Shouldn't These Professions Have These Professional Skills?

[Hermes]

Hello --

If by chance this topic has already been discussed somewhere and I've just missed it, please feel free to refer me to that thread. If not, though, I would offer this new thread as a place to discuss some situations I've come across in the PG where a given profession or elite profession really ought to have certain skills as professional skills that are not listed there.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but below are some of my initial thoughts. If we do want to follow up on this any, perhaps we can set up a more permanent repository for our conclusions so they will be easier to find.


Ambassador
- Computer Use
- Influence
- Investigate (Research)
- Observe
- (the complete Knowledge skill group instead of just some of the Knowledge skills)

Assassin:
- Unarmed Combat
- Investigate
- Observe
- First Aid
- Repair

Envoy:
- Observe
- Investigate
- Repair
- First Aid
- System Operation (Sensors)
- Negotiate
- Influence
- Persuade
- Survival
- Computer Use

Explorer
- System Operation (Flight Control)
- Computer Use
- Propulsion Engineering?

Spy
- Stealth (!)
- Language skill group
- Administration
- Business
- Influence
- Persuade



I have some other, slightly lengthier thoughts on the Starship Officer profession and elite professions, but I don't want to spam everyone with that just yet.

Has this already been brought up? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for your indulgence --

[Doug Burke]

One thing to keep in mind is that a character with an elite profession still has the Professional Skills granted by his basic profession. The only time this would chnage is if a second elite profession is taken, and then the player gets to choose which two classes he will be able to pick professional skills and abilities from.

Also remember that just because a skill isn't a professional skill doesn't mean you can't use picks to gain levels in it. It just takes more picks to do so.

[Hermes]

Hello, Doug -- pleased to make your acquaintance, and thanks for your response. This is just something I've been scratching my head about a bit.

Originally posted by Doug Burke
One thing to keep in mind is that a character with an elite profession still has the Professional Skills granted by his basic profession. The only time this would chnage is if a second elite profession is taken, and then the player gets to choose which two classes he will be able to pick professional skills and abilities from.

This is certainly true. It also provides a systemic reinforcement for what happens in people's lives, namely that different people come to the same job from different backgrounds with their resulting, different skill sets. (I'm referring primarily to what in the game would be the addition of an elite profession.)

Also remember that just because a skill isn't a professional skill doesn't mean you can't use picks to gain levels in it. It just takes more picks to do so.

This is also true, and it makes good sense. That which a person does for a living will be easier for that person to become good at than something he does in his spare time, if he has any.

I guess it's because of that that I find myself a bit perplexed that certain skills are not considered professional skills for a given profession. For instance, let's take the Spy. Our Spy may have come from a mercantile background and as a result may be used by his employer to gather corporate competitive intelligence, or he may have been a Starfleet science officer recruited into intelligence because of expertise he may have in an area important to his employer. Clearly, each of these people would bring very different skills with them.

The Spy considered simply as Spy, however, whatever his background and future assignments may be, will always have to use certain skills -- say, Stealth, for instance. Any Spy will have to be sneaky in what he does, whatever the type of intelligence it is that he is collecting. He will surely have to get into areas he shouldn't be in, etc. I know that the CIA trains all of its field agents (which is what the Spy EP seems to me to be, mainly) in basic breaking and entering and in countersurveillance (avoiding shadows and the like) because those activities permeate everything else they may do. Another key area is that of language. Operators move around not infrequently (every few years) and must be able to pick up the local language relatively quickly. They often do this in training provided by their agency precisely because this is a key aspect of their job.

The list of skills in the first post was just stuff that I thought to be essential in the way I have just described to those professions' actual core activities, as opposed to merely trying to think of anything I could that at least one member of that profession might possibly know. (Most of the specific items on the list are discussable, of course, which is why I brought it up. Some, however, like Stealth for the Spy, I think are less open to interpretation, but I could be wrong.)

Have I clarified anything or just made it worse? What are your thoughts on this?

Regards --

[Balok]

In addition to Doug's comments, I suspect that the skills for each profession were selected with an eye towards balance. Even though some professions might be more realistic with more skills, it's important to balance them, so that players can play the sorts of characters they want to, without feeling that they're "giving something up" mechanically.

I'm also not sure I agree with all of your selections. For example: Ambassador is a leadership position. An ambassador has a staff to do his research and computer operation. I therefore think it's reasonable that Computer Use and Investigate (Research) NOT be professional skills (especially given that a character so inclined could still take those skills.

One idea for a modification might be to leave a slot that allows a character to take a skill of his choice as a professional skill (subject to GM approval). Or have a slot that is a "pick one of" with a list of skills. That customization would allow some of the skills you cite to be professional skills in your variant, without greatly expanding the list of professional skills, and risking a balance problem.

