Hal replied to me: > Part of the problem with any skill set, is definining what it can or > can't do, and how one goes about learning new information regarding that skill > set. About the only solution I have for that, is the invention rules.
Hello Hal, in many skills, being able to decide faster, to track more items at the same time, or to act with higher precision means a higher skill level. You don't need more theoretical insight. Other skills require such a breakthrough to get better. I'm not sure where Piloting, Gunner and Electronics Ops come in. > Think about it. When a metallurgist is attempting to improve on a > product, he has to invent the new process almost from scratch in the sense > that he > doesn't know what will or won't work, but that he has ideas. Once he > tries those ideas out, he determines what does or doesn't work, and refines > that new knowledge into something he can either write about, or teaches his > students what it was he learned. In some instances, the only thing he can > pass on down to his students are those things that didn't work, giving them a > foundation to try to build upon later. That sounds almost as if skills are just a collection of techniques. > In any event, I've often wondered what the difference between a TL 2 > metalurgist and smith, versus a TL 3 or TL 4 version of the skill. Could for > instance, a TL 2 miner, smelt metals such as Titanium by having a skill 21 in > metallurgy and smithing? I suspect the answer is no. By the rules, Metallurgy/TL2-21 defaults to Metallurgy/TL3-16, Metallurgy/TL4-11, and Metallurgy/TL5-6, but there are no further defaults. Should Metallurgy/TL5 allow the smelting of titanium? > Now don't think I hold this process to be true for all sciences and/or > skills. But I illustrated the reasoning why some of those skills, in order to > be higher grade skill levels, require research to reach those levels, as > opposed to someone saying "Hey, I just spent 4 character points on raising > my programming skill, I am now an expert in all things related to > programming." Hence my suggestion of OJT -- "Hey, I just spent a year on the IT help desk, I was supposed to pick up programming if I could. Does that give enough points to raise my skill another level?" > Before I forget? One of the other things I used as a house-rule for the > group, was that you can't bank your experience points until you have a > gazillion experience points, and then spend them all at once in a single > skill. > Consequently, experience point expenditure must be on skills used during > the game run, and must also be spent such that no more than ONE experience > point may be spent on the skill per game run. The obvious exception to that > rule was for those crit successes or crit fail rolls that gave points on > the spot. We had a rule that CPs could only be spent during the "downtime" between adventures. That had the opposite effect, a few weeks of game time and a few months of real time could give a dozen points to spend at once. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
