Greets,

Recently I was thinking about Ranger school and BUDS courses. One of the things is that you need to have some qualities and skills to go and do this kind of training. With Ranger school being open for foreign nationals I could see it being a a useful way to gain money by defence forces.

So, instead of just being awarded karma and told that you can spend it on skills, you also have to spend money as well. Some skills obviously do not demand finances, but more exotic skillsets do demand time and money. Things like parachute training, piloting, even a drivers license all cost money and time.

Time is required by RAW. Money is covered by hiring an instructor (which speeds up the time, generally speaking).

This idea seems more 2nd ed goofy, I like it.
However since "realism" is the 4th ed buzzword, I would guess no. Instead of pure nuyen profit, this type of resource would be traded for favors, political gain or even impossible to find gear.

Not that any government would ever host a school to train foreign nationals military tactics for political reasons... never.

Not like the Israeli army being extremely cash strapped during the 1970s used to train Sri Lankan forces and Tamil Tigers at the same base.

I was actually thinking that skills beyond 1 need an instructor. There is a limit to how much you can learn through self-learning. I was thinking on patterning it on the British Army course cycle.

-Chrysalis

The U.S.M.C Sniper/Recon course is attended by soldiers from all over the world. I watched it on the Military channel, they had a Brazilian attending. I'd say: you have to be from an allied country/corp and your sponsor has to pay for it. Just my .02 .

It is not just the USMC Sniper/Recon course. Most major schools and courses within the US Military are open to allied countries. Hell, our SOF (thats Special Operations Forces) spend a good chunk of their non-combat/peace time actually training other countries military forces.

It really helps when your fighting terrorist if you can get other guys trained up and have them do it in their own country rather then you having to deploy your own forces there.

Is there? from my perspective I would say that you could learn it up to 6 on your own, however the time required would be substantially more without an instructor (perhaps way too long to bother in some cases). Providing you have a way to get the knowledge by another means (matrix, trideo, whatever)

What about houseruling that if you don't have enough karma to improve a skill or learn a new one you make the learning test and once you reach the treshold instead of learning/improving the skill you reduce its cost by 1 karma? Once you either reduce the cost to zero or have the ammount of karma required you make another learning test to learn/improve the skill.

Comments?

I had a Columbian CPT and a Panamanian Lt in my officer basic course. IIRC, they did everything except for one two hour class and a fairly pointless classified briefing we had.

Meh, I've always ruled that spending the karma to increase a skill implies that you somehow found a way to increase said skill. Karma represents a mix of experiance, time, training, effort, and luck. If you spend your karma to increase your firearms from 3 to 4, you found some way to do it. I might require you to explain how you did so, but you allready spent the resources.

However you earned that karma doing various things that might have nothing to do with firearms, as I see it karma is an award from they univers to the spirit that makes much easier it development (just think at the end of "Harlequim is back" adventure when the runners that make the sacrifice see the cosmical powers that be), with karma runners can learn new skill or learn new ones exceptionaly fast (more or less what adept did in EarthDawn) allowing them to raise above the masses in terms of skills (that's why corps hire street punks for high risk missions, karma made them exceptional; that and deniability), my houserule is basicaly awarding karma that can be spent only in the skill trained, a reward for effort and costance (Aquiring a new skill would require 4 + 1 tests, going from 1 to 6 would be 40 + 5 tests, aquiring aptitude quality would require 10 + 1 tests and increasing the skill to 7 would take 28 + 1 tests, for a total of 90 tests; by the way I can't find the target numbers and time interval for learning tests can anyone give me a hint?).
This would allow to increas some skills that are often overlooked such as knowledge skills, especialy hobby-related ones, that are cheap but often not of much use. Also my vision of karma nature explaines why Joe Everage are stuck in the 2-4 renge for skills when Joe Shadowrunner is soaring in the 5-6 range or even sitted on a monumentous 7.