AFMBE Skill Question

The fact that I cannot find this a common issue with an easy answer anywhere else makes me feel I may be overlooking something simple, but I cannot (for the life of me) discover what it is. The question concerns maintenance skills versus engineering skills (IE: Mechanics vs Engineering: Mechanics)

UNDERSTOOD: Even a master mechanic may not have the knowledge or skills to design and build his own machines (but can fix anything that comes his way and may even improvise some rudimentary designs). The intended use of this skill is fixing vehicles and such, I'm sure.

ALSO UNDERSTOOD: A mechanical engineer has the structural and material knowledge to design and build machines (and also use such knowledge to dissect or destroy them). And just as above, I can surmise that the intended use of this skill was ensuring a barricade would hold (or how to demolish other such barricades).

THINGS ENTER A GRAY AREA: An engineer is at such a level of knowledge that he should be able to perform maintenance. It is difficult to deny a player (especially one who has an engineering degree in real life) the ability to perform maintenance tasks.

IF AN ENGINEER CANNOT PERFORM MAINTENANCE: How, then, can I rationalize to a player that his elite knowledge of a skill does not include lower level knowledge of said skill.

IF AN ENGINEER CAN PERFORM MAINTENANCE: What use are the normal maintenance skills such as Electronics, Mechanics, and Civil. Players may as well OP on Engineering skills.

Assistance?


In rereading this i found a simple grammatical error. Correction is in bold.

Engineering includes the knowledge of how to design it, but not the manual skills of actually doing it or potentially interpreting someone's else's design from performance cues as opposed to design docs or full teardown.

For example, I know how to repair plumbing, but the one and only time I tried my hand, the plumber made more money undoing what I did than on the repair itself.

If you think the level of requisite manual experience is low enough, give the engineer a roll at -2 or more to reflect a skill carryover. I'd suggest -2 on his own design and -4 on someone else's to reflect assumption differences ("What idiot put the nuts there? That risks vibration loosening!").

Your response makes perfect sense and clarifies EXACTLY what I was feeling but could not explain. Not sure my players will swallow it, though - but they'll have to.

In MY experience, I found that maintenance often finds the flaws in what they are repairing. We often ask, "what the hell were they thinking when they designed this?" We are the ones that tell them what is wrong with their design. However, I also felt that someone with the skills to design (for example) a circuit card, should be able to repair what is wrong with their design since they have full knowledge of how it functions as well as what symptoms would occur with certain faults. Don't you agree?

Excuse my ignorance, but what is AFMBE? What game system is this for?

AFMBE is All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It is a VERY streamlined and phenomenal system for Zombie Apocalypse games in any era.