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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8440499" data-attributes="member: 75787">I might suggest a modification of the way mad scientists are handled in the original Deadlands:Ask the player what their scholar is interested in and work with them to define an invention or discovery that they want to work towards. In a sci-fi game this might be "discover a way to allow n-space travel inside the gravity radius of a planet". In fantasy it might be "find the lost spell-book of the Lich Emperor of Kaldak". It's helpful if this goal is at least tangentially useful to the rest of the party.Then get the player to write a short description of what they think the theory behind this goal, or what might be needed to achieve it. For the fantasy example and an unimaginative player, it might be really short - "discover his resting place; read the book". My experience has been that players who want to play scholars are pretty engaged and give a lot of info, though!Next, you use that as a base and expand out to maybe 5 core steps needed to achieve the goal (the number of steps depend on your campaign arc length and how much emphasis you like on sub-plots). For the fantasy example it might be:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Find the remnants of the family of the only surviving person who built his tomb, and get a map from them</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Correlate the ancient map to the modern era</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Go to the location and find the tomb</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Remove the curse on the spell book so you can open it</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Translate the spell book</li> </ol>Then it's up to you if each of those goals is a simple skill check, a scene, or a whole session. Depending on your players you might use it as a way to force moral choices ("if you look the other way and let me murder the queen, I'll give you a talisman that can break any curse") -- whatever your game wants.One important thing is to let the scholar know how close they are. Simply saying "now that you have the location of the time you feel you are about 40% of the way to your goal" is good enough. But if they just keep getting new tasks it can feel dispiriting. Ideally, they should be super-excited when one step away and be badgering the other players to interrupt the team goals to get the research done!</blockquote>

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