Skill Lists And Limits For Teenage Characters

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Kromm

"
This is why I'm not a huge fan of X hours = 1 point: The flat rates in the rules aren't just averages, but averages with error bars so huge that they don't really have much value. h.

On the contrary the time rules have a perfectly good use. That use might be small and simple but just by existing it answers the question "Can I learn Spoken Voormish while we're sailing towards Voorm or do i have to wait until we get there and I can kill some Orcs?".

Even the theoretical ability to learn skills without "adventuring" helps ground Gurps and make it less unreasonable than many games over the years where you did have to kill Orcs to pick up a new Skill even when that skill was largely unrelated to Orc-killing..

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

On the contrary the time rules have a perfectly good use. That use might be small and simple but just by existing it answers the question "Can I learn Spoken Voormish while we're sailing towards Voorm or do i have to wait until we get there and I can kill some Orcs?".

Even the theoretical ability to learn skills without "adventuring" helps ground Gurps and make it less unreasonable than many games over the years where you did have to kill Orcs to pick up a new Skill even when that skill was largely unrelated to Orc-killing..

... which presupposes that GURPS XP is solely based around combat. Which it is most certainly not.

I've never used the time rules, and my players know that the easiest way to save points to learn spoken Voormish -- even if they haven't been killing orcs in quite some time -- is to leave a point or two in bank against future such need.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Kaslak

I think I can contribute only a little to the first part.
In the answer I am assuming a sort of serious commitment from the characters, as if it was a recognized combat sport, just for illustrative purposes.

-=Snip=-

Also finding good quality instructors and the money to pay them could create interesting noncombat quests, and the need to balance out the characters related to real life skill needs may be a soft push for players not to focus too much on the sport. Maybe some characters are opposedd by the parents and need to use real life skills to get out from home to train, or may need to work part time because they are struggling. Maybe, as you mentioned, solving mysteries with other life skills might be the only way to prevent a cheating opponent to win automatically.

On the other hand, if your target is to put the campaign spotlight only on the combat game itself, I might expect that characters will want some options to advance on that field only, and any deeper character definition would be a nuisance. The mecha customization options (with point costs) may absorb that need. I have read sometime ago on the forums, to make things interesting, you might create dedicated techniques for different actions based on driving, to favor distributing points on different things and have specialized pilots...

So I'm wanting to limit starting skill level out of respect for realism, after all how good are 16 year olds scouted for US high school football? There's a good secondary narrative reason to do so, however. Something I realize I should have said earlier is the limit on play time characters will have, this will be a game mainly played in simulators similar to MechWarrior Firestorm ones, for which the characters have to queue for. The arcade probably makes most of it's money from selling food and drink while customers queue, and along with a desire not to see patrons banned isn't really interested in adding more machines. You can play at home, but the further you get from having the three screens and two joysticks of the pods the less useful it is.

Instructors, for e-sports?

Spotlight would probably be split evenly between in simulator and out, with the later covering a lot of bases, like dealing with school, parents, social situations, and any mystery's the PC's decide to investigate.

Originally Posted by Gef

>Now in general I'm thinking that skills should be limited a one or two point spend

A point can represent time spent, but could it also represent talent?

A lot of teenagers discover their future career in the things they spend time on. I've heard musicians talk about getting garage-sale guitars as kids, artists getting the bug early as well, high school athletes being heavily recruited by colleges, and in my case, a Radio Shack electronics project kit made more difference to my career than anything learned in school. And I also know some polymaths who might reasonably have a variety of academic skills at 12, based on high IQ or Talent, in their teen incarnations.

>and that many skills groups, like combat, will be off limits,

Combat Sport at least, for all those Tae Kwon Do tournements. The dojo I was in before I got too old and broken had kid classes for katana and open hand that would've included Acrobatics, Judo, Karate, and Two-Handed Sword. It aspired to teach actual self-defense not art/sport, and some of those kids were amazing by the time they got to be teens. Also, while my dad didn't teach me to shoot or take me on hunting trips, not his things, I would estimate that among my peers in suburban Oklahoma, such things were the norm, and I was in JROTC aspiring to be an aeronautics engineer, but many of my fellow cadets wanted infantry and were already preparing, and that was before paintball. Not too uncommon for a dad to teach his teenage daughter how to use a knife for rape defense.

