Artificial Advancement.

[CmdrBluejeans]

I'm curious to see if anyone's tried gauging the number of advancements necessary to make a really good (N)PC Captain. I saw a post wherein someone mentioned *21* Advancements, and I feel a little off because last night I made a decent 'bureaucrat' type NPC CO with 6. Okay, he was merely a bit above average physically, and not very skilled in hand-to-hand combat, but he's a decent marksman, a highly skilled economic theorist and administrator, and a charmer-from-Hell. All in all, I felt, not bad. But still clearly not Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway/Archer/Pike/April/you-decide material.

So where do we draw a middle line? I admit the whole professional-vs-nonprofessional skills division makes it MUCH MUCH easier to create PC COs and other senior officers who don't make junior officers a pointless waste of time by having all their skills and then some. But I'm still not keen on game overbalance by starting out a PC (or even an NPC) CO with 20 or so Advancements, even though the rough guidelines call for that.

So I guess what I'm trying to do is spark a common sense debate on what is 'really' necessary.

Ideas welcome.


BJ

[RIsaacs]

I know that Captain Janeway has 45 advancements. Captain Kirk has way (!) more.

What do you need for a credible NPC? First, the Narrator's Guide has a really nifty chapter on this subject that actually breaks it all down for you as a system. I know this is pointless to you now, and a horrible tease, but it's in there.

If you can make a credible bureaucrat with 6 advancements, I'd say that's enough.

I'm beginning to suspect that everyone is jumping on the "high advancements" bandwagon because they are recalling Icon System and it's need for really high skill levels. When you're talking about 6 advancements, you're talking about a "level 6" bureaucrat (to use the dreaded L-word). Does your ship's captain have to have 21 advancements? Not at all. This isn't the Icon System. Not every captain knows how to do everything and have every professional ability.

First, if he did, he'd have no place to go developmentally. Second, Coda is more forgiving with its TNs. You don't have to try to get skill levels so high that you can accomplish a Nearly Impossible task without relying on the drama die. Y'all should try the game out with fewer advancements and give your characters some place to go. I recommend you try the game system and see how it differs from Icon so you can gauge the power levels of your series.

[Don Mappin]

Once again, Ross eloquently addresses a conceptually difficult issue with elegance and grace.

The number of advancements required is honestly dictated by the player. In fact, I find Game Show Man’s example of a six advancement captain a prime example of this. As this issue continues to come up I’m going to point people to that captain as an example—six or fifty advancements for a captain? Whatever you feel is appropriate or necessary. Sure, he may not be the captain Kirk of the universe (geesh, who is?), but if it fits the need of the campaign and is a functional character, then I don’t see anything wrong with it.

It’s perfectly acceptable to have a ten advancement captain sitting on the bridge next to a fifteen advancement XO and a twenty advancement tactical officer. They had different life paths.

[Dan Stack]

Captain Jasmine Kharn of the Bridgetown campaign is a newly-promoted captain with 15-16 advancements (forget which). Once we redo her (i.e. use the final copy of the rules, which I got the same time as everyone else ) I'll post the character (probably here and at my website). She started in science and transferred into command. She seems representative of an "average novice captain" - competent, but not able to do everything under the sun. If she had a full-time starship (she commands the Bridgetown Starfleet outpost and the Defiant-class Avenger it'd probably be a smaller vessel - an Intrepid as opposed to a Galaxy (though that'd never stop me should the game require her to be on a Galaxy... )

[CmdrBluejeans]

Originally posted by RIsaacs
What do you need for a credible NPC? First, the Narrator's Guide has a really nifty chapter on this subject that actually breaks it all down for you as a system. I know this is pointless to you now, and a horrible tease, but it's in there.

You tease me, and you don't even buy me dinner. Darn you!



Seriously, though, thanks for the input on this. It helps a great deal to know. My players have made it clear that they will resist any attempt to convert my current series, so I'm working mostly on these ideas for a 'pickup' game to run on off-days when we don't have our full crew, for a 'lost years' game set on one of the first Constellation class ships in 2305. Obviously, it will therefore have somewhat of a more Kirk/Sulu feel to it, and as we see in TOS, starship and starbase COs of that time were either creme-de-la-creme or semi-competent boobs.


BJ

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by Don Mappin
Once again, Ross eloquently addresses a conceptually difficult issue with elegance and grace.

The number of advancements required is honestly dictated by the player. In fact, I find Game Show Man’s example of a six advancement captain a prime example of this. As this issue continues to come up I’m going to point people to that captain as an example—six or fifty advancements for a captain? Whatever you feel is appropriate or necessary. Sure, he may not be the captain Kirk of the universe (geesh, who is?), but if it fits the need of the campaign and is a functional character, then I don’t see anything wrong with it.

It’s perfectly acceptable to have a ten advancement captain sitting on the bridge next to a fifteen advancement XO and a twenty advancement tactical officer. They had different life paths.

