[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

From the text for Dabbler in Action 4, there's yet another reason the plan in the OP won't work, even if it did work on defaults from other skills rather than attributes, which is that Dabbling has a cap on skill. It's never better than the 1-CP skill level would be.



An all-around Scotty-style starship engineer does need a rather intimidating list of skills by RAW. It's a common enough character trope, though, and probably shouldn't demand that many CP to build the characters for most games. You might want to look into using a Wildcard skill (Engineer!), or just start ruthlessly combining all the design/repair/use skills into fewer variants and branches.

Agreed; you either need a Wildcard skill (call it Engineer! or Mechanic! or something similar), or my Condensed Specialties house rule. Essentially, Condensed Specialties is a reverse version of Optional Specialties: with a skill that has a lot of mandatory specialties (Engineer, Artist, Mechanic, Electronics Repair, etc.), taking the skill at one skill level higher (IQ/A becomes IQ/H, IQ/H becomes IQ/VH) means you can have the skill cover all (or most) of the specialties. (I say "most" because I still don't permit Mechanic (IQ/H) to cover Nanotechnology and rarely Microtechnology.)