>I also need to work out how speed should be factored into that,

Not familiar with your system, but...

For 10s turns, you should use full Acc bonus before subtracting range/speed, and for that plus 50m hexes (55yd), the formula is MV×10÷55=MBV×.18. I'd actually simplify that to MV/5. So MV 30, which is 60mph, reasonable for vehicles, becomes 6 hexes.

Well this would probably be about the time that kids would be finding out about these sorts of things, wouldn't it?

For martial arts skills it's fine, I was thinking more like Guns and Gunner should be banned. But for the kids taking those classes, how much skill would you rate the non-Olympic-hopefuls as having?

Non-GURPS system, why would weapons automatically have a GURPS stat? And I figured something like that for the movement.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

You might want to create variants of Gunner, Piloting, etc. based on Combat Sport, unless players are using the exact same interfaces that real mecha would use and face real risk of death or some other serious problem (extreme pain, major financial loss, crippling, etc.) every time they go into battle.

Well they're not going to be facing death any time soon at least. My plan is to have the campaign end with aliens invading and previously unknown defense mecha, that look an awful lot like some of the ones from the game, come out of hidden hangers to repeal them and the GM PC who I originally used as the excuse to bring the party together hands them sign up forms.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Spaceships assumes that all attacks are Aim, Aim, All-Out Attack. If I were running a mecha game with 10 seconds turns, I would double the RoF for all weapons and allow the RoF to be split equally between two targets without penalty. But ranged attacks should be at Acc+3 - and realistically, mecha weapons are stabilized, scoped weapons[1] and should have Acc of 6+6 or so for projectile weapons and higher for beam weapons.

Doubling RoF makes no sense, the weapons are already designed for 10 second turns. As for Acc, well the weapons design rules (which the PC's will have access to, eventually) allow you to give every what would work out in GURPS terms to a quality modifier between -2 and +3, this is unusable as Acc and to avoid '360, no scope' type stuff I have to limit access to it, meaning beginner weapons start at -2. All of that means that that any Acc bonus must be equal across all ranged weapons, and I'm not sure if torso or arm mounted weapons would gain scope bonuses, or if they did, would they be for the mechas sensors, not weapon mounted ones?

[Kaslak]

Originally Posted by scc

So I'm wanting to limit starting skill level out of respect for realism, after all how good are 16 year olds scouted for US high school football? There's a good secondary narrative reason to do so, however. Something I realize I should have said earlier is the limit on play time characters will have, this will be a game mainly played in simulators similar to MechWarrior Firestorm ones, for which the characters have to queue for. The arcade probably makes most of it's money from selling food and drink while customers queue, and along with a desire not to see patrons banned isn't really interested in adding more machines. You can play at home, but the further you get from having the three screens and two joysticks of the pods the less useful it is.

I fully agree, I realized only afterwards that it was not a general limit.

However I think you are still free to consider my advice to continue to slow down development, if you want to maintain the premise.
I agree with your approach of proposing diversified challenges to the players, this should keep a good CP dilution

Originally Posted by scc

Instructors, for e-sports?

As I wrote above, it was mostly an illustrative example, since I didn't know the setting or the TL.

I just assumed that, wherever there is money running, competition and a demanding audience, professional gamers might pop out. Just as a modern day example, Starcraft 2 became quite a thing in South Korea, and just searching on the web you get stuff like that:
https://www.gamersensei.com/games/starcraft-ii-coaching

But ok, apart from motivating the example choice, it really depends on your setting choices.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by scc

So I'm wanting to limit starting skill level out of respect for realism, after all how good are 16 year olds scouted for US high school football?

Mm ... aside from that every college star was once a high school football player, there's a basic paradigm question at stake: are you basing your campaign around exceptional, PC-level talents who happen to be in high school, or are you doing it around average HS students with the expected levels of dead-normal sixteen year olds?