For me, I find that the Coda character generation rules (including the open-ended advancement question) lend themselves very well to a goal-oriented approach. Not to sound too much like a "method gamer," but I would prefer to make the first stage of character generation be a biographical sketch of the character a player wants to play--then I, as Narrator, can assess that character's age and experience and assign advancements accordingly.

So far, in creating a "sample bridge crew" as a test of the character generation rules, I've found that the 1-advancement-per-year suggestion for Starfleet characters (starting arbitrarily from an Academy graduation age of 21) gives me plenty of picks to work with. For a character with as much hazardous duty experience as, say, O'Brien, I'd be willing to throw in a couple more, but I haven't found that necessary to get the character I want.

How does that apply to a captain? Well, I generated Captain Matthew Decker (that's the Matt Decker, as of 2258) the other night, placed him at about age 46, and the 25 advancements produced by the above method worked amply well to produce a swashbuckling, active CO in the TOS tradition. I'm sure I could have been satisfied at 15-18 advancements, given the character I was shooting for, and a more "realistically" administration-oriented CO could be done in less than that with no serious difficulty.

[Sea Tyger]

I used the same chart (from the book) for my "superstar" captain....I'm probably the one who mentioned 21 advancements for a 13-year career, part of which spanned the Dominion War.

What I did (after first creating the basic character, a Starfleet Engineering Officer) was took his career by years (based on my original roleplaying), then used the advancements chart...giving him an extra advancement in a couple of cases (to round out the character concept):

2365-7 USS Mendel/Starfleet Security School (switched to Security Officer in '67)...2 advancements
2367-70 USS Monitor...4 advancements
2370-3 USS Monitor-A (switched to Command Officer in '73)...6 advancements (wartime)
2373-6 USS Ticonderoga...6 advancements (wartime)
2376-8 USS Ticonderoga (post-war)...3 advancements

I ended up pretty much with the character I had conceived with that, so it seems to work well.

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Well if you think about it, 10 advancements is quite a lot (you can do an awful lot with 50 picks). So one advancement for every year of service sounds pretty reasonable to me.

[Shoshuro]

I can see one advancement per year a good place to start. The character has done things but not the things he would be doing as a PC.

I may have missed it in the book though, could someone give a quick explination (or pg #) or hwo I could transfer from one section to another? (ie I have a mystic who joins SF or my Science officer goes to Command)...Just take an advancment, use up all 5 points for the new section, then continue on, or just buy the skills and say he's "crossed over"

[Doug Burke]

Originally posted by Shoshuro
I may have missed it in the book though, could someone give a quick explination (or pg #) or hwo I could transfer from one section to another? (ie I have a mystic who joins SF or my Science officer goes to Command)...Just take an advancment, use up all 5 points for the new section, then continue on, or just buy the skills and say he's "crossed over"

There are two ways to do so.

1) Meet the prerequisites for the elite profession and spend five advancement picks.
or
2) Take the Starship Duty professional ability (either by already being a Starship Officer or by the use of the Innovative edge). This waives all other prerequisites for the starship officer elite professions.

[DavidSnyder]

You didn't list spending 5 advancement points in step 2. If you take Starship Duty, do you still have to spend these 5 points to change professions?

If you do have to spend the additional five points, what Profession are you during the period between getting Starship Duty and spending the five points? Can you change your mind when your next advancement comes and not change professions yet, or are you committed once you take Starship Duty?

If you don't have to spend five points, why would you ever change into a Starship Elite Profession using prerequisites,
since for the same five points you can buy Starship Duty using Innovative if need be?

-Dave

[Doug Burke]

Originally posted by DavidSnyder
You didn't list spending 5 advancement points in step 2. If you take Starship Duty, do you still have to spend these 5 points to change professions?

You don't have to spend the five points to get the elite profession. You either spend three points for Starship Duty (if alreadya a Starship Officer) or two points on Innovative and three more points Starship Duty.

If you don't have to spend five points, why would you ever change into a Starship Elite Profession using prerequisites,
since for the same five points you can buy Starship Duty using Innovative if need be?

Because you wanted those skills at those levels? Remember that by taking a new elite profession, all you gain when you first take it is some new Professional Skills and one Tier One ability. You don't get a development package or any additional skills automatically.

[AslanC]

So I have to buy Starfleet Duty twice? That seems odd.

And if I spend the 5 points, what exactly do i get?

How many skills do I get? None? 5?

[DavidSnyder]

>Because you wanted those skills at those levels? Remember >that by taking a new elite profession, all you gain when you first >take it is some new Professional Skills and one Tier One ability. >You don't get a development package or any additional skills >automatically.

But if I never need to take them, if I don't even get a point break for taking them , they're not even really prerequisites anymore. They're just "things that might be a good idea to have to do this job." Which isn't a bad idea, but isn't the same thing as prerequisites.

And it makes even less sense now for Counselor to have a prerequisite skill that's not one of it's professional skills, since apparently Counselors can do without it and there's no need or benefit for transferring professionals to take it.

-Dave