Enlisted Promotion

[nobby-w]

Got to thinking about the whole LBB1 vs. LBB4-7 supercharacter skill set issue.

As noted in other threads, part of my 'fix' was the Advanced Education INT 8+ table, bringing in a lot of those later skills.

But another one is something I thought up a couple weeks ago, Enlisted Promotion.

Jolly fine idea - I've also done that in the past. It gets away from the skill barrier arising from needing a commission. Also, you can indeed have characters go down the NCO route.
As for adding the LBB4-7 skills, I'd say best done judiciously. If you're sticking to LBB numbers of skills then adding a few key ones is probably the best policy, and you can sprinkle them in any sensible table. Some clear candidates include:

• Survival
• Recon
• Intrusion
• Carousing
• Heavy weapons (maybe a USP for army or marine characters)
• Ship tactics (if you use rules that make this useful, and maybe a USP for naval or pirate characters)
• Liaison (maybe a USP for diplomat or noble characters)
• Some sort of 'academic' cascade skill.

If you want to get granular with skills then you might need to shift to systems that generate more skills in total - for example MegaTraveller basic character gen systems.

 

[kilemall]

Jolly fine idea - I've also done that in the past. It gets away from the skill barrier arising from needing a commission. Also, you can indeed have characters go down the NCO route.
As for adding the LBB4-7 skills, I'd say best done judiciously. If you're sticking to LBB numbers of skills then adding a few key ones is probably the best policy, and you can sprinkle them in any sensible table. Some clear candidates include:

• Survival
• Recon
• Intrusion
• Carousing
• Heavy weapons (maybe a USP for army or marine characters)
• Ship tactics (if you use rules that make this useful, and maybe a USP for naval or pirate characters)
• Liaison (maybe a USP for diplomat or noble characters)
• Some sort of 'academic' cascade skill.

If you want to get granular with skills then you might need to shift to systems that generate more skills in total - for example MegaTraveller basic character gen systems.

What I have is a second Advanced Education table based on INT 8+ with LBB4+/S4 skills for all 6 original careers and the 12 S4 careers, not reposting as I'm sure most are tired of seeing it again.

Didn't create an Academic skill for Scientists or the like, but I have a kskill-like mechanism where one trades in EDU for specialized knowledge 'skills', I already have scientist player characters using that.

 

[Jame]

Jolly fine idea - I've also done that in the past. It gets away from the skill barrier arising from needing a commission. Also, you can indeed have characters go down the NCO route.
As for adding the LBB4-7 skills, I'd say best done judiciously. If you're sticking to LBB numbers of skills then adding a few key ones is probably the best policy, and you can sprinkle them in any sensible table. Some clear candidates include:

• Survival
• Recon
• Intrusion
• Carousing
• Heavy weapons (maybe a USP for army or marine characters)
• Ship tactics (if you use rules that make this useful, and maybe a USP for naval or pirate characters)
• Liaison (maybe a USP for diplomat or noble characters)
• Some sort of 'academic' cascade skill.

If you want to get granular with skills then you might need to shift to systems that generate more skills in total - for example MegaTraveller basic character gen systems.

Also, Demolitions would be useful.

 

[kilemall]

Also, Demolitions would be useful.

I roll with Combat Engineering on that one.

 

[nobby-w]

I roll with Combat Engineering on that one.

Same here - I was about to say that. If you want a small skill set then this would be the way to go.

I've also done a variant B1/S4 where some of the skill rolls landed on categories - e.g. vehicle, combat, technical, social, space, wilderness, subterfuge. Depending on the service (some skills only available to certain services) the player had the option of choosing a skill from that category.

For example, a 'technical' skill could be:

• Mechanical
• Electronic
• Engineering (available to Navy, Scouts, Merchants, Pirates etc.)
• Combat Engineer (available to Army, Marines, Sailors, Pirates, Belters)

And the player could choose the skill. This gives the player a modicum of control over the character. Other options would be to allow the player to choose some of the skills (maybe 1 per term), or give them a certain number of points that they can goose the rolls with (in either direction).