new skill- teaching

[Ashren Va'Hale]

I found in my game I ran tonight that it would be appropriate for a character and a key npc to be very interested in imparting their knowlege to others, but no skill was in the book for this and it would make sense for teaching to be a skill, optional perhaps in the clergy and academic packets. But how would it work?
Would you roll wit or MA against the SR? Or some other stat?

How would teaching help a player learn?

For skills I have the teacher roll MA teach, each success adds one die to the roll of the learner to practice the skill as if it were "duress" each roll represents a long period of time dependent on the skill being practiced. For read write I let the learner roll once a day to get a check mark, after three checks I let him roll teh skill test. When the learner declared he wanted to learn under instruction I let him roll against the default for the skill with the bonus dice from the teacher.

I figure this way a better teacher can really help a player learn faster.
But this still has a high bs factor involved since the GM has to arbitrate teh time passed per roll. Any one have ideas on how to flesh this out better.

And how would I do teaching a weapon proficiency? WIth vagaries instruction lowers the cost in SA's significantly... I was thinking that the cost of raising a weapon proficiency would decrease by teaching successes/2. so two successes teaching lowers the cost of buying the proficiency up one point by one SA, so if it normally cost 6 it woudl now be 5 sa's. This is very raw however and needs alot of work. Any one want to throw out an alternative or flesh this idea out for me?

Keep in mind, the goal is to make the quality of the teacher matter.

[Lance D. Allen]

In my opinion, teaching isn't so much a specific skill in and of itself as knowledge of a skill or area of knowledge sufficient to impart it. I mean, yeah, there are obviously techniques for instruction which work better than others, but those can be learned as part of the skill.

I'd say, for teaching, to simply have a skill level at which one can teach beginners, and a certain amount better than another the teacher must be to instruct.

[Ashren Va'Hale]

Thats not how I realy see teaching, I have had numerous teachers who were quite knowlegable but couldnt teach worth crap. The ability one has to teach would affect the speed at which someone learns....  The way I see it anyways, so for the sake of the thread lets imagine thats the case, how woudl you create a mechanic to illustrate that?

[Brian Leybourne]

You could do, but I would be inclined to just stick it as Craft: Teaching and be done with it (most likely a Wit roll) rather than making a new skill.

However, I would NOT allow teaching to reduce the SA cost of improving proficiencies or suchlike. It still requires the same investment by the student, having a good teacher can/should only reduce the time before you can spend SA's to improve your proficiencies (being told something is quicker than having to learn it yourself through trial and error).

Brian.

[Ashren Va'Hale]

but reducing SA cost is what happens with a teacher with vagaries so I am trying to be consistent here.