[Doug Burke]

Originally posted by Hermes
The Spy considered simply as Spy, however, whatever his background and future assignments may be, will always have to use certain skills -- say, Stealth, for instance. Any Spy will have to be sneaky in what he does, whatever the type of intelligence it is that he is collecting.

Oh, I don't know. Was Garak really Stealthy? Not really. At least no more than the Soliders and Starfleet Officers he was usually around... Have we ever seen a Stealthful Ferengi? Or even a Stealthful Klingon? I'm not saying they're not out there. I'm just saying that it's a possibility that a spy may not be very stealthy. Sneaky, however, has more than a physical component. Look at Garak, again. He may have been somewhat boistrous (for a Cardassian), but he used his Influence skills to distract any attention that might come his way. At least, that's how I see it.

Another consideration is that each of the elite professions have about 6 professional skills (giving them about half as many as a basic profession). Which of the Spy's six skills would you jettison to gain Stealth? Computer Use? Inquire? Observe? I think you see my point.

Have I clarified anything or just made it worse? What are your thoughts on this?

No, I see where you're coming from on this, I'm just giving you my take on it and the possible reasoning behind the decision.

[Hermes]

Hello again --


This post has turned out to be extremely long. I'm really sorry!


While I was reading your comments, it occurred to me that it might be helpful for me to take a step back and state some of the presuppositions I am working from. Firstly, it is not my intent to be a rules lawyer or an armchair quarterback. Yeah, yeah, I know, but work with me here. Rather, I just refer to some specifics as part of talking about design, because there are a couple of things that I have come across in the game so far that strikc me as very counter-intuitive. I want the game to be the best it can be, but at the very least I would like to understand some things more clearly (hopefully).

As a side note, I am aware of the standard RPG rules caveats to the effect of "GMs, if you don't like a rule, throw it out, change it to your liking, or replace it with a house rule." This is a true and good policy to have at one's disposal. My desire, though, is to play the game as it has been made by its designers, and I also want the game to be great for its own sake. It is because I think I perceive a conflict between these that I am asking about all of this.

So, all that having been said, there is, of course, always a dialogue between a game's premise and ideas and its system; each informs the other to one degree or another, or, at least, the designers must keep both in mind throughout the design process. I would suggest that a game's system should develop around the game's ideas and seek to enable those ideas to manifest, something which seems to be particularly important in the case of RPGs, which are by nature far more fluid than other types of games.

I would also suggest that what makes a work of fiction in any medium "work" is that the elements in it that are supposed to be familiar to us or like the real world really are like they are in the real world, and any elements that are more fantastical, to whatever degree the work requires, are consistent with the less fantastical, more "realistic" elements. Hence, even though transporters do not really exist, they have been explained in a way that makes them "possible" according to science that does exist. To the degree that the parts of a work that are supposed to be like the real world are not realistic, that work fails itself (since it was trying to be believable) and those partaking of it (since their ability to really bite into it it is hindered). In knowledge and imagination, we move from the known to the unknown, not to put too fine a point on it.

How in the world does all of this have anything to do with lists of professional skills? :P

If we work according to this approach, we would first determine what kinds of characters we want to be available and then ask "What is it that someone with this profession is trained to do and then does?" The important thing is that we answer this question without a view to how we're going to make the system reflect this. That comes later. Our answer to the question of what someone with a particular profession has been trained to do and does will be informed and corroborated by both our general, common sense of what these professions do and involve and by research into them so we can be sure that what we think they do really is what they do (or not).

Hence, when we've decided that we want there to be Spies in our game, the question we should ask first in terms of both sequence and importance is "What are spies in the real world trained to do and then do?" I know that there are many kinds of espionage in different arenas, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that all spies have to know how to avoid notice. Research into the training that CIA field operatives receive (just to pick one) reveals that they are actively taught various ways to avoid detection in general and also techniques of countersurveillance. The other thing that comes to my mind when I think "Spy" is language. Research into the CIA and other intelligence agencies also shows that these agencies maintain high-quality language schools and that their agents attend them, which also happens to make good sense. As it turns out, most field agents use both of these skills more frequently than I would have expected, namely, all the time, since they must avoid being caught by the people they are spying on (by blending in, which includes speech, in addition to actual sneaking into off-limits areas) and by the counterintelligence forces constantly at work against them.

In our case, since what we're dealing with is a setting that other people have created (the Star Trek universe), our next step after making all our initial determinations is to run it through the Star Trek matrix. Fortunately, the parts of Star Trek that involve spies draw on this same body of information; Star Trek "works" because its spies are recognizable to us as spies because while the technology and specific missions may be fantastical, the situations and techniques are still grounded in and merely extrapolated from the real world.

So if we're coming up with a list of skills that spies should have, and if we're following this approach, Stealth and Language would be toward the top of our list.

