Creating Academy cadets with Coda

1. Choose a species and apply the abilities and attribute adjustments, as per the normal rules.

2. A cadet's profession is automatically Starship Officer, however they receive no professional abilities and may not receive an elite profession during character creation.

3. Choose a Background package or create your own. Also choose Background skills, as per the Development chapter of the players guide.

4. To represent "special" knowledge your character picked up during childhood, take 5 skill points and distribute them any way you wish. No Academy cadet may, however, start with more than 4 levels in any skill.

5. If you wish to create a cadet more advanced than first year, take 2 advancements per year. You may NOT use these picks to buy professional abilities or elite professions. These are assumed to have been accquired during your cadet cruise, which hasn't happened yet.

Comments on this process? I am using it for my new STAR TREK: ANDURIL game (see the Narrator's Ready Room for a thread about that.)

Personally I'd allow them to buy Elite skills after they've bought their basic package skills. I seriously doubt a Dr. learns all the skills they need in the one year (or six months depending) for the cadet cruise.

Revision:

You can enter an elite profession in your third or fourth year at the Academy, but no professional abilities are gained until the cadet cruise.

PersonallY. I would simply use the standard Starship officer overlay without Elite profession to create cadets. It seems that the half skilled template seems to suggest to me.

That way the automatic Elite proffession bearfs some weight as specific department training, while the light basic skills list seems to serve perfectly as a relatively unskilled cadet.

I am with Dan on this one, but if you want to use your original proposal I'd suggest you add one or two of the future elite profession's skills to the cadet's list of professional skills each year after the first.