Professions vs Skills

[MarktheAnimator]

Hello,
I'm developing my Science Fiction RPG, "The Solar Imperium" and I'm having trouble with professions and skills....

In my fantasy RPG, "Fantasy Imperium" I created a list of professions and then listed the skills that a person may concentrate on for each profession.
A person can learn any skill he wants, but he may spend more skill points on those skills listed under his profession.

It all worked out fine.  However, doing this for a Sci-Fi game is extremely difficult (maybe I'm just lazy).

There are so many scientific / technical professions and skills... How should I categorize it all?  
Anyway, I'm just looking for a few good ideas...

I'll work it out.  Its just a pain, doing all this thinking. :)

Right now, I can classify it in three ways:
1. Who you work for, or where it takes place.
2. Profession.
3. Skills.

1. Who you work for, such as Intersteller Exploration, or XYZ Enterprises or where it takes place, such as a Colonist, or Starship.
A "colonist" is not a profession.  
Its a description of where you work (another world).  

2. Profession would include your title.  Starship Pilot, Businessman, Factory Worker, Goldsmith, etc.

3. Skills would include a list of what each profession uses.
For instance, an Artist (profession) uses the skills of Drawing, Painting, etc.


hmmm..... I'm having a bit of trouble categorizing everything.

Also, tech levels make it a nightmare.
Does the profession of Miner still exist?
How about a Farmer?
Some obvious ones could be Herald, Swordsmith, Blacksmith, etc.  These are fairly rare professions today.  

In the future?

Anyway, let me know what you think.

[Mark Johnson]

1)  Is it necesarry to list every skill associated with a profession?  Why not simply use the profession?  Sorcerer does this with its "cover."

2) Check out FATE for a very interesting system that combines professional development with lifepaths (which always seem to work well with sci-fi games.)

3)  Have you considered treating professions like attributes in relations to skills are in many games?  Give each character three or four "professions" which could be actual jobs or maybe even work like cliches in RISUS and add their skill and profession to get the modifier... # to roll under however your system works.

4)  Don't have skills at all, simply have professions.   This makes character creation very easy, but is not crunchy enough for some gamers.

5)  Don't have professions have any mechanical benefit other than who you work for and rank.  Stat out everything as skills.  This can make things very complicated for character creation as the player has to figure out what skills they need.  You can simplify this process by providing templates for each profession.  (These are the skills a Startship Pilot needs...)

6) Some combination of the above.

Later,
Mark

[Eero Tuovinen]

Hello,
I'm developing my Science Fiction RPG, "The Solar Imperium" and I'm having trouble with professions and skills....

Freeform skills are the answer you're looking for. Instead of skills, give guidelines for creation of skills based on play group needs. This isn't the easy way out, and can create the play experience you wish for if the guidelines are robust enough.

Right now, I can classify it in three ways:
1. Who you work for, or where it takes place.
2. Profession.
3. Skills

One cool structure would be that any character skill at all is denoded by all of your categories. Thus an example skill could be
(Aurora colony).(goldsmith).(assessment)
, signifying that the character has been assessing gold as a goldsmith in Aurora. Next, define penalties for the three categories:
-4 wrong place
-4 wrong occupation
-4 wrong skill
, or whatever strikes your fancy. Then whenever a character does something with a skill that isn't exactly the right one, slam in the penalty. Each of the above is easily rationalized, to boot, and give nice color. In addition, it solves your original problem: it's extremely easy to invent the ability you need when you know what the character has been doing: just define the place (should be easy, and if not, just pick one randomly), the occupation (if you don't know this one you can't pick the skill in any system) and the skill (what exactly the character can do). You don't need a pregenerated skill list for going through those, the players can do it themselves.

An additional bonus is that you can create professions out of the above ability conglomerates by simply dropping the last component: Aurora.goldsmith doesn't take penalties in any goldsmithing situations, as far as they are the kind done in Aurora. Similarly, if a character has universal goldsmithing expertise (would be unlikely in my sf game), just drop the place component.

