Skills
The use of skills within the Starfleet Command RPG have been simplified, to accomodate the sheer numbers of ships involved and the events that can take place at any one time. All skill are boiled down into three:
- Crew Skill
- Captain Skill
- Ship Skill
The Crew skill is all of the individual skills of each crew member of a ship recognized as one. It is tracked separately from the Captain skill, in order to recognize the captain's larger breadth of experience and to represent a specific skill level, when a Test roll (ex: Shipboard Systems) is required.
The Captain skill does not have the same opportunity of individual use tht the Crew skill has. Its purpose is to represent the captain's experience in decision-making and is avereaged with the Crew skill to determine the Ship skill.
The Ship skill is used to resolve Events that occur, either as assigned missions (outside of game-monitored combat) or unexpected incidents. It is comprised of the average of the Crew and Captain skills.
Both of the first two skills are initialized at the ship's commissioning [skill generation rules to be developed later]. Both recieve a free point following a successful ship's shakedown cruise (to reflect the crew coming together as a team). Following that, both receive one point every two years following the first January after ship's commissioning. Instead of computing every ship's latest skill point levels every January, whenever a ship is chosen for an Event the skill level from the last computation is updated (and recorded).
Theoretically, a Captain skill could be changed if/when the captain character rotates. However, for simplicity the skill can just be tracked as if the command crew always stays the same. The exception to this is when a ship suffers casualties and receives new crew replacements. In that case, the old crew skill is averaged with the base crew skill of the replacements (with numbers of both accounted for) to determine the curren one. Likewise, if a ship's captain is determined to be a casualty, then he is replaced by the next senior officer (with a Captain skill five points lower for each officer grade below the deceased captain). Once a new captain is assigned to the ship, the Captain skill is recomputed, per the skill generation rules.