It is at this point that we move on to considerations of the game's system. If we make a list of all the professions we want and a list of all the skills we think those professions would have, then we will probably find that there are some professions who do more or know more or need more than other professions do. Even though this is how things are in the real world, since we're trying to build a game, the question of game balance does arise.

The temptation for the designer is to fixate on numerical equality as being the same thing as game balance. This is understandable, since in other types of games they are often almost the same thing. This approach to balance, however, is the bane of RPGs, because it fails to consider other methods by which character types may be balanced against each other. It leads to attempts to shoehorn a character type into a format decided upon ahead of time, which, by definition, kills creativity, but it's also just plain unrealistic, the very antithesis of what is the most important and distinctive component of the RPG genre: believability.

...

When I peruse the basic character professions, I observe that each profession's list of professional skills is 12 items long. Elite professions' professional skill lists are 6 items long. This has a nice aesthetic symmetry to it, but then I find that certain skills I think are at the very heart of some professions are missing, it leads me to think that the game's system has come to take priority over the ideas instead of serving them. Somewhere along the way, it seems to me, it was decided that these characters will have 12 (or 6) skills in their lists, and so you'd better pick which 12 out of your list you want the character to have (I can hear someone say).

To do this is to have missed the entire point or maybe even to have shot it in the head. Remembering that RPGs are different from other types of games in that they are primarily games of make-believe that have rules systems to make task resolution more objective (to avoid "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" "No, I'm not!" "Yes, you are!" etc.), and, as such, the most important quality for them to have is plausibility. To make a well-reasoned determination of what it is that spies (or ambassadors or merchants or special forces) do and then sacrifice that grounded and therefore believable quality to a numbering scheme is fatal to a RPG.

This is not to say that game balance should not be sought. There are, however, other ways to achieve the desired balance. To take our poor, beleaguered Spy again, if we pursue these other roads to game balance, his list of professional skills may be longer than another profession's -- but there are many, many things arrayed against him as a Spy that more than balance out the length of his list. Indeed, they justify it. Within the Coda system, this could be rendered in terms of mandatory Flaws, just to pick one possible avenue. Another is direction given to the GM regarding the paranoid, sleepless life many Spies live by dint of their chosen profession. These things are less tangible than "How many lines of words does this list have?" but that is what makes the RPG as powerful a medium as it is.

There have been a couple of things that you have said that, together with observations I've made in the text, suggest to me that perhaps this is the sort of thing that the designers may have fallen into. It is easy, once having subscribed to that approach, having, perhaps, said, "Okay, we're only going to have 12 of these skills on our list," to then find yourself coming up with rationales why, yeah, of course they don't need that skill on their list, and, besides, anyone can get any skill, it just costs more, etc." I would suggest that this may be subscription to a groupthink mindset, if, indeed, this is what has happened. This is not to say that it is always easy to think outside that box.



(Continued in next post -- sorry!)

[Hermes]

In light of this, please allow me respond to a couple of specifics you brought up"

Originally posted by Fesarius
In addition to Doug's comments, I suspect that the skills for each profession were selected with an eye towards balance. Even though some professions might be more realistic with more skills, it's important to balance them, so that players can play the sorts of characters they want to, without feeling that they're "giving something up" mechanically.

I suspect that this may indeed be what was/is driving this, which is also one thing that has made me want to try to wrap my brain around the situation some. Do you think that the alternative means of achieving game balance that I mentioned, however briefly, could solve both problems and do so satisfactorily?

Originally posted by Doug Burke
Oh, I don't know. Was Garak really Stealthy? Not really. At least no more than the Soliders and Starfleet Officers he was usually around... Have we ever seen a Stealthful Ferengi? Or even a Stealthful Klingon? I'm not saying they're not out there. I'm just saying that it's a possibility that a spy may not be very stealthy. Sneaky, however, has more than a physical component. Look at Garak, again. He may have been somewhat boistrous (for a Cardassian), but he used his Influence skills to distract any attention that might come his way. At least, that's how I see it.

These are all good and accurate observations about how Garak actually behaved on screen much of the time. Indeed, there is also more to being "sneaky" than its physical elements. Also, fortunately for them, many if not most spies don't use stealth in the sense of sneaking around in a nomex body suit, defeating the security system, and breaking into the secret vault in the middle of the night. I would suggest that Stealth, though, at least if I have understood how that skill is being used throughout the book, involves hiding in plain sight, which is something that all spies definitely do, in addition to Stealth as an representation of countersurveillance skills, which they also employ constantly.

As a side note, Influence is not on the Spy's list, either.

Originally posted by Doug Burke
Another consideration is that each of the elite professions have about 6 professional skills (giving them about half as many as a basic profession). Which of the Spy's six skills would you jettison to gain Stealth? Computer Use? Inquire? Observe? I think you see my point.

