| From: | Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Skillz to pay the billz |
| Date: | Mon, 18 May 1998 16:35:35 -0800 |
>This opens up a gripe I know some people have with the SR skill system.
>Armed Combat for example. I find it highly unlikely that someone who has
>been training with a sword (of whatever type) will be able to pick up a
>quarterstaff and use it just as well as they did their sword. Yes, they
>will understand basic melee combat and they will have a better grasp of
>attacking and defending, but they simply won't be able to be anywhere near
>as effective.
A person who already knows how to use a weapon in melee combat will have
less to learn than a person who's never used one, but there would still
be considerable work in picking up the moves of the new style of weapon.
Armed Combat: Edged Weapons broadens to Armed Combat a little too easily
to simulate that. (Of course, if you use vanilla SR rules, if you buy
up a Concentration, you have to pay for the concentration *again* to buy
up the General skill...)
>Firearms? Everyone claims that shooting a gun is shooting a gun. But
>having fired handguns, shotguns, hunting rifles and assault rifles, I can
>say that while the principle is the same, there are major differences,
>especially between pistols and rifles/shotguns. The basic Firearms skill
>seems to indicate that you can pick up and small-arms in an instant and use
>it just as well as any other firearm, even if you've never fired that
>particular gun before.
My girlfriend is a certified sharpshooter, and has told me that it doesn't
take long to get used to a new weapon-- it's not *instant*, but it's pretty
fast. If someone has the General Skill Firearms, make sure they have an excuse
to have fired all the classes of weapon covered by it, or give them a
penalty for unfamiliar weapons until they've had a chance to get used to
it.
>And we all know that the skill "Computer" has no such real life analogue
>anymore. How many of you that can actually program your computer can also
>set up a LAN? Create a firewall? Write your own OS? Yet to my eyes the
>SR "Computer" skill allows all that to be known with the general skill.
Setting up a LAN is the Hardware concentration. Creating firewalls and
writing OSes is the Software concentration. I can do any of these if
need be, though I'll have some ramp-up time reading up on LAN management
if it's more than just a local Ethernet to hook up a few PC's and/or
Macintoshes to the printer, or on OS design and implementation if I'm
going to be creating anything more than a toy OS. (A basic firewall with
a proxy server wouldn't be too hard.) Becoming familiar with one of those
topics goes a *lot* faster than improving my basic skill as a programmer.
--
%% Max Rible %% slothman@*****.com %% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
