Aside from Character Creation... or as a result of it... one of my favorite aspects of Traveller is its lack of an experience system. You're not playing the standard Bildungsroman plot... farmboy becomes a hulking demi-god. So the mindset is different... less the meta-concern of a constant flow of XP you can fully focus on in-game notions like reputation and resources.
Not that leveling up a character isn't fun... but it's fun to have other options too, and I can't think of many games other than Traveller that don't push that experience/improvement angle.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1115662As others have noted, skill-1 in something is enough skill to do it professionally, and skill-3 is a very solid career. Not many people have twelve different professions, nor do many people pick new ones up past their 20s. This is of course the cue for someone to pop up telling us how he's an expert in forty-eight different careers, and picked up half of them after 40 years old, also speaks 6 languages fluently and is a black belt in 14 different martial arts. I don't mean you, Mr Special, I mean the rest of us plebs.

Mr. Special is an example of Jack of all Trades - 3.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1115662Not many people have twelve different professions, nor do many people pick new ones up past their 20s.

I'm not going for Mr. Special, but I think you're overestimating how many people develop a profession in their 20s. IME, I've seen a lot of people that don't develop even their first career until their 30s (unless "student" is a career).

Quote from: HappyDaze;1115683I'm not going for Mr. Special, but I think you're overestimating how many people develop a profession in their 20s. IME, I've seen a lot of people that don't develop even their first career until their 30s (unless "student" is a career).

Welfare is a career for half of US citizens. Worse than proles.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1115683I'm not going for Mr. Special, but I think you're overestimating how many people develop a profession in their 20s. IME, I've seen a lot of people that don't develop even their first career until their 30s (unless "student" is a career).

In CT after the first 3 books, a "college education" didn't give you any skills, but 1d-2 (minimum 1) added to your Education stat. In this worldview, university doesn't give you a profession, it just broadens your education - your Education. So if you had your character do a term at university in the game they wouldn't gain any CT skills. Military colleges can be an exception to this.

Of course, the way to understand this is that the CT skill lists mostly focus on adventuring kinds of skills, and everything else is assumed under Education.

In the experience rules, if you got skill after character generation, the first 4 years would make it temporary, the second permanent. So... 8 years to develop skill-1. Military training pre-game was more rapid, of course, and there is an argument that's reasonable. After all, one of the things you have to do if you want to develop your own skills is a "dedication throw" of 8+ on 2d6 (no modifiers), but in the military your dedication is enhanced somewhat by the assistance of your friendly NCO instructors who make everyone dedicated whether they like it or not.

In real world skill assessments one of the things they note is that at the lowest levels, the person can perform the task while supervised. It takes time for them to be able to do it unsupervised. And of course, most people reach a level of competence in their job and don't push themselves further, instead spending time to "network" and/or build up their wealth - the Social rating. So we might argue that in CT terms, a person's career might look like,

Term 1: university, add 1d-2 Edu
Term 2: start career, working supervised, develop level 0 in 1-3 related skills
Term 3: cement career, working independently, develop level 1 in 1-3 related skills
Terms 4+: use the income and contacts made from use of the skill/s to build Soc.

and that's why we're not adventurers.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1115690Welfare is a career for half of US citizens. Worse than proles.

Admin-0, possibly Liasion-0.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1115693In CT after the first 3 books, a "college education" didn't give you any skills, but 1d-2 (minimum 1) added to your Education stat. In this worldview, university doesn't give you a profession, it just broadens your education - your Education. So if you had your character do a term at university in the game they wouldn't gain any CT skills. Military colleges can be an exception to this.

Of course, the way to understand this is that the CT skill lists mostly focus on adventuring kinds of skills, and everything else is assumed under Education.

