Mastery Training for Everything
by Charles TaylorOne interesting thing about the Weapons Mastery rules in the Masters set is the detailed training rules – giving training times and costs depending upon the level of training required and the skill of the teacher.
An idea I’ve had is to extend these training rules to cover other forms of training;
General Skills
Learning a new skill counts as Basic level mastery
Improving a skill counts as higher levels of mastery; +1 = Skilled, +3 = Expert, +4 = Master and +5 or more = Grand Master. Use this same equivalence to determine the mastery level of the teacher.
Magic-User Spells
Note: applying this one would make learning new spells a lot more time consuming and expensive. Also, as clerics don’t need to learn their spells, there is some imbalance here, so perhaps some comensatory cost should be levied against the cleric?
Learning a spell counts as a level of mastery determined from the level of spell; level 1-3 = Basic, level 4-5 = Skilled, level 6-7 = Expert, level 8 = Master, level 9 = Grand Master.
Use the highest level of spell the teacher can cast to determine their level of mastery.
Level Training
Each level requires training. For both student and teacher use the following equivalence:
Level 1-3 = Basic
Level 4-9 = Skilled
Level 10-14 = Expert
Level 15-25 = Master
Level 26-36 = Grand Master
Determine the cost, chance of success and time taken as if the character were learning the equivalent level of weapons mastery.
Self Training
The tables allow for training buy a teacher at the same level of skill as the student, but with a small chance of success.
However, as the rules also state that completing the time required for training even if the training roll was failed gives a +10% chance of success for any subsequent attempts, so even under these conditions a student who perseveres will eventually succeed.
This allows for the possibility of self-training – the character teaches themselves, self training will be cheaper, the student need not pay the teacher, but will need to supply living expenses and any other necessary costs, it would be, however, time consuming, especially at high levels, where there might not be a higher level teacher!
ATM the idea is skills work as given in the RC, the rules I posted are just use the Mastery training rules to determine the time and cost of learing new skills or improving existing ones.
Thus a character reaches a level where they may learn a new general skill, so they seek out a teacher - the process of learning the new skill is the same as learing a new weapon at basic mastery, including time taken, money spent, and chance of success - remember that failing to successfully learn a level of weapons mastery just means that the character must spend more time and money.
Some (4) levels later, the character can again learn a new skill, or improve an existing one, they choose to do the later, this time the process is the same as trying to improve their weapon skill from basic to skilled mastery.
It occurs to me that using this system, characters are going to be even less likely to try and improve skills rather than learning new ones. It might be an idea increase the benefit of using skill slots to improve existing skills to +2 per slot, rather than +1 per slot as written.
I hope this is clear.