Occupations

Where new Keepers can ask "stupid" questions without fear of hazing.
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kaensada
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Occupations

Post by kaensada » Tue Dec 10, 2013 8:58 pm

I'm a new keeper and am learning the system alongside my players. I've been asked about having more than one starting occupation. I am unsure how to work this though I think I remember reading that they can. I was also curious about how one would go about increasing abilities like int,dex,pow.

Dr. Gerard
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Re: Occupations

Post by Dr. Gerard » Wed Dec 11, 2013 4:13 pm

I have skimmed the core rules and companions, but haven't found anything that specifically addresses multiple occupations at the same time. But the rules encourage Keepers to make new starting occupations by picking up to eight base skills that apply. These are the base skills where players can spend their EDU points during character creation. So if you want to create a soldier-doctor, for example, you would pick up to eight base skills that make sense for that description. I would try to mimic reality as much as possible -- combat medics do not get the same training as snipers, for example, so medical skills should be emphasized. In general, I would avoid trying to combine incompatible professions. The base skills should reflect the things an investigator has spent their entire career working on. If you want to have a medical doctor with an interest in the occult, consider using the suggested base skills for doctor and then spending the INT points on things like Occult and History.

I think in this game, an attempt to "double class" a character comes with the risk of watering down the identity of the character. Mechanically, the more you spread your base points across many skills instead of specializing, the more mediocre your investigator becomes. I even encourage my players to spend some of their INT points to boost their base profession skills. 70% sounds like a high level of skill, but imagine a combat doctor who fails to administer First Aid about a third of the time when under stress. Or consider an academic who can't quickly find what they want in a library about 40% of the time. Players who spend a few points in a lot of things end up with characters who fail most of the time. There's nothing wrong with that (I happen to enjoy playing failures), but you want to make this clear to players who are new to the game. It's fun to do stuff. It's fun to succeed at things you think your character should be good at.

That is just my personal take on multiple occupations.

As far as increasing abilities, the game generally doesn't have mechanisms for that. There are ways to increase your attributes through magic spells, but these don't come up often and should usually incur a cost of some kind, like sanity points or drawing attention from Mythos entities.

That's not to say you can't play this game however you want. BRP covers all kinds of genres and flavors of role play, so you might want to look at the BRP rules for more ways to focus on character advancement. Playing CoC the way it's written means playing characters who are on a slippery slope to death and crazy, with a few tiny skill bonuses along the way just to keep them coming back for more abuse.
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fox01313
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Re: Occupations

Post by fox01313 » Thu Dec 26, 2013 4:17 am

I can see a double class occupation being a little complicated unless one is a spy & the other is the cover job they do but then I'd say to split the skill points they'd have so there would be enough in the cover to make it look like they know what they're doing.

Another thought, is that some characters that are older might have had other careers then I'd say just pick a couple skills to illustrate this (by putting more points into those skills). The overall simplicity of the professions make it easy between those primary skills & the acres of points for hobbies to make a well rounded character without needing to resort in a weird dual class and figuring out the mechanics for that. Of course you could just sink all the points into acting & other deceptive skills for that player claiming they have some sort of paragon of professions & tell the other players that they have a wide variety of professions but for some reason he/she is having the worst luck at getting things to work (due to the bad die rolls of having low scores).
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