So, has anyone thought up some decent rules for learning times and what you have to roll to learn/improve attributes/skills/etc (to make Instruction and Tutorsoft useful )?

Bye
Thanee

No, but I was think of make the characters instrucat someone (direction to loot, teach a skill) to get the big pay off at the end of the run.

Decent rule: Between runs if you spend the karma you get the Skill or Attribute increase.

Life is short. Screw learning times. Play the game.

Variaton: If they want the PC to learn something during the run just bump up the karma cost. Say 50% or 100% premium. If the player wants it bad enough they'll cough up for it.

I believe he meant something along the lines of a part of the run being "and before you're done, teach my son how to use his monowhip."

** runs and hides, waiting for the monowhip threads to leak into this one **

So, noone actually uses learning times or learning tests?

Admittedly, I'm rather partial to let this slip as well, and just use the limit of not being able to raise the same skill twice between two runs (unless there's a lot of time between them). It's simple and good enough.

But still, I'm curious how it could be done in a reasonable fashion. The rules certainly hint at such tests...

Bye
Thanee

I'm considering knocking together some sort of set up where a character can spend money and time being trained and can use this to take skills up to rating 3(which fits the desc in the skills chapter). Not sure how it would work though, karma spending would be instant and you'd have to spend some time maintaining skills at 6 and above(to represent how soem one who's been out of the game looses some of their excellence.

Thios may never be finished but I've had the basic idea for a while. I may finish it some time...

IMO there are a few rules put into the RAW that are pretty much only for RP reasons. If you have a run and gun group then you might want to just toss the RP rules for simplicity of the run.

We tried to use the learning rules with 2nd and 3rd edition. The players and GM hatd them. So we dropped them like a rock.
You only get new skills between runs, and you pay what ever the costs are listed if there is any.
Most of the time no one learns any unusal skill set that they do not already have.

I usually find that karma supply is limited enough that it never seemed my players were "learning too much too fast" to believe. I hand out a decent amount of karma (5 points is about average per evening of play, once a week), and there's so much for the players to spend karma ON that it never really seems like they absolutely max out on anything just because they can do it without huge delays.

Learning times are an optional rule for someone else's game

Our old SR3 house rule was that it took new rating^2 weeks to learn a new rating of skill. so a skill of 1 was 1 week, 2 = 4 weeks, and so on. never made any learning tests since you're paying karma to learn it.

Edit:
We did away with this in SR4, just passing it off as downtime, limited to 1 point upgrade on any attribute or skill.

We have a hit and miss system of using learning times in games. We never used it in SR, but always used it in Earthdawn. I prefer the Rolemaster method: you mark down what you're studying, then learn it when you level. If you manage to level twice (never happened in our games, but possible) then you would just gain those skill ranks twice.

In SR terms you would probably write down where your next karma is allocated. If you gain more than that I'd either let you spend the excess on one-shot stuff like bonding a foci, or apply it towards the skill the rest went towards. So if your plan was to raise Pistols to 4 and you gained 3 more karma then you needed, that karma would go towards either something that doesn't require lots of training (foci is the only example that springs to mind) or it would go towards Pistols 5.

I probably wouldn't actually use that system in SR, as it doesn't work as well in a ruleset where you get lots of little incremental bonuses instead of large chunks of them at one time like in level-up games.

Karma represents time spent on an endeavor, so I plan on asking them to give me an idea what skill(s) they're working on, and when they spend the karma it represents them finishing their "education".

However long it takes, it takes. I don't know how strict I'll be, but I'm definitely going to enforce a rule that if you haven't been using the skill or actively pursuing it, you can't raise it.