How to handle explosives

[UraYagyu]

As my charakter used his dynamit several times to almost kill himself, i would recommend  a special ability for proper use of explosives.

[Black ICE]

In most RPG you can always ask for special abilities for your character.

but nevertheless, the skill to roll the dice successfully is needed by all players

[UraYagyu]

Well in that case my dicethrowing skill was very bad. Maybe i should bring my own Dice the next time, to be sure, our group will survive my mining ambitions.

[Black ICE]

that is a very good idea! in Spieleri or Harrys Planet you will find plenty of types of dice

[Roland]

In our group we thought at several times that the skill list in MC is too short. So we began using a much expanded list and the sub-skill system from the Freelancer Handbook with some added skill points during character creation (I think we added 2 technical and one free per background repetition).
If you do not want to do this I would recommend the skills "Chemistry" or "Weapon Systems" for handling explosives.

[Black ICE]

Actually, it depends on the gamemaster and the player how a specific situation is handled. Therefore, you can either depend on subskills or when the player knows good, what his character is capable of, he can decide, which skill he will use.

My personla opinion about sub skills is: good idea, when you keep the number of sub skills very low. Bad idea when there are many skills. The game systems main advantage is its simplicity.

[UraYagyu]

Different opinions occur about how complex a role playing system should be. On the one hand there are the purists who think, the rules must kept as symplicistic as a cardboard game on other hand there are gamers who want to exercise a rulebook as big as a dictionary. We must consider a way between so we keep the fun in the gameplay.

[Aldrien]

check out the cyberpunk 2020 system.. I like it a lot!

we also used it for traveller!

[Black ICE]

You should look for the GURPS system - AFAIK this covers everything you can imagine of!

[Aldrien]

yeah, but its the gurps system... which is not my taste..

also it is not really that ballanced. it works, but the flavor you need to like..

A  (after trying it): GURPS......   (spatter)

B : ähhhh YOU clean that up yourself!

[Fetzenbankert]

I go along with Roland - I would suggest to stick with the subskill system. Its not so bad at all. To mix the game system with different other RPG-systems will make the game unbalanced.
Every player is free to give his character special skills (as stated in the core rule book). Why not use them? In the different sourcebooks there came up a lot of new skills (which can be used only by the chars of the specific megacorporation, which is IMO complete nonsense - why can only imperial characters fly spaceships? ), so why not give some skill pics on a new skill, which is not in the general list?
But I dont think thats a good idea to give chars additional skill picks points. Why? So there are specialists, ok, why should every character be an allrounder who knows all and everything? E.g.: I wanted to play a spacecraft-pilot, therefore I had to take several picks in spacepiloting and spacenavigation. On the other hand, I had no picks free for e.g. chemistry, acrobatics or climbing. The heck with it! We are all specialists in the real world - why should it be so different in a RPG?