On Jan 9, 2012, at 10:26 PM, "Onno Meyer" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hal replied to me: >> One of the rules I "houseruled" very quickly was the OJT such that you >> can't get above "well trained" or in some cases "expert" with the skill. Day >> to day ordinary activities almost never bring you into circumstances in >> which you become a verifiable expert at your given skill. > > Hello Hal, > > that raises the question of "who teaches the teachers?" > > Or perhaps "if you're Trained By A Master, can you surpass the > sensei?" > > There must be a way to improve the state of the art beyond the > best manuals and the best available teachers. For the computer > operations example, you could argue that they can consult the > computer programmers, but that only shifts the problem. Who > trains a world-class scientist or engineer? > > I assumed that this is represented by self-learning, without > books or teachers because there are none, and by necessity on > the job -- you can't train sensor ops by thinking about a > blank wall. IMHO, there should be limits to the study rules (which include the "1/4 rate for learning on the job", IIRC) beyond merely the amount of time spent. If you're learning from a teacher, you should not be able to use that learning to surpass your teacher's skill (although I factor relative Talent into this); likewise, if you're learning from a book, you shouldn't be able to surpass the author's skill, since he is, indirectly, your teacher. If you're learning by doing, a cap should be set based on how much of a challenge you face on average during a given training period (however long it takes to earn 1cp). As well, some of these "study sources" should also have minimum proficiency requirements before you can earn character points from them: just as a basic primer won't teach you much more than the basics of a skill, so too will book written with advanced practitioners in mind be useless to a beginner. As a rule of thumb, I figure that any given teaching source is good for a four-point spread: a book that can teach you up to a skill of 18 requires you to have a skill of at least 15 before it's of any use to you. With books and supervised training, this floor can be lowered if the supervisor is a good teacher: the best teachers know how to teach to a student's level, while the poor teachers generally forget how to talk about the subject in "simple" terms that a novice is read for. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