As to tech levels, why bother? You can categorize tech by workplace. Aurora, above, has a single spaceport but the rest of the world lives on a subsistence level, so a character from Aurora will incur penalties whenever in a different workplace, and cannot even learn things not available in Aurora.

When determining "whether there are miners still in this era" think locally; if there's no tech that does the job automatically (which would likely still need supervising), and there is still need for ores, then there sure is miners. What do you care if it's realistic or something like that, if our character from Aurora wants to be a miner, why not? It won't affect the place where actual play is situated, unless the place is Aurora itself, in which case the GM knows if there are miners.

I hope I understood your problem correctly.

[Slortar]

I would go for skills, since those are more flexible. What if a character were to learn something completely out of context from his profession, but still not enough to qualify for some whole other profession, such as a scientist learning to understand the engine of a spaceship, which by itself is not enought to qualify as a full-fledged "Starship pilot". Skills are also good at showing how some professions overlap -- for example, a colonist would not have as much trouble starting to work in a factory as a historian would have. I feel that a system of only professions would make the skills of the characters more static, not to mention standardized -- one colonist might only have a few skills in common with another. There are also skills which are hard to define as belonging to a specific profession, but still might be known by a character, simply because they have learned something in their spare time.

[MarktheAnimator]

Thanks for all the ideas.

I don't limit skills by the profession chosen.  Any skill can be learned, but the professional skills are where you spend most of your points.  So a person can still develop non professional skills in their spare time.
Also, if the character uses a certain skill in a profession, then it is simply added to the list of professional skills.

[Chris Lekas]

One idea if you are worying covering all the technical angles, is to have specialties. Instead of saying Chemist, Agronomist, Physicist, etc. Have "Scientist, (Specialty)" Give a few examples. Then as the skills they would have starting off, for example, "Research, Technical writing, beauracracy, science (Specialty). Give a few examples, but let the players come up with their specialties. The same is true for technical proffessions. List the skill almost all of them would need, and then leave a couple slots open for skills related to their specialty. Let the player and GM come to some agreement on what those are. Give some examples of common ones, but this leaves the players to realize...Hmmm, I could be an Anthropologist!

[TonyLB]

One thing I like from Amber (yeah, I know) is that there aren't skills, there's just "What you've done in the past".

It would be sort of neat to have a curriculum vitae that lists what your character has accomplished, and then to have a systematic way of deriving, from that, how likely they'll be to be able to accomplish such a thing again.

All sorts of fun to be had there, like "Sure, you were an asteroid prospector ten careers ago, but that's a young mans game... sure you can still crack a rock like you used to?"

And it also lets people who aren't playing achiever-types have fun.  "Rapid Comestible Logistics Field Coordinator?  Dude, you delivered pizzas!"

[Tobias]

I've got something like the curriculum vitae thing going in YGAD - but I guess many different character sheets can apply for that title.

It's an interesting concept though, old skills becoming outdated!

[Sixteen Coal Black Horses]

Isn't a profession the sum of a group of skills? If so, would it be prudent to emphasize skill creation over profession?

[TooManyGoddamnOrcs]

This may be repeating what's been said, but the way I see it, what you learn in your profession is only half your skills: it's also who you know and what you know because you know your skill.  In Unknown Armies, if you have the gun skill you also can use that skill to, say, find local gun shops and, on a difficult enough roll, see if you know anything about someone else who has a high gun skill (if Duke Togo is one of the finest marksmen in the world, and you're another of the best shots on the planet, you've probably heard of him and may even know how to contact the guy).  You could distinguish it in this game by making it, say, if you're an Anthropologist by trade you'll probably also know how to behave at academic cocktail parties and how to deal with pesky undergrads but if you got it through a skillsoft jacked into your brain you'd just know the facts and principles.

[TonyLB]

And then there's the issues of street cred and connections that are external to the characters.

If you're one of the top marksmen in the world, and you walk into Duke Togos house, the Duke is likely to treat you im mediately as the party spokesman, because he knows of you.

What I find fun is that this reputation does not, in fact, mean that you're any good at the skill in question.  It just means you're regarded as good :-)