Re: (1069) Utter hogwash about Pilot 7s and so on.

In TML Biweekly Volume 6 Issue 16 [email removed] writes:
> I will merely say that your initial premise is total bilge. Has it
> ever occurred to anyone that if one preson in ten were a member
> of the Imperial Services, the economy would collapse? Let's get
> realistic here for a minute, folks!

Hmm.  Perhaps the estimate is high, but "total bilge"?  Please correct me if
I'm wrong, but I believe the good ol' U.S.ofA. has a total armed forces
payroll of around 2 million bodies, or about 2/300 of the total U.S.
population.  This would only change the estimates in question by 1 order of
magnitude, and certainly wouldn't invalidate the premise that the existing
rules make it abnormally easy for player characters to get high skill levels.

The problem is that the probability of getting skill level n + 1, given skill
level n, should be O(1/n) rather than the O(1) function it is now.  This
would make the probability of getting skill level n from scratch roughly
O(log(n)), which would make the suggestion of an earlier poster make sense,
by making the skill level be roughly the *log* of the actual "amount of
skill".  If the constants were chosen correctly, there might still be some
Pilot-9s in the universe, but there would be many orders of magnitude more
Pilot-7s.

On the other hand, I had always assumed that the rules were the way they were
to make player characters more interesting, and that they didn't apply to the
population as a whole.  To put it another way, if I used the character
generation system described above, I would probably throw away most of my
characters as "too boring", and the existing generation system just
"pre-throws-away" most, but not all "boring" characters.

I'm sure I will be liberally corrected on all of the above.

					Bart Massey
					..[email removed]
					..[email removed]