Question about Barbarians of Lemuria. How essential are careers

>>51598411
What would you want to replace them with ?
Most likely it would just end up being unnecessarily complicated
I'm biased since I love the system, but it's pretty much perfect for what it's supposed to do

>>51598801
I'd like to replace it with a background system. Instead of careers, you'd choose (or roll randomly, if that's your thing) different events that happened in your life, and those would influence your skills. You'd still put points in each event, both to keep the dice rolling the same and to determine how influential that event was.

>>51598913
But you gain skills from practice, not trauma or just experience
Maybe you could add an 'important events' system on the side to justify knowledge and other gifts, but BoL careers are already pretty vast
If by events you mean extended periods of time practicing a set of activities, I'm okay with you, it just means you expand the possible number of careers
Otherwise doesn't make sense

>>51598913
>Instead of careers, you'd choose (or roll randomly, if that's your thing) different events that happened in your life, and those would influence your skills

That seems needlessly complicated and prone to ending up with characters that aren't the characters your players wanted to play.

>>51601407
How is it any more complicated from choosing from a list of professions?

>>51598913

So if I'm understanding you right, you're basically just home-brewing some new careers, re-fluffing them as backgrounds, and rolling them randomly instead of having the players pick?

If that's the case, then I imagine that they'd function pretty much mechanically identically to careers. I don't think you'll be breaking the game.

>>51602078
They can choose too if they want. I just know my group likes to roll things like that.

>bump

A big part of what a career does mechanically is give the player a suite of skills based on it.

>"Can I pick locks? Of course, I was a thief."
>"Can I track that guy? Yeah, I was a hunter."
>"Can I butter up the clerk? Sure I can, I was a courtier."

Changing careers to events might make for less easy skill-associations. Things like "Physician", "Priest", and "Blacksmith" give you pretty clear ideas of what it is a character can do, and limits the amount of grey area when it comes to determining whether a particular character has experience in a certain area.

But what exactly does "Orphaned at a young age" let you do? Or "Present at the King's coronation"? These are the kinds of events that might be super important to a character's backstory, but they have limited mechanical impact once players start rolling dice. It's certainly possible to create events that have some mechanical use baked-in ("Stranded on a desert island" is probably good for some survival skills), but it's a lot less straightforward and a lot more murky.

>>51598913
>we Travellers of Lemuria now

>>51598913
If you read how careers work they are your background. Its what you were in life before game start.

Anyone have a pdf?

>>51607833
This. OP seems determined to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

>>51598913
Great just like the part of Traveler everyone hates other than new players. ,,,,"But I do not want to play a shopkeeper" ... "Sorry the random rolls say otherwise, Hay, do not leave for a better game "

>>51598411
I've heard some pretty decent things about this system.

>>51609020
Check the pdf thread