Traveller 5.10 Book 1 - part 6: Skills

Book 1: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

 Now we get into what all those skills we earned in character generation mean. And the opening paragraph about skills define abilities is even confusing:

Skills are quantifications of each individual character's abilities. Skill is a broad label which is further divided into Skills, Knowledges and Talents. Each has its own usage and restrictions.

So, a skill is broken into skills? Is that like an apple is made up of apples? Seems almost like a Platonic idea of what matter is. Skills are then defined as an area of expertise. We actually start off with the master skill list, which as 64 skills. They are grouped by a general purpose skill, such as Admin, Driver; starship skills from Astrogator (and I still prefer Navigator but see as that could be confusing) and Pilot; trade skills such as Biologics and Gravatics (which is not the same as the engineering skill for grav engines?); the Arts such as Actor and Author; and soldier skills such as Fighter and Heavy Weapons.  Next to this list is also the list of many knowledges, which are the skills broken down even more. so there are technically more than 64 skills as several of those skills are a collection of skills. And we have talents, which usually are used by aliens and not humans. 

Which is where it gets really confusing to me: they are all skills to me. I think the way they did this in the Classic Mercenary and High Guard "advanced" character generation made more sense to me: you picked a specific skill if you got a broader skill. For instance, you rolled Driver and picked grav vehicle. And I think we're doing the same thing here but with a different name for the same thing. Though I think (and I'd need to re-re-read the character generation process) if you get 2 knowledges in a skill you pick up the broader skill, giving you knowledge-0 of the other skills, err, knowledges, in that grouping. Seems overly complicated to me, and not really needed. Why, back in my day a ship's engineer could maintain the jump and maneuver drives. And we didn't need no power plant! Now we have specialists. Which honestly reminds me how software development has changed over the years as well, come to think of it. 

We also get the default skill list, which is much larger than I expected: 12 skills you get at level 0 so you can at least attempt things, though it will be really hard so you will need to add an extra die to the dice pool. T5 does seem to have the skill explosion process down pat! I prefer the Mongoose and Cepheus versions where you get some default skills based on your home world, which T5 does as well in addition to the base default skills. Seems like a power gamers paradise. Starting out you get a broad swath of skills out of the door. Of course, in many ways this makes sense with T5's task system. But for me it seems to make the game more rolling than role-playing as the tasks cover so much. However, I think all that really also depends on how you run the game. In the end, you are still playing Traveller and if a well-prepared referee can have the tasks set up, you are still rolling dice for things that have an impact if you succeed or not. You are just rolling probably more dice and want to roll under the target. Which still does not sit well with me for Traveller. I am old and crotchety, what can I say! (And not really that old, though I did hit 60 a few weeks ago. Which when I started playing Traveller seemed like a doddering old age, but now that I am here, well, 90 is the new old age!)

Reading on, we find that each level of a skill represents about a year of training in theory. The naming convention is the same as it has been since Classic, with Pilot-1 meaning they have that skill at level one. Biggest difference is the level 0 skills, which were actually "half skills" in Classic I found when re-reading some of the old books. I think 0 makes more sense: you are not great at it, but you can try without a penalty. Though with the T5 task system, there is now a bit of difficulty as it adds a die to the dice pool. Unless you are cautious and take twice as long to attempt that task. 

An interesting touch to the default skills is that you can take a hobby after your career and have it at level 0. Except for the 2 careers that have a hobby built into them.

And finally, it is explained that the progression for those skills with sub-skills (aka knowledges) go knowledge, knowledge, skill. Meaning they get the Skill (such as ships boat) at level 1 but not the pilot  ACS (Adventurer Class Ships). Before that, they get the sub-skills at level 1 meaning they can try to pilot a ship if they have shuttle pilot but get no bonus and have and have the extra die because this is hard. Yes, I keep repeating that as the more I read, it does start to make more sense. But still seems pretty complicated. From the table, it looks like once you get that 3rd hit, you just bump up the skill. Which I read to mean that you have all the knowledges at that skill level. We've also changed the rule for maximum skill levels across all skills (which I think was more a house rule but may have been in the books) in that you can at most get a single skill level up to 15. Which matches the human-norm max for a characteristic. Coincidence, or just someone who really likes hexadecimal? And some knowledges max out at 6, and there is this thing about career knowledge based on the number of terms. The example is a Scout who has served 4 terms - he has Scout-4 as a knowledge. Meaning he knows a lot about the Scouts. How would that parley in play? I honestly think it would amount to a sort of specialized admin skill in dealing with the Scout bureaucracy. I can see this as a sort of useful tool when dealing with your previous career, but that is something I think most referees would have done out of the box. We just now have explicit rules for it. Which seems to be what T5 is trying to do. 

And that is the thing about T5: there are a LOT of rules and mechanics. I am hoping as I read through the books I can tease out some of the more useful ones and apply them to Traveller and other games. As there are some really good nuggets in there such as the QREBS system which I have written about, and comes up soon. While I think several make some sort of sense, I really have a hard time seeing how you could use all the rules. I think it is more like the MOAN principle but applied to the rules: use only what you want. MOAN is Map Only As a Needed. Which, if you've been reading my posts, you know I map way beyond that!

We have a quick recap of a skill check (which is what was the only check back in the old days): check against the skill only. An easy task is 1d6, a hard task is 3d6. Not quite the same as we need to roll under the skill level vs rolling 8+ and adding in your skill. But as T5 generally has higher skill levels, sort of similar and is basically the 68A rule from Megatravaller. Interestingly, you always fail if you roll the max. Meaning an easy roll of 1d6 is a lot easier to automatically fail than a hard skill roll (6 on 1d6 vs 18 on 3d6). 

Then we have almost 40 pages covering the skills, talents and knowledges in detail, along with a few examples on how to use them and setting up some task rolls. A far cry from classic Book 1's 5 pages covering the all the skills. But there is a consistent mechanism now for applying the rules and skills. Classic Traveller had a few skills that changed the modifications based on your skill level (looking at you, vacc suit skill!)

T5 is still accountants in space I feel!

T5 represents a skill explosion, which some gamers love, others hate. I personally prefer the simplicity of Classic Traveller yet I can understand having more details. It all depends on my mood. For instance, I am running 2 Fantasy Trip games: the mechanics there are pretty simple. And yes, there are a lot of talents and spells, but you either have it or not. Tracking XP is a lot different than level-based games: it is basically a purchase system: you spend XP to gain a stat boost or buy a skill or talent. Compare this to Old School Essentials, where your skills are class and race-based, and then level-based, and it is more nuanced for each type of character in terms of skill progression and talents. I like both, though I'll admit TFT is a lot easier to run. But I will get better at running OSE (and next year will try a Dolmenwood game).