Acquired Skills

Continuing on from the last post, the title for this does not come from the DMG.  This answers the question, where do these skills come from?

Sterling mentioned Traveller, an example of the same period that appeals to me.  For those who don't know, Traveller is a future-based RPG where players travel to multiple planetary systems and have adventures on different kinds of planets.  Basically, the original premise for Star Trek, or Wagon Train to the stars.

It seemed that when I ran this game in the early 80s, it was mostly about players trying to accumulate money to either buy, build or fix a ship, and constantly getting into trouble they had to get out of.  My experience was limited to the very early books, those published in 1980 or thereabouts.  I had abandoned the game before later books came into style; searching for a pdf of the original books, I was stymied online.  I guess they're quite rare now.  As such, I was forced to take images from my own copy of Book 5: High Guard.

Now forgive me if I miss some details regarding the explanation below.  I haven't created a character in Traveller in 35 years, so I'm rusty.  And it could be this was the way we interpreted the rules back then, different from other players; there was no internet where aggressive self-righteous persons could tell us we were doing this wrong.  Too, I'm going to skip over a number of details that aren't relevant to this post.  Please bear with me in any case; I'm establishing background for a point I'll make after.

The game had an unusual procedure for rolling the player character.  In our game, the character "began" at 18 years of age, and could attempt to join various organizations: the navy, the army, the marines, the scouts and so on.  Here, the example player character, Jim Ford, is entering the Navy.  Jim wants to be an officer, so he tries out for the Imperial navy and succeeds.  He rolls for his branch selection (what part of the navy he serves in, and we'll say "Line."  I'm leaving out details, because I'm not trying to teach people how to play Traveller.

The first one-year assignment of the character begins with OCS; for that one year (Jim is 19 now), he gets a roll on the branch skills table and the staff officer skills table.  Here's a screenshot of the skills table:

Jim gets no bonus on the staff officer table, as his rank is "O1."  He rolls a 5 and gets bribery, written as "Bribery-1."  He gets +2 on the Line/crew table because he's in the Imperial Navy; he rolls another 5 and gets "Zero-G Cbt-1."  Okay.  He's out of officer's candidate school and now he's young Ensign Ford, with two skills under his belt.  What happens next is ordered by these tables:

Let me stop a moment and say that Traveller was an odd, idiosyncratic game.  On the one hand, the character development system was overdone, and yet at the same time strangely compelling.  A navy character wasn't a "class" like D&D; it was a collection of skills, gathered randomly, which made any two characters potentially different ... but it also tended to create a lot of similar characters, where die rolls clustered, and many of the "skills" were not that useful for the game.  In Jim's case, unless he actually enters zero-g, or decides to be the sort of person anxious to bribe someone, he has no useful skills at all.  This was very frustrating for players who lacked flexibility in their self-perception.

Here we get into the weirdness of the system.  Jim's entry into the navy is presumed to be a four-year assignment; we've determined his first year, it's officer candidate school.  Now he's entering his second year: and he may, but he's not required to, make a throw on the Command Duty table, top left.  Success puts him in a command position; failure puts him in a staff position.  If he doesn't roll, he's a staff officder.  We always rolled.  Non-officers do not roll for command duty.  I roll for Jim on 2d6 and he gets a 6; he's a staff officer.  Next, everyone rolls for specific assignment; I roll a 5 on 2d6, and Jim gets assigned to a "Strike" — a combat mission, rather than an upfront battle.

And now I will ask you to look at the lists of tables on page 7.  At the top, you'll see "Line/crew."  Jim is an ensign, so he's "Line," and rolls on these tables.  The tables read Training, Shore Duty, Patrol, Siege, Strike, Battle.  Under "Strike," the table gives survival as "6+".  Here's a quote from the book's rules:

"Any assignment may pose some danger of injury or death.  To survive a unit assignment, the character must throw the indicated number or higher on two dice (2d6).  If the indicated number is thrown exactly, the character has received a wound or injury; if the injury occurs while serving in a battle or strike assignment, it is officially classed as a combat wound and the charaacter is awarded the Purple Heart.  A character may elect to take a negative DM on his or her survival roll and then apply it as an equal postitive DM for decorations in the next step."

That is, he can roll 8+ to survive to get 5+ on his decoration.  If Ensign Ford dies here, he dies; mindbogglingly, the player starts at the beginning of the procedure, as many times as necessary.  This could be extremely frustrating ... but it did tend to have players hesitate when deciding to accept another tour of duty (four more years).

