Hi there! This group's still in business after all!
As someone pointed out, Books 4-7 give characters more skills than the basic
character generation rules. My solution to this is to mimic the skill award
system from those books as follows; each term, roll 2D four times. Award the
character a skill for each roll of 6+. Of course, the range of skills isn't
as great, but at least this gets over the "I'm going to be a Marine so I can
get a more skilled character" syndrome.
My main gripe with "Merchant Prince" is the trading system. The tech level
modifiers on the number of passengers, amount of cargo and value of cargo
make it impossible to go from a low-tech planet to a high-tech one and make
a profit. It's also almost impossible to go along the Spinward Main because
of all those Non-Industrial worlds.
Question about the "Mercenary" abstract combat system. Is "Indigenous" a
mission by itself, or do you roll again if the opposition turns out to be
Indigenous, to find out what the indigenous troops (i.e. natives) are doing?
I'd expect the latter, but the rulebook seems to indicate the former.
Question about "High Guard". If a few ships with black globes and particle
accelerators jump into a high population system whose main world has no
atmosphere, and turn off their globes just as they're passing the main world,
does this world then surrender, even if it has a few thousand SDB's? The
"Striker" rules say, "If one side has a particle accelerator in orbit over a
vacuum world, the other side should surrender"; they don't even try to say
what happens if a bombardment actually occurs, except to imply that it's
nasty and excessive. Also, what happens to matter (e.g. missiles) which hit
a black globe? I hope it doesn't get turned to energy and absorbed, because
if it does, one small missile would wipe out anything other than a large
battleship with a lot of extra capacitors.
"Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott
Adrian Hurt | JANET: [email removed]
UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian | ARPA: [email removed]