I noticed something about SA a while ago. At first glance, it looked like a bug in the system, but then I realized that it was a feature. It's the idea that a character could take multiple overlapping professions. (The core rules already have this to some extent with Politics and Media).
So, let's say I have a Stored with Programmer at 10 and Hacker at 9. Hacker is a subset of Programmer, so it looks useless. Except that it gives another 18 reserve. So, let's say that I want to hack into a terraforming project. I could roll on programming, with a profession of 10 and 20 reserve, or if I'm running out of programming reserve (or want to save it for later), I could roll on hacking with a profession of 9 and 18 reserve. It gives the character more staying power, the ability to continuously perform near-optimally on what it is good at, and it gives me (the player) interesting choices. All good things.
Now, it isn't entirely protected against twinking. The easiest way to twink the system is as follows:
Take a max-capability character. Then toss on lots and lots of, say, level 3 professions. With Cog 8+ a level 3 profession costs only 2.5 years, and with high Bio a few hundred years of experience is reasonable. So a character could start with about 100 professions.
Munchkin Upside:
- About 300 reserve to spend, and high capabilities means high rolls even with lower professions. The character can perform near optimally almost forever, and nearly fully recharges after a night's rest even in lowtech environments.
Munchkin Downside:
- Inventing ~100 unique professions.
- Only 6 reserve can be spent on any given roll without eating into the capability's reserve. Makes extremely high rolls harder, and less reliable.
- Professions are low, so the munchkin is relying on getting a good roll with one die. This doesn't reduce the high rolls, but it makes skill checks unreliable, and means that reserve will get spent more often (to correct for unusually low rolls that could otherwise be ignored because the profession rolled decently).
- Can't be combined with a themes character (not enough years to get enough professions, and low capabilities would leave the character nearly crippled).
The hypothetical munchkin could up the professions to level 5 for 8.75 years each (10 reserve per roll). But that would produce only ~30 professions.
Personally, I intend to allow characters to have multiple overlapping professions, especially if some are subsets (or otherwise smaller) than others. I'll also make sure that no one abuses this by vetoing absurd profession lists.
