Fixing Advanced Skills

[Whill]

The black text in this post is the background to the topic. The dark blue text at the bottom of this post is the proposed fix.

In 1e, the premise of the skill-based game system is that all skills default to attributes. 2e added the concept that some skills should not default, that they require years of disciplined study to have. Advanced skills have prerequisite skills levels of normal skills to qualify for, but they start at 1D, not on top of an attribute. For some uses of the prerequisite skills, you may get to add your advanced skill dice to the normal skill. But for the primary uses of the advanced skill itself, you just roll only its die code. With the starting PC rules, players may allocate 1D or 2D of their starting skill dice to skills, so if a player starts with an advanced skill, the highest die code they can start out with in it is 2D. Herein lies the problem.

The only advanced skill detailed in R&E is (A) medicine. It appropriately stacks with its prerequisite skill of first aid for using medpacs, but the only other use of (A) medicine that the book has rules for is bacta tank operation. It makes bacta tank rolls Very Easy, which is a good thing for starting PCs since they aren't going to have more than 2D to make that roll. What about other medical professional actions that might be harder than using a bacta tank? Medical droids have a high (A) medicine as you'd expect. Are PCs with (A) medicine one or two-year medical students who never graduated medical school?

Another RAW advanced skill is (A) engineering from Hideouts & Strongholds, or is it? (A) engineering is described as a base advanced skill with many specializations. At first I thought that you would get the base (A) engineering skill first, and then each specialization had its own prerequisites but once qualifying for any, the specialization dice would go on top of the base skill like a regular skill specialization, and the (A) medicine specializations. But it doesn't give any prerequisites for this supposed base engineering skill. So the intention must be that each specialization is its own advanced skill (and they are just nonsensically describing a base advanced skill that doesn't actually exist and the each kind of engineering being listed as if they were skill specializations when they're not). The other engineering skill with any RAW details, (A) droid engineering from Fantastic Technology: Droids, was presented as its own advanced skill, so this must be how it really works.

The engineering "specialization" Hideouts & Strongholds gives us rules for using is (A) engineering installations. Let's say a player chooses the Tongue-Tied Engineer character template (Technical 4D) to base an installations engineer on. Two of the skill's prerequisites are two 2D Technical skills, and those are covered by the base attribute. It also requires 1D in two other (A) engineering skills to choose from a list of five skills, but all of the skills have their own prerequisites. Civil/industrial engineering's prerequisites are all covered by this PC's base attributes, but all of the other four have 5D Technical skill requirements so they will all require placing starting skill dice in skills. Let's do space transports engineering. So the player allocates 1D in starting skill dice to raise space transports repair to 5D, 1D to space transport engineering, 1D in civil/industrial engineering, and to be the best installation engineer he can be, 2D in installation engineering. So the player has used 5D out of 7D to have 2D in installation engineering. Then looking at the skill difficulties, the PC can't design and lead the construction of anymore more than small basic dwellings and roads with much consistency. Maybe if they take twice as long (with additional labor costs) the GM will give the player an extra 1D. Better spends some CPs to make anything cool.

What if the Tongue-Tied Engineer player decides to instead make a droid engineer. Technical is 4D, so the player only has to allocate 2D total to the prerequisite skills (droid programming and droid repair) to get them to 5D each, the amount that gives you the full powers of the advanced skill. Then the player allocates 2D to get (A) droid engineering to 2D. That's spending 4D of starting skill dice to be a 2D droid engineer. Some of the upgrading traitware installation difficulties are high, but they require the (A) droid engineering skill alone or the droid repair skill at two higher difficulty levels above the chart's. Well, you are really good at repairing or programing droids, but a crappy engineer.

GMs are on their own for the other advance skills anyway because WEG only detailed a few. It seems to me that advanced skills were an undeveloped concept. How do we tweak this to make it work? Allowing the players to allocate more than 2D to advance skills is one way to deal with it, but as you know they don't have that many dice to go around as it is. To be a good medical doctor you can't really be good at anything else. I've spent a lot of my weekend racking my brain. After I started typing this post to rant against RAW and ask for advice (originally this thread was titled, "The problem with advanced skills"), I thought of a really simple fix. But of course, I still want to put it up for discussion.

Keeping advanced skills as not defaulting to attributes is absolutely essential to the concept of them being advanced skills. There are some things characters can't do at all without them, and others that are a lot harder. This is the way it should be. But what if the advanced skill dice are added to an attribute for the dice roll? You still record them the same as the dice value of just the skill. You still improve them the same at double the CP cost. You still add the die value to relevant normal skill die code for applicable rolls. The only thing different is, the advance skill gets boosted by an attribute value. If you add that to the three examples I gave above, suddenly everything makes more sense for professionals with years of dedicated training and experience in that profession before becoming a PC adventurer. Advance skills still aren't defaulting because if you don't have the advanced skill, you can't just roll a base attribute like normal skills.

Thoughts?
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[sithholocron]

[garhkal]

[sithholocron]

[CRMcNeill]

[garhkal]

As an option, that kind of splits the difference, between just rolling (A) skills, and adding (A) skills to the base attribute.. How's about you add a Bonus to the (A) skill roll, of say +1 (or +2), per full D you have in the attribute.. So someone with 3d, would roll +3 (or +6), added to the (A) skill.
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[CRMcNeill]

Sounds like an additional layer of unnecessary math...
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[sithholocron]

[Whill]

[garhkal]

[Whill]

[garhkal]

True, they're not being able to "Default", but if you are still adding the attribute to the (A) skill, HOW is that anyway, different than regular skills?
That is what i was getting at.
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[Whill]

[Naaman]

Garhkal's idea isn't "math heavy" in my opinion.

Also, I agree with Whill's proposal. As a matter of fact, I posted an idea very similar to this one a few years ago. There may be something useful there for anyone interested in looking at it.

https://rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6024&highlight=advanced
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[CRMcNeill]