How hi do your players skills get?

[Cyclonus13]

So I have a group of players that started as cadets at the onset of the clan invasion and have played all the way though to just finishing the fedcom civil war. We use total warfare to do mech combat. Being vet gamers they know when to cut and run so we’ve only had a handful of pc deaths, one being an epic rearguard action in his Awesome, but now they are defiantly top tier mechwarriors and aerospace pilots, Hell the ground pounder and his tag unit are scary effective. skill bonuses of 7+ in their specific fields, this does make the mech jocks 0/1.
Do other long running campaigns reach these heights. We are about to dive headfirst in the jihad and see what happens.

[Arcanist Raven]

I'm playing in a campaign right now, granted its 2nd Edition. It's been a long game session, currently My Mechwarrior is -1/-2 with NA Pilot and Gun Mech. The game master has no problem with this, I asked if I could have skills go into the Negatives and He was fine with it. We get together 1-2 times a month, and sometimes he hands out AP like candy. When I run games, I like it when the players have a high pilot and gunnery skill. However, if you tend to run a long campaign, Your players will more than likely have some pretty good skills with good levels. All you have to do is up the difficulty of the sessions, or just start a new campaign.

I used to have a GM, that would run snuff campaigns once a year. You knew going in that your character was going to die, but that was the fun of it. It was a great way to end a long campaign, everyone always enjoyed it. If you didn't want your character to die, you didn't show up for that session.

[victor_shaw]

It depends on a few things.
First, the length of the campaign. Second, the stinginess of the GM. Third, the version of the game being played.

Longer games will tend to have way better skilled players no matter how little XP the GM gives out. Longest one I was in lasted 3 years. (Most of Highschool)
The GM really sets the pace of advancement, so I've been in games where little advancement was made by the end and others that we were elites by the end of breakfast.
A major factor is the edition itself. Where MW2 (what I normally play) is a lot more swingy based on the GM, 3rd advancement was like pulling teeth. Didn't help that 3rd character creation tended to create Very Green PCs if they could even walk after character creation that had to be pampered by the GM early on to survive long enough to advance. Add to this the annoying fact that there were combat skills that were broken into 2 to 3 sperate skills.

My favorite campaign, being the one where my forum name comes from (MW2). We were Mercs and by the time it was over we rivaled Wolf's Dragoons and owned our own Planet. Average skill TN was between 0-2 for most skills. Our chief contract negotiator had a skill TN of 0. So as you can imagine we got some really good terms.

[pat_hdx]

In my current MekHQ campaign the Elite mechwarriors (4 out of 25ish Mechwarriors) are Piloting 3 Gunnery 2, and are between 38 and 46 yrs old.

[Col Toda]

I use the point buy system otherwise I end up with affiliation Protocol levels at absurdly high at creation.  Still I shoot for 2/3 at creaton Protocoal and language minimum equal rank or Tital which ever is higher .The a good perception and English score 2+ . I put enough XP in Dex so when I get to the next Age bracket  I  do not lose anything.  Start at age 30 with 5900-6900XP at creation depending on random roll in ATOW Companion. Look at life paths for what skills the character should have do not waste XP for more than protocol 3 unless making a faceman . Due to Age penalties having a character still fighting at 61 is rare . You want fast learner and Tough to offest the Slow learner and Glass Jaw character traits everyone gets at 61

[Col Toda]

How high do they get is less important than how high they stay . In long campaigns due to massive amounts of time in transit a 6 month contract is mostly tied to a 4 or more month round  trip jump transit add 2 month leave or down time a company can rarely do one 6 month and 1 3 month contract a year. So 10-15 contract is 10 years and in ATOW age starts to erode effective skill level unless much or most of the character's effort is to just maintain a skill level as opposed to improve one .

[Daryk]

"Long running" campaigns should reach those heights, really.  At least if the focus of the campaign is on combat.  If it isn't, combat skills might plateau at a lower level.

[guardiandashi]

one thing I would tend to do to help mitigate ageing losses, especially in "transit" is to allow and or encourage "training" and grant at least a little xp/month spent training.
to reference mw 2nd edition you would only pick up SP no AP for regular training, on the other hand if there is an encounter in transit that could be an adventure that get regular amounts of XP (or second edition ap/sp)

[Tslammer]

We played ATOW since it was released until the Covid stop. The longest played characters were certainly getting to be elite.
But our system for that seemed to be working well.

Right now were restarting as 3026 Snords. Everyone gets 5500 to start because we use attributes. Then each player gets an adjustment roll which is 200-500 points they spend on specific things like custom mech or attributes, traits or skills.

In our system DEX/INT and sensor operations are core to each MW. We also use individual INIT so RFX is also key. Our system is an off shoot of the old MW3 Solaris rules.

Each player can have up to two MW and one out of mech specialist. Right now since were restarting were one MW per player and one out of mech.

As far as aging the longest campaign was from 3055 -3074. By the time the oldest got there they had (or should have) enough XP to buy off the negatives.