This is one example of what I have been attempting to describe, namely what appears to be an a priori decision to limit all professions to a certain number of skills on their list, even in situations where it is obvious that the profession cannot accurately be represented without more. The number 6 does not appear to me to have come out of anything organic to what being a Spy or any other profession involves; it seems to me rather to have been arbitrarily imposed from without (and by arbitrarily I do not mean randomly; rather, I mean inorganically), whatever the rationale to do so may have been. The asking of the question seems to me to indicate subscription to this approach, with the result that justifications and rationales are being sought to pull some sense out of (or possibly read a rationale into) what indeed has no actual, organic cause. Am I making sense?


Nevertheless, it got me wondering about the number of skills on the various lists, and so I went and ran the numbers. It turns out that the actual numbers of skills on the skill lists, far from being uniform, vary considerably. I counted them in terms of skill picks equivalency.

For individual skills (not skill groups), I counted each skill as 1 and each specialization specified in the particular profession's list as 1.

For skill groups, in the cases where the list of skills within a group is presented in the book as pretty well comprehensive and therefore finite in number, I have counted each skill in the group as 1 skill. Specifically, the skill groups that I counted thus are Engineering (3), Enterprise (3), Knowledge (7), Ranged Combat (3), and Science (5). In the cases where the number of skills within a group is presented less specifically, I have counted them as 1+ to attempt to indicate this. The groups I counted thus are Armed Combat, Craft, Language, and Unarmed Combat.

Having done so, the actual number of skills each profession's list involves are

Diplomat 12+
Merchant 15+
Mystic 12+
Rogue 14+
Scientist 21+
Soldier 14+
Starship Officer 13+

Command Officer 6 (19+)
Flight Control 4 (17+)
Starship Engineer 6 (19+)
Starship Operations Officer 4 (17+)
Starship Security Officer 6 (19+)
Starship Counselor 7 (20+)
Starship Medical Officer 5 (18+)
Starship Science Officer 8 (21+)

Adept 6+
Ambassador 4+
Assassin 8+
Envoy 12+
Explorer 10
Free Trader 6
Inventor 12
Mercenary 8+
Smuggler 6
Special Forces 8+
Spy 6
Weaponmaster 8+

Numbers with a + after them indicate that that number is the minimum actual number of skills on the list and that there is theoretically no upper limit. Numbers without a + mean that that profession's list has exactly that number of skills on it and will not vary.

One other piece of information is that each basic profession has 4 Tier 1 abilities, 3 Tier 2 abilities, and 1 Tier 3 ability. Each elite profession has 2 Tier 1 abilities and 2 Tier 2 abilities.


As you can see, if you grant the counting scheme I have described, you wind up with quite a bit of variance. This was another reason I think that the numbers 12 (for basic professions) and 6 (for EPs) were arbitrarily applied for primarily aesthetic reasons, perhaps; I can think of no other.

In my personal opinion, I don't find the professional abilities of the elite professions to be sustantially more impressive or powerful than those of the basic professions. This is just my subjective impression, however, so I could be wrong.

In any event, though, it would appear that what entering into an elite profession actually is is spending several advancements paying 2 picks per level to acquire levels of certain skills sufficient to meet the EP's prerequisites, if necessary, and paying all 5 picks of an advancement for the privilege of entering into another class with half the number of professional skills of my old class and fewer professional abilities to pick from, some of which require the use of skills not on the EP's skill list.

If I am a Starship Officer, I am doubly screwed, since I will effectively have to drop my present Starship Officer EP so I can retain my base Starship Officer profession to advance along with my new EP or drop my base Starship Officer profession instead, which means I will have to spend 5 picks later to re-enter it if I want to go the Starship Duty route to acquire another SOEP. In either scenario I will have fewer skills than other professions, which get a full base profession plus an EP.


Anyway, this has been a very long post, and I really do apologize. Sorry. I really am just seeking to know whether I have misunderstood something or the design team wasn't thinking along these lines.


What are your thoughts?

[METH]

I am a Big fan of the Spy package too, but I think you are overworking the idea a tad. One skill from the Rogue or Spy skill sets allows additional Primary Skills through the Sabotage specialty. This could unbalance the Rogue over other Professions if he or she is well developed over time. This gives our erstwhile, albeit, reluctant hero a decided advantage. He could have well over the 12 / 6 Primary skills in time.

Second, not all real-world or movie based Spies start out as James Bond or Garak. Most start out as research agents or listening post specialists or clerk / administrator types; this probably accounts for over 99% of all real-world spy types (CIA, FBI, KGB, etc). Many simply never make it that far or get killed shortly after being sent undercover. A good Spy has to earn his undercover assignments and in the process has the time to learn Languages and Stealth. With the number that get caught and interrogated by enemy forces, they obviously, even with time, have not succeeded at or mastered these skills.

Only time will tell how our Boy does. I am anxious to see how he develops in my future sessions.