I have had Megatraveller since the 80's, but have never had the opportunity to play.  I occasionally make a character and have recently helped my kids make some characters.  Now we are wondering what these characters' skill levels represent.  One son built a diplomat with Liaison - 6.  We have no idea what is a normal skill level in this game.  The only clue I can find is that if you have medical - 3, you are a doctor. 

So, if a character has a skill at level 1, how much competence does that represent? 2? 6?

Thanks for the help.

Traveller SRD on skills has some examples.

https://www.traveller-srd.com/core-rules/skills/

Thanks, it looks like a skill level of 6 is excessive, but it also looks like your skills don't do much to alter the outcome of a die roll, except that having the skill at all will offset a hefty penalty.  Do people fail often in Megatraveller?

Well I think it's a 3 can do dental work very competently and has 3 specialties related to dental work but a 6 can do it while being thrown around by turbulence in a plane passing through storm while being pestered by a lot of loud angry drunk rowdies in first class who want more free wine coolers. and has six specialties or multiple levels in one or more specialties. It's sort of about how difficult the task is or the conditions it is to be done under or the usual time frame being vastly shortened, or working with bad tools, or on a patient with a lot of serious health issues that require more care than usual.

I am not sure how this relates to being a liason unless a 6 means you have sufficient visualization. problem anticipation and solving, morale building. and communications skills that you could teach someone to fly and land a plane safely over a radio
when they find the pilot is unconscious and the plane it low on fuel.  A 3 would be a lot less likely to pull that off and would need more time and help etc.

A Skill-6 is truly world-class (if not Galaxy-class) ability. The task resolution system is "if a task is non-routine, roll 2d6 and add your Skill level to it". So you've automatically got at least an 8. 7+ is moderately difficult: under a time crunch, or under cover during a firefight for instance. 10+ (which a Skill-6 will give you, what 92% of the time?) is very difficult, like both a time crunch and a firefight or the fire alarm and sprinklers are going off around you.

Liason-6 is the guy who walks into a bar brawl between a pack of Vargr and five Aslan males, and comes away with a trading charter to the Vargr's clan, the Aslans' Matriarch's personal comm number, and free drinks for the rest of his life from that particular bar. And he probably is also in the Archduke's rolodex as the guy to call when the Zhodani send their thought police across the border looking for a refugee/criminal.

Quote from: Earlofwessex on August 20, 2021, 04:15:22 AM
I have had Megatraveller since the 80's, but have never had the opportunity to play.  I occasionally make a character and have recently helped my kids make some characters.  Now we are wondering what these characters' skill levels represent.  One son built a diplomat with Liaison - 6.  We have no idea what is a normal skill level in this game.  The only clue I can find is that if you have medical - 3, you are a doctor. 

So, if a character has a skill at level 1, how much competence does that represent? 2? 6?

Thanks for the help.

I never played Mega Traveller because of missing rules in the book, etc.
Current views on 2D6 Traveller games is that skills are 0 - 4. With 5 being very rare. This according to Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition and later.

These are helpful comments.  Thank you.  It seems to me that I should have capped off his liaison skill at 4 or so.  To be fair, he wanted his character to be an old, retired diplomat, so he kept him in the diplomatic corps until he was in his mid-60s.  He also avoided his acquiring any combat skills, opting for every kind of interpersonal skill (like Bureaucracy and Streetwise) and a few technical skills.  He physically feeble, so would be pretty interesting to roleplay.  Having written that, maybe it's fair that he has Liaison - 6. 

Sounds kind of like the sort of character Groucho Marx played in Duck Soup, effortlessly and compulsively messing with everyone's heads, including his own.

Classic Traveller (1977 and 1981, before Mega) was based on the idea that PCs were generally competent people who could do what someone from their background might be expected to do. If you've served 8 years in the Navy, you know your way around a ship even without necessarily having Mechanics or Electronics or whatever skills. If dice needed to be rolled, the Ref would come up with a throw on the fly based on what made sense. Skill-1 in that kind of context is a serious level of expertise. Skill-1 in a field is generally enough to get you hired on as a professional in that field.

