Designing The Training Rules
Here's what the original game specified, and my thoughts on how to remove XP and add space travel but not unbalance things.
Duskvol
Zero dice is not "incompetent" -- scoundrels are generally competent protagonists, and with pushing, can get several dice on the spot.
A group training hall for a set of dots would be clock-10, and a crew can make 0-8 ticks per session. (Let's say typically 4 ticks for a proactive group.)
As you only need three of those to cover all 12 actions, saturation of this bonus is complete at clock-30 / ~8 sessions.
With the appropriate training grounds, you can train a dot (which are clock-6) in 3 downtimes. (Likely less, as any solo/group desparate action counts as a tick.)
None of the above helps with playbook feats. Those are a clock-8, and a PC can make 0-6 ticks per session. (2 are easily attained by just playing to your playbook's strengths, and the rest are taking the initiative on roleplaying.)
Training activities do apply to playbook tracks, which allows for a much faster roadmap than relying on per session rewards.
Nota Bene: my read of rules as written
- You can't spend your two free downtime activities (or any extras) on the same XP track -- you can parallelize resolve and insight training for example, but not rush one track. (p155)
- Training isn't a roll, so you can't spend coin/rep to increase results.
Goals in Spaaaace
- Will put it nicely: I really enjoy the idea of Special Abilities and new skills requiring a solid story answer for how you got them, a teacher or a dramatic reward for a big job or the culmination of a complex project specific to the thing you're trying to learn, rather than knowledge just appearing out of the aether once an invisible number reaches an arbitrary value.
- Not all phases of education are equal: Getting started is hard without assistance, but soon after self-improvement takes off. We hit another cliff when you start to push past cutting edge.
- Gaining access to a tutor/library/holocron should be advantageous to the PC, as I'd rather them push and pull on the setting than just sit in their cabin and read a book.
- Tangentially relevant: Allow for greater scopes on distance and organization: Crew/Lair upgrades in Blades are great for a city-dwelling crew with a main HQ; I'd like to capture the distributed nature of a interstellar rebellion in my crew/lair hack.
- Avoid changing the base game wherever possible -- I've had enough game modding go into an infinite spiral of tweaking.
Implementation
Original Research
This is well captured by "desparate rolls earn ticks", but I think that rule shouldn't apply to combat checks. (I also wince at Luke/Rey picking things up without even a montage scene, and I'm chalking that up to moving at plot speed, just like how distances are completely incoherent in the movies..)
Will's examples
Simplest form is
- both you and the teacher spend downtime until you fill a 6-8 tick clock.
More complex projects would involve for example
- tracking down the location of the schematic for this ancient cybernetic doohickey with a Study clock, then
- obtaining it as a Job, then translating it as another long term project, then
- obtaining the rare materials required as either a Job or a big expenditure of Coin during downtime, then
- actually building the thing as an extended Rig project, then
- installing it as a tough Doctor roll that leaves you wounded, then finally gaining the relevant superpower once you recover fully from the surgery.