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Old 01-23-2019, 05:10 PM   #31
Vaevictis Asmadi
 
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

Paying for a separate perk or technique just to access each low-TL version of each of dozens or scores of skills, over multiple TLs, isn't just expensive. It's very tedious.

It also doesn't remove the TL penalties on learning new skills or using low-TL equipment. In other words, it doesn't adequately represent somebody who personally lived through and remembers those TLs.

And for entire immortal species, charging for an Unusual Background on top of that doesn't seem reasonable.

Wildcard skills can remove TL penalties for what they cover, but it's tricky to get every skill in the game covered by non-overlapping wildcards.

Malloyd's Tech Familiarity looks like the most useable suggestion for immortals. They'd still need multiple versions of skills, but it would nonetheless be minimized bookkeeping.
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Last edited by Vaevictis Asmadi; 01-23-2019 at 05:30 PM.
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Old 01-23-2019, 05:28 PM   #32
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
Paying for a separate perk or technique just to access each low-TL version of each of dozens or scores of skills, over multiple TLs, isn't just expensive. It's very tedious.
It also seems to be a fantasy, since simply buying those skills has always been allowed.

What a perk or technique might do is let you not buy all those many skills.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
It also doesn't remove the TL penalties on learning new skills or using low-TL equipment. In other words, it doesn't adequately represent somebody who personally lived through and remembers those TLs.
What penalties on learning new skills are you referring to? And there are no penalties for using equipment from a past TL with the skill for that TL.

You're penalized for using equipment that does not meet the basic standards for the skill you are using it for - a TL6 doctor's bag is fine for Physician/TL6, but for Physician/TL8 it's verging on improvised tools. If you have Physician/TL6 you can use it with that without penalty, but you'll only get Physician/TL6 results.
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Old 01-23-2019, 05:59 PM   #33
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
It also seems to be a fantasy, since simply buying those skills has always been allowed.

What a perk or technique might do is let you not buy all those many skills.
This! Very much this!

Allow me to expand on what I have for "I Lived It!"

Say you took Soldier/TL8 at IQ+2 [8] and I Lived It 7 [7]. That would let you use Soldier/TL1 through Soldier/TL8 at no penalty (because you've been kept up with things from, say, being an Achaean or Akkadian spearman through being a soldier in the current Middle East conflicts).

If your TL is 11, as in William's case, and you have Electronics Operation/TL11 (Communications) IQ+1 [4], and you've got I Lived It! 3 [3], you can use ElecOps (Comms)/TL10, ElecOps (Comms)/TL9, or ElecOps (Comms)/TL8, with no penalty. Buying those separately up to IQ+1 would be the expensive part.

Clear as mud?
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Old 01-23-2019, 06:08 PM   #34
Vaevictis Asmadi
 
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

I'm afraid I'm pretty confused by this. I thought the TL rules make it that you can only learn skills from your own TL, not any other TL.

And I'm not really following the perk and technique suggestions. Do you have to buy them separately for each skill, or just once per TL?

Phantasm when you say "at no penalty," do you mean Attribute+0 ?

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
What penalties on learning new skills are you referring to? And there are no penalties for using equipment from a past TL with the skill for that TL.
Don't the TL penalties get added to the default penalties, for both default use and learning from default?

You might think there'd be no point to trying to learn a lower TL skill, but say you're a blacksmith and you're stranded in the wilderness with no knife or axe, and no forge. Can you knap a decent stone knife or axe? Say you're trying to use equipment from a lower TL because that's all you have available... while picking a lock, setting a broken bone, or repairing a car.
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Old 01-23-2019, 06:24 PM   #35
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
I'm afraid I'm pretty confused by this. I thought the TL rules make it that you can only learn skills from your own TL, not any other TL.

And I'm not really following the perk and technique suggestions. Do you have to buy them separately for each skill, or just once per TL?

Phantasm when you say "at no penalty," do you mean Attribute+0 ?
Normally you can buy skills from any TL up to your own. This is realistic, since there are those of us who learned to use a TL7 skill and *not* the TL8 version, because of when we learned it in the past (I was in middle school in the late '70s and early '80s when I learned to use a darkroom; nothing in there was digital, so it was Photography/TL7 (I doubt I learned more than a single point, which has degraded to default, but that's beside my point). As another example, my dad has Mechanic/TL7 (Diesel Engine), as he learned in the '60s to do his own repairs, but modern TL8 engines confuse the hell out of him for anything other than an oil change or belt replacement (it's the computerization of the engines that kills him... not literally, of course).

The Low TL disadvantage means you can't buy above a certain level, and the High TL advantage means you can buy up. You don't need anything special to buy your skills at a lower TL, because someone can probably still teach you (or you can self-teach with the right manuals).

And what I mean by "no penalty" in regards to the perk is: if you know Skill/TL8 at IQ+2 and I Lived It! 3, you can use Skill/TL5-7 at IQ+2 without having to buy the lower levels of the skill separately.

