when checking for effect, add only the skill modifier - including the -3 if unskilled.
The effect is that talents helps you succeed, and can be seen to have nearly equal weight, but for any outcome other than succeed/fail, skill determines quality.
If you are using talent (Dex +3) to overcome a total lack of skill (-3), you may succeed (roll 8+), but the result is very likely to be a MacGiver/Bodgejob/bailing wire and gum sculpture. (effect -3, minimum 1)
It might be good to also including the difficulty mod, perhaps capped to the skill level : that way one doesn't always have skilled people producing excellent results no matter what the difficulty. (skill 2 would get the "exceptional result 50% of the time; seems a bit extreme, speaking as having at least one skill 2 IRL).
I suggest the cap as the difficulty scale is different from the skill scale, so it won't take much for all difficult tasks to produce shoddy results,( and thus punishing the attempt to challenge oneself)
The above doesn't effect the accumulation of pluses wacking the Bell curve, I admit. I'm open to suggestions.
Comments ? [/i]