Then from Book 4 on, the game started to move away from this in two ways. First, adding more skills - so we got Sensors as well as Electronics, Gravitics as well as Engineering etc. I think this was done to support campaigns focused on a particular sphere, so if you are all playing Navy characters and focussing on that using High Guard (=advanced Navy chargen in your MT book), fine, you might want that granularity between Gravitics and Engineering. But if you're mixing and matching PCs from different backgrounds, then including Gravitics implicitly devalues everyone else's Engineering skill that they might otherwise have deployed in fixing a problem with the gravitics.

Second, adding more skill levels to starting PCs, which starts to break the 2D system. I guess this was done partly to give PCs more slots in which they could pick up the wider range of skills. But the problem is it is hard to stop a PC maxing out on one skill in a way that interacts poorly with the core mechanic.

So that's partly why I'm a CT books 1-3 person. If I want a skill driven game where everything has to be a skill roll, I'll play d20 or BRP or something. Traveller doesn't need and in my view doesn't benefit from an elaborate skill system.

Quote from: Marchand on August 23, 2021, 01:42:19 AM
Classic Traveller (1977 and 1981, before Mega) was based on the idea that PCs were generally competent people who could do what someone from their background might be expected to do. If you've served 8 years in the Navy, you know your way around a ship even without necessarily having Mechanics or Electronics or whatever skills. If dice needed to be rolled, the Ref would come up with a throw on the fly based on what made sense. Skill-1 in that kind of context is a serious level of expertise. Skill-1 in a field is generally enough to get you hired on as a professional in that field.

Then from Book 4 on, the game started to move away from this in two ways. First, adding more skills - so we got Sensors as well as Electronics, Gravitics as well as Engineering etc. I think this was done to support campaigns focused on a particular sphere, so if you are all playing Navy characters and focussing on that using High Guard (=advanced Navy chargen in your MT book), fine, you might want that granularity between Gravitics and Engineering. But if you're mixing and matching PCs from different backgrounds, then including Gravitics implicitly devalues everyone else's Engineering skill that they might otherwise have deployed in fixing a problem with the gravitics.

Second, adding more skill levels to starting PCs, which starts to break the 2D system. I guess this was done partly to give PCs more slots in which they could pick up the wider range of skills. But the problem is it is hard to stop a PC maxing out on one skill in a way that interacts poorly with the core mechanic.

So that's partly why I'm a CT books 1-3 person. If I want a skill driven game where everything has to be a skill roll, I'll play d20 or BRP or something. Traveller doesn't need and in my view doesn't benefit from an elaborate skill system.

A solution might be to allow a character to use half their skill level if they have a skill that while isn't exactly on target, could have some application in that task. I cheerfully admit I'm cribbing this idea from Erin Palette's Count of Upward Failure NPC (who can use his Carouse skill at half rating for certain tasks if they can somehow be linked to hedonism).

Thanks for the additional help; it's very useful.  I think I get what the system was supposed to be and how to guide character creation in the future. 

Couple more things for the OP: 1) I'm not trying to tell you you're "doing it wrong". Your son's character sounds like a blast to play, and would stretch some roleplaying muscle given as you say the character is in his 60s and probably won't be jumping into too many swordfights. So, he's literally one of Charted Space's most skilful diplomats. Cool! Throw some challenges his way that will challenge even that level of skill.

2) If you want to know more about the less skill-roll-dependent approach try googling "Rule 68A" and "Tales to Astound". The former is a very loose framework someone sketched for playing Classic where the Ref makes up throws on the hoof. Tales to Astound is a blog mainly about this kind of playstyle.

Also, I was a bit unfair to d20 and BRP; not everything is a skill roll in those systems. I just mean they have more elaborate skill systems baked in than Classic Traveller did before it started to move in the direction of Megatraveller.