Occupations

A character's Occupation is how they earn their living. For NPCs its probably a good description of their day to day life, but for many player characters its a toss up as to whether or not they actually still practice their profession.

Occupation is the main mutable statistic outside of skills themselves for this very reason.

A character's occupation specified during character generation has an enormous impact on their starting wealth and their skills, connections, and sometimes even granting a minor trait. Setting Developers are strongly encouraged to come up with a setting-specific set of occupations for players to use, to the point where there is no stock list of occupations (as there was for, say, backgrounds).

In a sense Occupation could be thought of as being somewhat similar to a player's class (and some setting developers may choose to use them in a similar manner to how other game systems implement adventurer classes).

Reading an Occupation Entry

Occupation Name and Description

An occupation entry should include some basic information about the role the occupation serves in society and what most people in that society would recognize that job as

Occupational Income

Since wealth is almost always highly setting specific, setting developers are encouraged to model wealth based on the occupation, both as a worldbuilding exercise and with a mind to keeping an eye on player incomes. Unlike in other systems, its discouraged (except in certain circumstances) that the wealth of the players should massively eclipse the average person in the setting. If it does, that should come from their adventuring proceeds and not simply as a consequence of their profession. In general, since the basic units of downtime are one day, one week, one month, and one year, it is helpful to list each of these as options for income.

Occupation Skills and Skill Pool

An occupation entry will always include a list of skills (which may be stock skills or setting-specific skills) that are considered "core" to that occupation's daily operations. Your character sheet will have a way to mark out certain skills as being occupation skills, and you are encouraged to do so for two reasons.

Firstly, during character generation, your occupation will also define an occupational skill pool (usually a multiple of the relevant aptitude as judged by the setting developer who created the occupation), which are skill points that you can spend only on advancing the skills considered occupation skills.

Secondly, during downtime, if you are pursuing an Occupation you will be challenged on these skills as checks, and it is therefore possible to do skill advancement on occupation skills in downtime, which can help accelerate landmark advancement.

Changing Occupations

Facilitators and players should be mindful that occupations can change. After all, if you spend all day gallavanting around the high country on horseback instead of showing up to the office to do your work as a ledger-keeper, you are likely to return in short order and be handed your walking papers. Similarly, your experiences as an adventurer might help you see the world in a different light and you may wish to change occupations.

This is something that should be roleplayed out between the Facilitator and the player working together as a team rather than being purely mechanical. You do not lose currently-accumulated scores in your old occupation's skills, but they stop being considered occupation skills. You also won't be granted a new set of occupational skill points to spend on your new occupation skills; you'll have to simply catch up with the rest of the class in other ways.

"Full Time Adventurers"

In long-running campaign play or in settings where it makes sense for a character to be a full-time adventurer, setting developers are strongly encouraged to create one or more adventurer-specific occupations so that player characters don't instantly become unemployed as soon as they set out on their major journey.

This could be handled in a number of ways. Perhaps the journeying and adventuring is actually part and parcel with your role - you could, for example, be a doctor hired by an expedition for exactly this purpose. You could also implement something like an Adventurer profession.