In the experience rules, if you got skill after character generation, the first 4 years would make it temporary, the second permanent. So... 8 years to develop skill-1. Military training pre-game was more rapid, of course, and there is an argument that's reasonable. After all, one of the things you have to do if you want to develop your own skills is a "dedication throw" of 8+ on 2d6 (no modifiers), but in the military your dedication is enhanced somewhat by the assistance of your friendly NCO instructors who make everyone dedicated whether they like it or not.

In real world skill assessments one of the things they note is that at the lowest levels, the person can perform the task while supervised. It takes time for them to be able to do it unsupervised. And of course, most people reach a level of competence in their job and don't push themselves further, instead spending time to "network" and/or build up their wealth - the Social rating. So we might argue that in CT terms, a person's career might look like,

Term 1: university, add 1d-2 Edu
Term 2: start career, working supervised, develop level 0 in 1-3 related skills
Term 3: cement career, working independently, develop level 1 in 1-3 related skills
Terms 4+: use the income and contacts made from use of the skill/s to build Soc.

and that's why we're not adventurers.

In my mind this is an example of the rabbit hole of trying to use any sort of RPG skill system to model the real world.

Once I let go of that idea, it was much easier for me to go back to Traveller Book 1 character generation and NOT get sucked into adding new skills for everything.

It is a bit of a disconnect to me that the crew positions have defined skill requirements and it is defined that a Doctor has Medical-3 (and a Surgeon Medical-3 and DEX 8+), but since those definitions all work reasonably with what players are going to want their PCs to have I can play along.

So that's what I like about Classic Traveller, it has enough skills to make characters different without creating an expectation that the skills a character has actually defines what the character is knowledgeable about. In that way, we don't invent so many new skills that the PCs never have the right skill, or that players are frustrated by random skill assignment. That combined with the mechanisms to gain a new skill or improve the ones you have (granted taking some time, and no where near a sure bet) give a path to rescuing a "lost cause" PC.

Quote from: Theros;1115550I'm a MegaTraveller player, so it's a bit different, but I always wondered what those Classic Traveller characters with only two or three skills actually DO in any given adventure or campaign?

You can roll for anything.  I once got stuck with a one-term Scout in the same party as a literal geriatric admiral with all the skills.  (One of only two times I've seen those in actual play, and I'm quite certain he was cheating on dice rolls to get there.)  I ended up being the most active character because I was thinking of what I could do while two of the other players were always looking at their sheets to find the highest skill to roll, and see who should roll it.

Although - the game still wasn't that fun for me with that level of power disparity.  The GM had house-ruled that "death" in char-gen meant you mustered out and entered play.  So in RAW Classic I'd have gotten to re-roll, and the rest of the party would have had an incentive to bank their gains and muster out before they got to old age.  I still don't ask for perfect balance, but having characters in the same ballpark is a lesson I've learned both as a player and a GM.  In Mongoose Trav I set a limit on the number of terms, usually four.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1115693In CT after the first 3 books, a "college education" didn't give you any skills, but 1d-2 (minimum 1) added to your Education stat. In this worldview, university doesn't give you a profession, it just broadens your education - your Education. So if you had your character do a term at university in the game they wouldn't gain any CT skills. Military colleges can be an exception to this.

Do you have the exact source?  I like that, but all I have at present for Classic is The Traveller Book, which has two entirely different options, but not that.  But I'm aware a lot of stuff came out for Classic in other forms.

Quote from: Shasarak;1115660Fear the Boot recently did a podcast covering the character generation in Traveler.

I listened.  Reminds me of why I both once binged on Fear the Boot, then dropped it entirely.  They're trying to be helpful, and there's certainly worse podcasts out there.  But would it have killed the main host to go through character creation just once before the show?  Yes, that would be homework for a free podcast, but on the other hand listening to a guy who's proud to know nothing about Traveller try to educate us about it is wasted time for every single listener out there.

Quote from: Marchand;1115611...If you know Barbarians of Lemuria it might help to think about it like that - you and your Ref should consider your guy able to do pretty much anything you'd expect someone from his career to be able to do, whether there's a skill written down for it on the character sheet or not.

