11-14-2018, 11:26 AM | #51 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Was someone asking about Middle-earth navigation?
Just found this meaty article sitting in my inbox: The Dúnedain and the Deep Blue Sea: On Númenórean Navigation Jonathan Crowe
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11-14-2018, 05:33 PM | #52 |
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota, U.S.A.
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Ooh, awesome! Thanks Daigoro.
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11-14-2018, 08:05 PM | #53 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Thank not me, thank the Maiar of Serendipity.
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04-11-2019, 06:41 PM | #54 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
It strikes me that the most common use of Navigation in my campaigns is in chase scenes, where the rules (possibly from GURPS Action) call for seperate checks against Driving and the skill used to choose a route, usually either Area Knowledge or Navigation (Land).
Obviously, it is a benefit to have a dedicated navigator rather than a driver who also navigates, if only because of the generic -2 penalty for doing two things at once. That being said, it seems that equipment and workstation should matter a great deal. A map is basic equipment for navigation, but not all action scenes in vehicles offer a plausible way to deploy a map. The driver usually cannot do so at all and a passenger might have major difficulty if the map is larger than the space he has available. This will hold particularly true on a motorcycle. I was wondering what fair modifiers were for having access to a map, but little time or space to consult it. Or, alternatively, having studied a map of the operational area for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks before a mission and trying to navigate by your memory of the map. I would roll an IQ check (if higher, I'd also allow Cartography, Professional Skill (Intelligence Officer) or Tactics to memorize a map) modified by Eidetic or Photographic Memory and use the margin of success to reduce the -10 for not having a map. But what would be a fair base time to study a map before you could roll an unmodified check to memorize it?
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04-11-2019, 07:36 PM | #55 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Quote:
I'd also penalize the "memorized map" depending on what you're trying to do. If you have a clearly defined route, with maybe a few alternates, that may be worth an unpenalized roll. But if you're going to try to figure out new routes on the fly, that's going to be penalized more. I wouldn't penalize Area Knowledge on the other hand, as I consider it to be the sort of "mental map" of an area.
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04-11-2019, 07:42 PM | #56 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Quote:
I imagine that normal people generally use x8 to x32 this base time, to get +3 to +5 for Time Spent and therefore having decent odds at reducing the penalty significantly. I suppose an hour sounds workable, meaning that about one working week would give the maximum +5 bonus for Time Spent. Agreed and an important benefit of Area Knowledge over Navigation.
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04-11-2019, 08:16 PM | #57 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Quote:
But I feel like an IQ 12 person with Eidetic Memory(or other traits) is shaving off way too much of the penalty for navigation without a map, and I tink it crowds into Area Knowledge too much. Hmmm. Maybe it could be handled as a "default" of Area Knowledge.
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04-11-2019, 08:32 PM | #58 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Quote:
A 1-2 point Accessory Perk of Computer + Heads-Up Display will canonically allow you to ignore the entire -10 penalty, because you can store the map in your digital device and access it with the HUD. Hell, cash and minimal technical competence at today's TL8 will do the same. I don't think it's unreasonable that a 5 point Advantage and up to a week of study will allow a character with decent IQ to do this reliably. Sure, the size of the map ought to matter, but generally, unless the operation or mission is a very complex multi-day affair, I think an hour as the base time to study it seems logical. So the Navigation skill level would be irrelevant?
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04-11-2019, 09:27 PM | #59 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Quote:
Eidetic memory also has a lot of other uses, such as allowing one to memorize accents after an hour of listening to one. Well, to be fair, anyone can do that, but Eidetic memory makes it trivially easy. Which in any sort of environment where you want to blend in, eidetic memory becomes very useful. Now, I do generally extend the +5/+10 bonus for "learning" to any sort of "remembering" task. So if someone takes you through a labyrinth, for example, someone with EM/PM would have bonus to remember the correct path, while someone without it would not. Also, "complex" is a relative term. Driving from say, Charlotte NC to Houston Texas isn't really a complex task. But remembering that the road atlas you looked at showed a bypass route to avoid heavy traffic? More complex. I think someone being able to have a 100% accurate mental map is the stuff of cinematic heroes. You know, guys with IQ 13 and Photographic memory. My logic for heavily penalizing the IQ roll is not to punish EM/PM, but to highlight their unique capabilities. With a -4 or -5 penalty to the IQ roll to memorize the map, most regular people can't do that. But a clever girl with EM/PM can. Quote:
Now, that said, I'd generally allow someone with EM/PM to easily gain 1 point worth of Area Knowledge from traveling through an area. To me, the memory ability seems far more relevant to creating a mental map than the ability to determine north or time of day by the position of the sun.
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04-12-2019, 06:31 AM | #60 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Navigation
Verjigorm: You realize that by adding a -5 penalty to the IQ roll to memorize a map and proposing to increase the -10 penalty for not having any map by the margin of failure, your rules essentially state that an average person (IQ 10) who spends a whole workday (8 hours) poring over maps of his operational area, planning routes and memorizing fallbacks will be worse off than someone with zero preparation and no map about 75% of the time (IQ-5 +3 (for Time Spent.) = 8, fails on 9 or higher and thus suffers -11 or more). And that even highly intelligent special operators (IQ 13) are worse off after having an hour to prepare with a map than without any access to a map.
That is not plausible. In your desire to limit the impact of Eidetic and Photographic Memory, you've made it essentially impossible for anyone without it to benefit from mission planning and preparation with a map. Cinematic heroes can glance at a map and remember it. Actual, real people can study a map and the possible routes they might want to use on an operation for days and weeks and thus make it possible to navigate under time pressure without referencing the map. That's not cinematic, that's what actual special operators do, and they usually don't have Eidetic or Photographic Memory. For those who do, I don't really see the problem of letting a success by 10 mean that they don't have to physically refer to the map any longer, after having spent so much time memorizing everything on it that matters to them.
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Tags |
basic, navigation, orienteering, skill of the week, world building |
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