Starship Duty?

I'm not seeing the "needless complexity" in this. The only thing that could possibly lead to confusion in the matter, as far as I can tell, is that they accidentally left out the word "OR" on the SOEP prerequisites list.

Just relax. Use one method. Or use the other one. So they spent a paragraph explaining an "alternative" method of entering a SOEP. Personally i think it makes the system a bit more robust.

And it allows for better "story sense" to have prerequisites available as an option. Your character is going to pick up cetain skill during his career. Those skill will make it easier if he decides it is time for a "career change" at some point.

Frankly, the idea of taking the Innovative edge to then purchase Starship Duty in an attempt to circumvent the prerequisites is too strongly a metagame action to be allowed unless there is an extraordinary story explanation.

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Originally posted by EliasVaughn
Frankly, the idea of taking the Innovative edge to then purchase Starship Duty in an attempt to circumvent the prerequisites is too strongly a metagame action to be allowed unless there is an extraordinary story explanation.

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True. Starship duty means that your character has spent time on a ship in an assignement compatible with the elite officer profession that the character will have. So it's only logical that the pre requisite be almost fulfilled by the character. I can't imagine letting one of my player take starship duty and an engineer profession as long as he does not devellop the skill necessary to be an engineer by spend time on a ship as part of the enginnering crew to earn the starship duty edge. This way he'll have the two options.
I see starship duty as a way to quicken things. For exemple a soldier/mercenary in a mercenary ship spending time in the engineer section helping the enginner could spend all his picks to obtain the pre requisite, or begin develloping the skills necesary and then buy starship duty and the enginneer profession to pay them a lighter price (meaning he's started to devote more time to his enginnering study than his mercenary or soldier profession). But if the guy says: "I wanna be engineer, I've got no skills but I'm gonna buy starship duty with no reason so that my skills will be cheaper", I'm gonna laugh at him with the the evil GM smile (tm) :) .