I never liked the 'INT+EDU' skill limit. It always fell short of describing the people I knew.

One day, a few years back, when we were in our prime, most had one or more post-secondary degree (one had 4), and most had a lot of non-academic skills (shooting, martial arts black belts, amazing creative stuff, writing, painting, smithing, first aid, history, languages, etc) plus a lot of the academic ones (physics, chemistry, astrophysics, math, computers, electronics, communications, electronics, mechanical (no gravitics though), linguistics, legal (professional stuff), geology, geography (human and physical), economics, etc). The ones from the military were just shy of marksmen levels (competed) with rifles and pistols (and one claimed a dab hand with a .50 BMG), the navy boy had some training on bigger ordinance, though he was a Maritime Engineer until they nuked his trade and he became a Maritime Surface Warfare officer and then ended up doing op planning in Aghanistan and doing disaster relief all over the world, people knew heavy weapons (LMGs, GPMG/MMGs, shoulder launched gear including Carl Gustavs and LAWs), knew some recon and tactics (one ended up in RCAF Intel after many infantry years, and did a Master of War Studies at RMC in between), and on and on.

There is no way a character with 5-7 skills of maybe 10-15 maximum skill points represented that.

I see in one of the new versions (T5, MgT), that limit is set to 3 x (INT + EDU) which seems more like reality. Though I was unclear if they were counting 0 level skills, which I think should be left out.

I also always thought having some things give you a zero level skill but not an upgrade was, while not necessarily an incorrect map of reality, an annoying character generation item for little real in game benefit. I think that was not a required distinction.

I always looked at it as:

Level 0 - something that could be taught briefly (really fast in a crisis) to let you do particular tasks (but not with any particular panache or depth of understanding) - basic self defence training

Level 1 - you spent a term or a maybe a year with this being part of your daily life - self defence white/yellow/orange

Level 2 - you've done this for 2-3 years as part of daily activity (some college certifications/diplomas) - self defence level green/blue/purple

Level 3 - you've done this for 4-6 years as a part of daily activity (university graduation in key skills for a career) - self defence level brown/1st black - professional (MD, Engineer, etc)

Level 4 - you've done this for 7-10 years as part of daily activity (post graduate levels) - self defence level 2nd to 3rd black - Expert - Masters Degree to PhD

Level 5 - 11-20 years of daily activity, PhD plus, self defence 4th+ black, Renowned Expert

I always also thought that although there should be nothing magical about level-0 skills (in terms of how they might stack with more skills of that type) but that getting to level 2 is harder than getting to level 1, and so on... to get from level 4 to 5 should take longer and be harder (more skill tallies/xp/whatever). This is why some of MT's expanded chargen was a problem - you could get, andnot just very rarely, characters from generators that had level 5-7 skills in one skill (thanks to skill trees in part, but also because there was no gradient in how hard it was to increase a skill).

So, how have you found/used/changed skill caps? Have you level-limited skills for your games? Have you liked one version of Traveller's approach to skills vs. another?

TomB