Of course it's not, and I accept that my experience is not everyone's, but from what I've
seen and heard most games involve some at some point. The LBBs gave all PCs level-0
with some or all (depending on printing) guns and melee weapons for a reason.

One of my new goals, now that I have regularish players, and am getting TTA adventure out of my system, is to actually tackle some of the LBB adventures at some point. And IIRC three of them run into one larger adventure. But that might mean I have to be better at the combat rules to run it. (And dish out some skills if I create some new PCs!!)

> But on your wider point, I've never let the rules bind me on what I'd
> allow players to "trade" for in character gen as long it's reasonable
> and becomes part of their character.

I don't either - back in the CT/MT days letting people roll the d6 for a skill and then
choose which table it was from was a common house rule. However, when discussing
published rules giving them a pass because I can make a house rule for them seems
unreasonably kind, given that in the end any set of rules gets a pass if this is the case.

Fair point! Though I've tended to run fairly rules lite games in any case - and that may be why I struggle with T5 much though I want to love it. FWIW I could wish I didn't come up against *quite* so many bugs, urhh, quirks let's say every time I open a rulebook. I took the new Central Supply Catalogue to bed with me the other day to browse the medical gear a PC wanted to take with them on Into the Unknown. The book does look great. But the *very first* item I looked at had the same serial number as one next to it so it didn't match the text numbers. <sigh>

> (The hardest bit seems to me to be writing scenes/plots that let them
> utilize the Talents they have - or should I just be doing the usual
> kinds of things and letting them come up with the application of
> skills and Talents to the tasks in hand?)

The former makes sure the talents will see use, the latter more often (IME) results in truly awesome and surprising play.

OK, so maybe I should aim for a mix of both then. Good tip.

cheers and have a good week everyone. I've got the third lunchtime session of Into the Unknown tomorrow - one of the advantages of NOT running it in a four hour convention slot is that we can spend more time on bits I've elided over before. Tomorrow we might *just* make it out of Jump into the system after an evening in Jumpspace with the crew doing their party pieces to pass the time...

(and Kelanora has been shacked up with Thomae (an NPC as I've only got three players) in a stateroom, so how polite is it when I'm asking PCs how they've been spending time in Jump - aside from practising their party piece [1] - to ask how that's been going?! (I'm thinking maybe a -DM on the party piece 'entertainment value' roll due to distraction) :-) Maybe next week we'll actually get to some scouting...)

[1] We had quite an amusing moment last time when the guy playing Perce (Percival) blithely volunteered to do a turn when asked but only thought 'hmmm, maybe I *had* better practice' when he saw how seriously everyone else was taking it (PCs and NPCs).

(I'm convinced we underestimate just how boring a week in Jump would really be. Might there be a traditional "fifth night" in Jump, jump in of party pieces on most ships?