I recently rolled a character up with a random generator and got a character with Rifle-2, SMG-2, and … Hovercraft-2. Since I started by talking about skills, look at Mickey and think about that.īut let’s look at something simpler. Lots of people prefer to throw up their hands and say “that’s ridiculous”, “that’s impossible”, “that’s unbelievable” but I always prefer to look at stats and say “I wonder so hard how that could be that I am now making up a plausible reason”. I love random values and then trying to make sense of them. How come he dropped out of school when he had the brains to pursue it at least a little further? What kind of nobodies were his parents? Why? But on the other hand, that’s a lot of information! How come he’s so weak and sickly? Maybe the fact that he’s a Belter has something to do with that. He’s not gifted by birth at anything - he’s weak, he’s slow, he’s got a nasty cough that won’t go away, he dropped out of high school, and his parents were nobodies.
He’s below average in every stat but intelligence, where he’s perfectly average. They are also defining characteristics - they don’t just tell you how the character will engage mechanically but also who they are. But you have to look at all features of the character, especially skills, in ways other than just how they mechanically operate in play. You’d think it would benefit from a ton of generalization. TAS Membership, Pinnace to call my own (The Stephen Foster)
Mickey is distinctly below average in all respects, but remains the hero of his own story.Ĭutlass-1 Brawling-1 Mechanical-2 Ship’s Boat-2 Vacc-1 So recently we’ve been playing some classic Traveller. There are too many cool things out there to sit in a corner with that one you liked when you were 12 and deny all others. I’m long past claiming only one game or one kind of game will satisfy me. I still like this though it’s no longer an axiom of taste but rather just another kind of game I like to play. The machine doesn’t need to know it in order to crank out resolution effects. That is, you can fabricate this background detail of specificity yourself. Or don’t use Violence when you’re in one. I felt (and still feel, for these games) that if you the player want your character to be great at rocket launchers and shitty at barfights, then don’t get into barfights. Sure, there are different skills involved in real life usage of fists, a knife, a rocket launcher, but verisimilitude was no longer my goal, at least not through strict simulation. Eventually I’d be very happy with “Violence” as a skill that subsumed all of that combat shit. How much difference was there really between a submachine gun and an automatic rifle? Did they really need different skill? Even if they were different, don’t you think you could pick up the skill pretty fast if you already knew something similar? So at this point I was digging the Traveller Mercenary (Book 4) abstraction (available only for military careers though, so in a sense this is just a bucket of skills with a new name) of “combat rifleman”.Īs time and experience moved forward I came to really like generalization. That’s mighty specific!Īs I matured, or at least grew older, and started to think about game design I started to appreciate the verisimilitude of generalization - or at least categorization.
#TRAVELLER RPG ADMINISTRATION SKILL HOW TO#
But skills were so specific in Traveller that there wasn’t even a general rule for determining success - pretty much every skill had its own paragraph describing how to use it. I suspect I felt something else I didn’t have words for yet as well, but I would.
At first (say 1978, playing Traveller) I would have said “very specific” because that felt realistic to me.
0 kommentar(er)