Clear as mud?
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Old 01-23-2019, 06:32 PM   #36
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
I'm afraid I'm pretty confused by this. I thought the TL rules make it that you can only learn skills from your own TL, not any other TL.

And I'm not really following the perk and technique suggestions. Do you have to buy them separately for each skill, or just once per TL?
You're getting statements from people who haven't read the rules closely.

The Basic Set says explicitly that you can learn skills at your TL or lower. What you can't do is learn skills at higher TLs. So if you're a present day character, you can learn TL0-8 skills, but not TL9+. If you have High TL 1, you can learn TL0-9. If you have Low TL 1, you can learn TL0-7. And so on. You don't have to pay points for the ability to learn skills for a TL lower than yours.

I have suggested, and some other people have, that there are cases where you might not be able to learn a lower TL skill, because it has fallen into disuse, and the equipment and the textbooks or manuals for it are gone. That's not in the rules as written, but it seems like a reasonable "reality testing" thing.

If you have that issue, you might want to have something that lets you learn a skill that ordinary people can't learn. It might be an advantage, or a perk, or a technique.

My suggestion was that it's comparable to Reawakened, which also lets you learn things that are unavailable to normal people in your setting, because you remember it from a past life; and since Reawakened is a specialized Unusual Background, other rationales for learning archaic skills could be defined as UBs also.

The suggestion that you do it with Anachronistic Skill is the result of not reading the definition of that perk carefully. In the first place, Anachronistic Skill lets you learn a skill that does not yet exist at your TL; for example, it lets you learn Meteorology or Pharmacy (Synthetic) or Physician at TL4 (in the RAW, they aren't available until TL5). But the skill you learn is a version of that skill that fits your actual TL: you learn, say, Pharmacy (Synthetic)/TL4, which otherwise does not exist, rather than Pharmacy (Synthetic)/TL5. Likewise, someone like Ada Lovelace would have Computer Programming/TL5, not /TL7, which is when computer programming came into being as an organized activity in the real world; she would be able to write code for an analytical engine but not for an IBM computer. But this doesn't get you access to a skill at a different TL, whether it's Engineering (Nanomechanisms)/TL10 or Machinist/TL0.

In the second place, Anachronistic Skill is described both in Low-Tech and in Powers: The Weird as a perk that lets you learn skills BEFORE THEIR TIME, not after they've been forgotten. Ordinarily, you wouldn't even need it; you could just learn the low-tech skill. If you made up a perk that let you learn just one otherwise lost skill from a lower TL, it would cause less confusion if it had a different name. On the other hand, you could just take the UB and have access to as many forgotten arts as the GM would hold still for.
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Old 01-23-2019, 06:47 PM   #37
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

I must note that my suggested "I Lived It!" Perk is a house rule I use, not RAW.
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Old 01-23-2019, 06:59 PM   #38
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

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I must note that my suggested "I Lived It!" Perk is a house rule I use, not RAW.
Sure. That's why I didn't comment on it at all.
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Old 01-23-2019, 07:02 PM   #39
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
Don't the TL penalties get added to the default penalties, for both default use and learning from default?
I don't understand what you're getting at. TL penalties certainly are cumulative with any and all other penalties. Defaults aren't really penalties, but it's not implausible that one might rule that you only have defaults for skills at your TL, not for earlier TL versions, so you'd have to use your your-TL default penalized for the TL difference. What defaults you get is expressly left to GM judgement.

Learning from default rarely relevant to begin with and TL penalties don't relate to it in any way I can see.
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Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi View Post
You might think there'd be no point to trying to learn a lower TL skill, but say you're a blacksmith and you're stranded in the wilderness with no knife or axe, and no forge. Can you knap a decent stone knife or axe? Say you're trying to use equipment from a lower TL because that's all you have available... while picking a lock, setting a broken bone, or repairing a car.
Yeah, I think that's obvious to everyone.

Though the obsolete equipment is a mixed bag. "Obsolete" bonesetting equipment for a simple fracture might be little different from modern emergency kit, warranting a small penalty at most. For picking a lock or repairing a car, the tech level of your tools is less likely to be a problem than the tech level of the lock.

EDIT: That is, if you're using outdated tools on a modern target, or vice-versa, the problem of you knowing what to do may take second place to simply not being able to get there from here. TL4 thieves tools probably won't even fit into modern key locks, never mind electronic locks, and you simply can't fix an engine control computer problem with a wrench or a cracked axle with a workshop for retuning grav-car drives...
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Old 01-23-2019, 07:05 PM   #40
Christopher R. Rice
 
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Default Re: Low TL familiarity?

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Anachronistic Training is defined as an Average Technique, but actually, I think that's a bit of early-4th-ed weirdness; it makes more sense to regard it as a leveled perk, which is how we treat it in the games I play in.
I turned it into a wildcard technique myself. It applies to all skills usable at a lower TL, bundled that with a 1 point UB then made a new advantage for 4/level. Works decently enough.
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