Training skills?

Discussion on game mastering Earthdawn. May contain spoilers; caution is recommended!
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Michael
Posts:94
Joined:Tue Mar 05, 2019 3:33 am
Training skills?

Post by Michael » Fri Oct 04, 2019 7:03 pm

Can you train someone in a skill if you have the talent or do you need to have the skill?

thanks

Bonhumm
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Location:Right behind you

Re: Training skills?

Post by Bonhumm » Fri Oct 04, 2019 9:52 pm

My understanding of the rules is that a Talent comes naturally to an Adept, the training is just 'showing' to an Adept how to channel magic to accomplish a new action while a skill is just like in real life: practice-practice-practice. Thus someone who 'only' knows said 'action' as a Talent would not be able to 'teach' it as a skill.


The subject had (kinda) been brought before too: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1255&p=9522#p9519 and I'm pretty sure another thread had touched that subject more specifically AND in much more details but I can't find it.

Telarus
Posts:267
Joined:Mon Nov 28, 2016 1:16 am

Re: Training skills?

Post by Telarus » Sat Oct 05, 2019 11:41 pm

It really depends on how you want to position Adepts socially in all the societies. If non-Adepts can learn Skills from an Adept who has the Talent, then Adepts are often found leading/teaching bands of non-adepts. Warrior-bands, Garlen-cults, etc, etc will have well-trained non-Adept members.

Otherwise, adepts tend to cluster together in little 'cliques' that have far fewer ties to the non-Adept local population.


In my Barsaive, Adepts can teach the Skill version of Talents and Knacks that they know. It's less about "I'm not sure how to explain to this newbie how I do it", and more "No, no, you're doing it slightly wrong. Watch me again." (See all martial arts schools ever.) This doesn't cut down the training times, at all, at all... and sometimes the Adept just won't be around to train with. Practice can be done without the teacher.

ManDrake
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Joined:Thu Sep 26, 2019 11:09 am

Re: Training skills?

Post by ManDrake » Sun Oct 06, 2019 5:03 pm

We had several debates about this topic over the years. The general solution that we came too was that people with talents could train people in them as skills. Mostly based off the fact that skills can be aligned into talents with the optional rules in the books. The reality is that the source of the knowledge is magical, but otherwise the player still has access to the knowledge for as long as that magic is around. In a situation where players end up in a place with low/no magic, it gets more complicated. The ruling that we came to in that situation, was if the talent has an equivalent skill offering, the player has a functional skill level equal to the reverse of the aligned talent chart. But that was an extremely rare edge case caused by a very specific adventure.

Qwazi
Posts:9
Joined:Mon Oct 07, 2019 8:53 am

Re: Training skills?

Post by Qwazi » Mon Oct 07, 2019 9:06 am

Michael wrote:
Fri Oct 04, 2019 7:03 pm
Can you train someone in a skill if you have the talent or do you need to have the skill?

thanks
My interpretation: no
There is a Wizard spell that can interrupt a magic talent, and if used to interrupt "Melee attack" would force a Warrior to use the Melee skill (or Dex if the Warrior does not have it). If a talent was equivalent to skill this would not be the case, and I interpret talents as innate magic abilities that do not work or look the same as skill.

Slimcreeper
Posts:1061
Joined:Mon Nov 28, 2016 11:44 pm

Re: Training skills?

Post by Slimcreeper » Tue Oct 08, 2019 6:43 pm

Maybe talent unarmed combat looks like mortal kombat and skill unarmed combat looks like MMA.

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