Quote:
Originally Posted by Alonsua
No, no, you can also raise their personal TL.
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In the first place, raising a personal TL gives a character the option to learn skills at the higher TL, but it does not give them knowledge of those skills. They need to study them. Since you are talking about their being the creators of the higher TL innovations, there are no teachers for the skills, and no textbooks they can study on their own; they are going to have to learn at on-the-job rates, 800 hours per character point. And they are going to have to do this while running huge business enterprises and doing scientific research (not to mention carrying on complicated and obsessive personal lives).
In the second place, and more important, a higher personal TL "is most useful if you also have access to high-TL equipment." But every single piece of high-TL equipment is something they are going to have to invent, and build prototypes for, and then debug. And until they do that, they do not have a TL9 laboratory or productive facility where they can work on building TL10 prototypes, and so on.
In our society, if I wanted to work on developing TL9 electronics, or medicine, or crops, I could order all kinds of equipment from catalogs published by scientific and industrial suppliers; I wouldn't have to build everything myself. But there are no suppliers for TL9 equipment to be used in advancing TL a further level. To make such equipment available, I have to raise the society's TL, not just my own. The ability to do such things solely with one's own resources is precisely what the cinematic advantage Gadgeteer confers; it has no place in a realistic campaign.