On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 11:34:29 -0400, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

>It's funny how people see extended generation. My group always wanted it
>and people chose careers that had it over those that didn't (or asked me to
>create it). They liked the detail, the larger amount of meta-game (chargen)
>that they could use to connect to their character.

My take on extended generation is that it had good and bad features, which
were, unfortunately, closely intertwined:

The good is that it gave you a "better" view of the character's career (and
to some extent let you control it), and also presented a set of
more-narrowly-focussed skills. This is actually more consistent, in many
ways, with people's perceptions of the real world.

The primary downer was that it promoted skill proliferation, in that it was
too easy for a character to get fairly high levels of a comparatively large
number of skills - thus putting Extended-process characters at a
significant skill advantage vs basic-process characters who had the same
number of terms in the same career. Ostensibly, the INT+EDU limit was
supposed to address that, but even then, an Extended character still ended
up advantaged vs the Basic character.

A secondary downer was that it was pretty much only available for the
"major" careers in the core rules; you couldn't get an extended diplomat,
bureaucrat, noble, pirate/corsair, belter, etc., which left those
characters at a disadvantage relative to the Big Four (Mercenary, Navy,
Scout, Merchant).

The skills problem could actually have been remedied fairly easily, by
changing the rolls needed to be awarded skills - if I was guaranteed one
skill per term in basic gen, then the roll in extended gen should have been
9+ each year. Most rolls were lower than that, which meant that I could
expect more than one skill per term. Dropping the roll from a 9+ to a 7+
more than doubles the probability of getting the skill, which means that
I'd expect two skills per term - but most skill rolls in extended gen were
even lower than 7!

Alternatively, I think extended characters would still have been
advantaged, but not so badly, if the limit were (INT+EDU)/2 instead of
INT+EDU.

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Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com
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