Scott, you are correct. I'm afraid I oversimplified my answer to John because I didn't want to go into that kind of detail--and because I didn't want to find myself counting out four hundred days on every skill he decided to push to professional levels. Besides, although I don't have a "plan" exactly, I'm pretty sure he does not have that time (over a year) in this world. The next step has hit, and a General Effects roll is going to determine whether he has a few days or a few months or something between the two. I should have said, "Yes, but it will take you an incredibly long time to advance with a normal training regimen, to the point that it does not seem to you as if you are gaining any benefit from it." I'm sure that would have led to a longer discussion about how long and so on, and I already had the separate issue of whether I could let him advance for "practice" when he was focused on advancing for "new use"--problem for me, because of what I consider the ramifications for breaking the system. In short, practice requires a specific number of days to gain an intensity, and inherently assumes that in the course of that practice you will be advancing your knowledge of the skill through what are logically new uses. New use suggests that under some sort of pressure to solve a problem you apply a known skill in an unfamiliar way. The line blurs quite a bit, but the problem that arises is here: if you are using the skill on a regular basis as practice, then in the specified time you ought to get the advancement credit, a number of unstated new uses included in your learning process; but if in the midst of that you also get credit for a new use, that means that the learning process is not working as a process of learning new applications of the skill through gradual advancement over time, but that the learning of new applications has been divorced from the learning process generally. So what do I do if someone who is practicing in the midst of that gets what is clearly a new use? Well, it's an extremely complicated problem. I think that if the new use is divorced from the practice, then both should apply. Let me craft an example. Harry Renquist is a spy. As part of his training he is taught to dance, so he can mingle with the rich and famous at diplomatic functions when he crashes them, but he has never done so. He still practices regularly--and then he is on a mission, inside the home of a foreign businessman somewhere in the Alps stealing files from his computer. His entrance has been discovered, but he has not yet been located or identified. He is mingling, talking to an attractive female antiquities dealer, as the security comes in the front door and the orchestra strikes up a tango. He immediately asks the girl to dance, grabs hold of her, and sweeps her onto the floor, dancing his way through the crowd so that by the end of the song he can wish her farewell and slip out through the kitchen. For that he should have a new use, without disturbing the advancement for regular practice, because he has never used dancing with an unfamiliar partner as a means of effecting an escape across a dance floor--a creative solution that relied on a known skill.
What is happening in John's situation, though, is he is trying to divorce the specific new uses of the skill from the ongoing practice. He wants to use "practice" as the failsafe for when the skill fails. This becomes extremely problematic, though. Let's suppose he decides to knit a sweater, as a new use. Let's suppose that something as complicated as knitting a sweater takes a hundred days--the same time as it would for him to get a credit for practice. So the dice are rolled to see whether he produced the sweater, and if it succeeds he gets a new use credit but if it fails he gets a practice credit--but why doesn't he get the practice credit if the new use succeeds?
I don't object to people trying to advance a skill rapidly by dreaming up new uses that can be performed quickly. I've done that myself, particularly with psionic skills. However, at some point we have to distinguish between practice and trying something that will be a new use, and thus I think that anything that is part of the new use attempt is not practice, and anything that is part of an ongoing practice is not eligible for a new use roll.
So let me correct myself to John: Yes, you can advance your skill into the professional level by maintaining an ordinary amateur level of training. It will take you a very long time to do so, and you will be nagging me about why it's taking so long, and I don't want to hear that. The time required for such an advancement two hundred forty hours dispersed over four hundred days, such that you do sixty hours every hundred days in a reasonable format. You are are better off trying to find ways to build a double doubled program, if you want to improve your ability by practice. And as to pushing into the expert level with an ordinary training program, it will take two thousand seven hundred days in which you put in sixty hours every one hundred days, which off the top of my head is one thousand six hundred twenty hours evenly spread through those nearly eight years.
Now, if my Internet connection will remain stable enough (it keeps dropping and reconnecting) I'm going to address the gameplay for Kurt, Nikolaj, John 2, and Graeme. I'm noticing the absence of two rather regular players, but they know who they are and I'm sure they're busy with something else.
I was thinking that Kurt shouldn't have much trouble getting a good night's sleep; but then it occurred to me that Zigesfeld is pretty good at his job, and he and his boss want this spy removed from the picture, so I'd better give him a GE roll on that. 23 is bad--Nearly as Bad as Anticipated--but that's not going to disrupt his sleep. He's in a hotel, not a motel, so his pursuit would have to get his room number from the desk or else wait for him. That car of his is not going to stay off the radar very easily--how many of those can there be in Paris?
Nikolaj is still meeting people and getting something of the flavor of the present world.
John 2 finally gets the answer to his prayers. She's not what he prayed for exactly, but apparently she's the answer.
Graeme moves to the Mongol-chin prisoners.
--M. J. Young
