[House Rule] Effect on EDU of sophont life cycle and cultural factors

[Hemdian]

I was looking at sophont lifecycles and an idea just popped into my head. For sophonts where C5 is Education, I tend to think of Education as a sort of general knowledge characteristic. That being the case then early schooling is about learning basic skills (reading, writing, math, etc), and later schooling is about building on that to gain knowledge. (Okay, I know it’s not that simple and a lot more blurred than that but stay with me for a moment.) How about if that related to life stage 1 (childhood) and life stage 2 (adolescence)? You could say that the pre-Chargen Education score corresponds to time spent in life stage 2 only.

I’m proposing a house rule where, for a sophont that has C5 = Education, the number of dice rolled = the number of terms in life stage 2. So, a sophont with 1 term in life stage 2 gets 1D Education prior to Chargen, a sophont with 2 terms in life stage 2 (such as humans) get 2D Education, and so on.

In addition to that, there are cultural (non-biological) factors. Probably the best way to handle that is a flux roll made once per world and then applied to the Education of all who grew up there, regardless of race.

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[Murdoc]

Overall, I like it. I like these kinds of systems that tie things together like that. Now, more specifically:

In addition to that, there are cultural (non-biological) factors. Probably the best way to handle that is a flux roll made once per world and then applied to the Education of all who grew up there, regardless of race.

This is good because my first thought when reading the paragraph before this one was, what if a certain culture doesn't educate its young for every term before adulthood? As an example I am reminded of a race I made up for Star Trek that sent their older adolescents to a special off-world colony, suspending their formal education so that they could focus on developing their social skills and building relationships. Well that was the official reason, really it was an excuse to get the rowdy kids offworld so they could party to their hearts' content out of the way of the adults, and hopefully get it out of their system before they take on real responsibilities in the adult world. Humans that knew of this jokingly referred to it as "college".

My only problem with the applying flux part, which is fine by itself, is that the culture may also treat different portions of its society differently in terms of their education. Examples can include by social class or status (wealth), gender, caste, "races", political ties, religions, etc. Now one could, if they wanted to, continue to apply flux to any such group developed, even based off of the world's flux roll in a manner similar to how I use flux to determine the popularity of works of art and entertainment among segments of the population. In the end, not everyone will want this level of granularity, and it may just be simpler to roll each individual's Edu randomly to begin with, and use any of these excuses to explain the result. But still, if you want to make up a culture's educational "profile", sure, this sounds like fun.

ps: I see Edu the same way you do, sort of 'any information that doesn't fit into an existing skill'.