This is a place to discuss the game rules and mechanics.


As I've pointed out to several players in PMs, there are a number of 'problems' with the rules, either things that don't make any sense, contradictory rules, things poorly explained or simply not explained at all.


In the first category, everyone in the military who is an officer is supposed to start out as a major.

Huh? How does that make any sense? It'd be pretty stupid if all four members of a team were majors. If you look at the composition of the other SG teams, they aren't all majors. On the other hand, though, they are NPCs.

So we're not using that rule.


Another thing, when the listed the pay grades, they only deal with the Air Force. Would it really have been that much extra effort to list the titles for the other branches?

It leads me to believe that if someone was recruited from another branch, they had to actually transfer into the Air Force. I'm not really how the chain of command would work across branches, so that does seem to make sense to me.

However, they list two ranks for enlisted airmen, but skip over Sergeant. Seems bizarre to me.


The other problem I had with the pay grades was when it comes to the non-humans. It generally says they can be paid as officers or enlisted, but then they don't quite deal with it in the pay grade area. There is simply no provision for paying someone as if they are an E5 or an O5... unless they are in the military! They can get paid the equivalent money, but that would be as a G4 (government 'employee').


I don't know. Maybe I'm knitpicking, but I just found it annoyingly confusing.


In case you were wondering, this all came about as I was going over Gear Picks and Resource Points. Both are affected by rank, but rather than just make it equal to your rank (way too simple!), you have to wade through it and see what each rank gets. I found that too much of a pain, so I'm just making the rank bonus equal to your rank.

That being said, I just got done going over everyone's Pay Grade, Gear Picks and Resource Points and updating them. If you see any problems, just holler!


Additionally, I added Action Dice to everyone's sheet right under 'Favored Class'.

The interpretation is, obviously, up to you, but here is some information from an actual military perspective...

First off, the air force doesn't have a flat sergeant rank,  they go from senior airman to staff sergeant.  As for having everyone join the air force...  Well that is actually one way they might do it.  More likely they would use a model more like special forces where everyone is just assigned to an ad hoc unit.  Marines remain marines, army remains army, navy nave and airforce are still just Airedales.  They just work together with whoever has the highest rank being in command.  Different rank names don't really mean anything unless you're an army captain calling a navy depot...

As for the major thing... Yeah totally agree.  Actually that was one of my pet peaves in the series.  They wear first off very officer centric and their ranks were way inflated.  That said, for a special project like SgC ranks might be higher than average and, with more specialists, officers might be more common as well.  There are mechanisms in place for determining who is command among people of equal rank(time of service) but that is a bit out there.

Lastly, I looked at my character sheet...  I'm not sure you get gear or resources equal to your rank.  Some ranks have specifically listed bonuses.