The former isn't out of line. Realistic or no, I can name you numerous athletes who were winning championships at 16 or earlier against adult competition. There've been numerous chess Grandmasters 16 or younger, numerous Oscar nominees at 16 or younger, and we've all seen articles about teenagers elected to local office, getting graduate degrees from major universities, and the like.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Kaslak

I just assumed that, wherever there is money running, competition and a demanding audience, professional gamers might pop out. Just as a modern day example, Starcraft 2 became quite a thing in South Korea, and just searching on the web you get stuff like that:
https://www.gamersensei.com/games/starcraft-ii-coaching

But ok, apart from motivating the example choice, it really depends on your setting choices.

Well the process that resulted in this game started about 20 years ago, when some governments got wind of information that an aggressive and expansionist alien empire had established a colony right next door in Alpha Centauri and realized that closer coordination on military and economic policy was needed to deal with the future possibility of contact. Virtual Mekon is secretly a military program, aimed at, among other things, part way training personal in armored combat before putting them through proper training.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by scc

Doubling RoF [of mecha weapons] makes no sense, the weapons are already designed for 10 second turns.

Ah, I assumed you would start with the normal GURPS stats for the weapon and then upscale the values for the longer turns. This is what GURPS Spaceships does - a beam weapon has RoF 1 for a 20 second turn and RoF 3 for a 1 minute turn.

Originally Posted by scc

As for Acc, well the weapons design rules (which the PC's will have access to, eventually) allow you to give every what would work out in GURPS terms to a quality modifier between -2 and +3, this is unusable as Acc and to avoid '360, no scope' type stuff I have to limit access to it, meaning beginner weapons start at -2. All of that means that that any Acc bonus must be equal across all ranged weapons

I assume you mean the Mekton Zeta Weapon Accuracy stat, and I can't see why you couldn't use it as a basis for Acc or why you would require that all beginning weapons start with WA -2. Most of the canonical Mekton designs for early mecha have weapons with WA 0 or higher.

Starting mecha might choose their weapons from among Acc 12+6, Dmg 6dx3 (2) lasers at RoF 20; or Acc 9+6, Dmg 6dx5 (3) blasters at RoF 3; or Acc 6+6, Dmg 6dx6 (2) autocannon at RoF 50; or Acc 8+6, Dmg 6dx8 (5) missiles at RoF 10 that are vulnerable to point defense. The different weapons perform in different roles.

Originally Posted by scc

I'm not sure if torso or arm mounted weapons would gain scope bonuses, or if they did, would they be for the mechas sensors, not weapon mounted ones?

All mecha weapons, wherever they are mounted, would have gun cameras linked to the mecha's general sensor suite. I'd assume they would get scope bonuses based on the mecha's sensors.

[Rolando]

For the combat I think you may use the mekton ranges and combat straight from the book, modifiers and all.

You are simulating a game inside the game so ranges don't have to be in virtual reality meters or anything but hexes (50 meters to a hex for description purposes).

I think mekton skill rolls are close enough to GURPS that it may work, and most combat rolls are quick contests, so the skill scale between attacker and defender is the same, you may want to watch some of the modifiers and make a few test battles and see if the modifiers need compressing (each +-2 in mekton equals +-1 in GURPS).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

S

For martial arts skills it's fine, I was thinking more like Guns and Gunner should be banned.?

Are you not in the US?

In the US I can assure you that there are plenty of 16 year olds who've learned to shoot and hunted large animals and/or shot competitively quite intensely.

Gunner not so much. That would be simulated experience only.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Gunner not so much. That would be simulated experience only.

OTOH, there are people in the U.S. licensed to own and shoot serious firepower, ranging from HMG to anti-tank guns. Select for close adult relative who holds the appropriate licenses and with the right Unusual Background you could have a 16 year-old with range time with real heavy weapons. (Technically illegal, IIRC, but on an isolated private firing range, the Feds aren't likely to notice or care.) Ditto for Armoury (Small Arms).