I really like this.  If you are a Marine you know how to do all of the things a Marine knows how to do.  Your weapon skills, squad tactics, your shipboard duties, etc.  Your level 1 and up skills are those things that you shine at.

Quote from: Dave R;1115885Do you have the exact source?  I like that, but all I have at present for Classic is The Traveller Book, which has two entirely different options, but not that.  But I'm aware a lot of stuff came out for Classic in other forms.

It's in the old little black books from 1977 and 1981, a couple of times. High Guard, for example, page 15. General university gives you no skills, but there's also naval college which may give you some skills, and flight and medical skill which will give you some skills.

Books 1-3 don't mention college. I stick to them while running it.

Quote from: Theros;1115550I'm a MegaTraveller player, so it's a bit different, but I always wondered what those Classic Traveller characters with only two or three skills actually DO in any given adventure or campaign?

Back in Classic, players did a lot of rolling under their character attributes to accomplish stuff.

Quote from: Theros;1115550I'm a MegaTraveller player, so it's a bit different, but I always wondered what those Classic Traveller characters with only two or three skills actually DO in any given adventure or campaign?

There was also the BITS task resolution system, created by the British Isles Traveller Support (BITS) group on usenet.

https://www.bitsuk.net/Archive/GameAids/files/BITSTaskSystem.pdf

Quote from: GameDaddy;1116021There was also the BITS task resolution system, created by the British Isles Traveller Support (BITS) group on usenet.

https://www.bitsuk.net/Archive/GameAids/files/BITSTaskSystem.pdf

Nice chaps, the guys from BITS. Won a competition playing at GenCon UK with those guys - tactical combat imperials v zhodani, managed to make the zhodani missile lose tracking due to distance then managed to make him take all his shots through my sand, while my lasers blew his ships up one by one. Happy days!

The BITS guys had a nice Traveller combat system based on Full Thrust. FT had a couple of movement options but one of them used vectors ala Traveller/Mayday.
I already liked both games separately, so joining them was great for me. FT's ground pounder sister game Stargrunt had a similar Traveller-ish feel, based on what I've seen of Striker... though vehicle design is much simpler.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1115959Back in Classic, players did a lot of rolling under their character attributes to accomplish stuff.

Did you actually play back in the day? I did, I don't remember ever rolling under character attributes, nor do I remember that from the games I played in. But then back in the day we also all used Book 4 and Book 5 (and Book 6 and Book 7 later when they finally came out) so we also had more skills and more detailed skills.

These days, based on reading Christopher Kubasik's blog, I do use just Book 1 (well plus Supplement 4 but with the skill lists changed to reflect mostly Book 1 skills), and I consider things other than roll under character attributes (like give a modifier for good attribute using Advantageous Dexterity or Strength as an example.

Quote from: ffilz;1116056Did you actually play back in the day? I did, I don't remember ever rolling under character attributes, nor do I remember that from the games I played in. But then back in the day we also all used Book 4 and Book 5 (and Book 6 and Book 7 later when they finally came out) so we also had more skills and more detailed skills.

These days, based on reading Christopher Kubasik's blog, I do use just Book 1 (well plus Supplement 4 but with the skill lists changed to reflect mostly Book 1 skills), and I consider things other than roll under character attributes (like give a modifier for good attribute using Advantageous Dexterity or Strength as an example.

I never used roll attribute under in the early days, I always used a target number based on a 7+ success and just naturally glommed onto the BiTS task/difficulty technique when I first saw it on usenet in the 90's. Interesting enough, when I sat in on a Traveller game with Marc Miller in 2017 one of the young guys at our table had never played Traveller and he taught him simpler is better when GMing, and to pick an attribute that he beleived would most affect the skill in question, and roll under stat for success to keep the game moving fast. He said to use modifiers too, if the task was extremely difficult, or extremely easy.