We don't have to talk about decorations and promotions; we're here to talk about skills.  Jim needs to roll a 5+ to get a skill; I roll an 8 and he gets one.  That makes him eligible for one skill, on the Skills Table where he rolled after OCS.  He gets one skill, but he gets to pick which table it comes from.  Anyone in the navy is entitled to choose the Navy Life table.  Jim isn't a petty officer, and can only roll on the one branch skills table, Line.  He blew the command roll so he can choose Staff Officer.  He did not serve in training or shore duty, so he can't use the shore duty table.  But he was aboard ship, so he can roll on the Shipboard Life.

That gives him one skill rolled on one of four tables: either Line, Navy Life, Staff Officer or Shipboard Life.  Players never get enough combat skills or the treasured pilot skill, so they tend to roll on tables that will get them one of those things.

At last, then, let's begin to move away from such details.  As nuts as the system was, the players could see and feel where their skills were coming from.  They could perceive that they had been in fights, and could add bling and ranks to their characters.  After going through the process four times, they could muster out, get some money and equipment, and start running in the "real" campaign.

Towards the end of my running Traveller as a "referee" (which I did as a DM, to be honest), I began to subvert the character generation in an unexpected, and reportedly popular way, so my players said.  I required them all to join the same service and, with some variance, the same branch.  All the players would be in the Navy together and they'd all be either officers or crew.  Players would compete for the commander position, with only one getting it, because their characters would be "together" on the same assignment.  And then, to take the example above, instead of making a "survival" roll, I would RUN the players in a strike situation, role-playing the experience as an adventure, and force them to live or die by their own wits.  At the end of the adventure, the skills they gained would depend on what they'd tried to do, or what they'd been forced to do; much of the time, I rolled the skills in secret for the players, and then built the adventure around that.

This got everyone into the game quickly, without relying on the character generation system — but still using that system as a premise.  Character skills therefore became things the characters PICKED UP over time, rather than something they were trained to do in the distant past.

Additionally, I began around 1983, about half-way through my Traveller years, to mix in rules from another roleplaying game, Top Secret.  I preferred the combat system, adjusting it to work with Traveller weapons.  I liked something else about it:  when something special was done in the game, the skills were "marked up" by a 10% bonus.  So instead of a character having Bribery-1, a successful use of that Bribery would make it Bribery-1.1; and then 1.2 and so on, letting the character increase their skills by their own ken, rather than letting the game system rule completely over it.  I also let players without any skill develop something like Pilot, starting at 0.0 until they got a little bit of training that would boost them to 0.1.

These things worked very well with the players, as we might imagine.  Unfortunately, I would have to surrender my D&D campaign for a few weeks to play "Star Jumper," as I called my campaign; and then suspend Star Jumper to play D&D.  By '87-88, I was getting less and less interested in suspending D&D.  Finally I called an end to S.J. and never went back.

I could probably run it now, but it would never have the depth of my present D&D campaign.

Notice, however, the way that my sage abilities have begun to reflect that earlier idea in a different game.  Players aren't limited to the sage abilities they're given.  They CAN find an instructor, spend a lot of time and learn how to do other things.  They can improve their own skills through levelling; and the system is built so that everyone of any given class will become an amateur-level in every study within that class, within 5 or 6 levels of 1st.  To some degree, an experience player becomes a jack-of-all-trades within their class limitations; and this scope increases if they choose to be multi-classed.  Most importantly, they know where their abilities are coming from and what those abilities do, in game terms, when I have the time to sketch them out.  I'm usually a few abilities behind, but I'll work on any ability the players truly desire to have in their pocket.

Therefore, while there is a certain randomness in the sage abilities, they're not relying on randomness. Nor is the party relying on having only a few abilities forever.  With henchmen added, a party can eventually incorporate every character class into their ranks; and therefore, every amateur skill available for the party as a whole.  Since most of these skills are something the characters can simply DO (no roll made), the sense of inconsistency in the skills that exists with 3rd and other editions isn't there.  When a character in my game has "close drop," it means their weapon, when it falls out of their hands, never falls into an enemy's hex.  Some might feel this takes away from the game: but not every player has access to this particular ability, and those with it will most often be those who can remember when they didn't have it.  Therefore, it becomes something like "belonging to a club," where the players can feel real evidence that they're getting stronger and that all their gaming is having a measurable effect.  That is far, far more important than insisting on constant randomness for the sake of randomness.

Hm.  I seem to have run out of things to say.