Initial Cost and Running Cost of Skills in Life

So I've been keeping a notebook of my TRPG mental ramblings. One of the Key thing I've gotten into is Decision Analysis for stuff. I realize that the same Decision Analysis for a Car or a House has some parallels to Skills.

Example.
Becoming Literate in Chinese has an Initial Cost. This can come in the form of the Classes as well as the manhours invested.
Buying a Car has its Initial Cost, both in Manhours and Investment.
Getting into Linux has an Initial Manhour Cost.

Then there is a Running Cost.
For a car this can be the Gass, Maintenance, cleaning, parking, etc....
For Chinese its Usage of the skill, See forgetting Curve,

These two costs are a key to understanding Skills, Opportunity Costs in life, and creating a model in understanding what We Put Into pursuits and what can we expect to get from them.

How do I spend my Time is a question I always ask about myself. Its my reflection about what I should expect from myself. If I put my time in Family, Distractions, Skills, Work, relationships, etc... then I can only expect this is what will grow and what will evolve.

In the same way Character Creation and Development follows this basic principle. That What we spend time in is what makes us who we are. That our choices shape us - even our flawed choices (choices out of weaknesses ) shape us. 

Combined with the Scale of Manhours,
Tens, hundreds, and Thousands.

Plus the model Consistency
Reliably (of course exceptions do exist),
Unreliably,
and Rarely to Never

Then add a mechanic for Conscientious Learning - that the Person Identifies with a Skill or a set of skills. That when it comes to this skill - he has some Flow .

And then a mechanic of Building Complexity:
Defining what 10s, 100s, and 1000s manhours means to the Character of a particular pursuit or practice.

Skills, the Pursuit of Knowledge and the acceptance of Forgetting (and Atrophy) of some skills is one of the most troubling and challenging aspects of the Real world that games simplify to make it fun - but when explored is quite satisfying.

I have the components of a Skill System that can be used for a Game but used to Ask some hard personal questions to the Younger me about what I want out of my life. Its easy to Answer for a Character but hard to Answer if it was really being asked of me. But in a TRPG I can explore characters and world views.

I cannot have all the Skills, I will have to choose between some skills in many points in my life, and will have to work with the ignorance of the skill I did not pursue (the inability to make an informed decision). That the world is changing - and that as awesome as a skill may be in a TRPG he real world will create so much noise, uncertainty, and screwed up incentives to devalue hard won knowledge and painful decisions. 

That the world does not care how much you paid for a skill - that it makes you need them but won't pay a fair price for them without a lie or a story. Speaking as a person from the Developing world where you can look out our Education index as see how unfair and inaccessible knowledge is to the rest of our country.

I see it when I have to plan in the scale of years and months the smallest detail of ability for personnel in our company.  That there is so much grift and noise - and skills (and people) are devalued in the machine of the world.

Ideas/musings: Applying Life Lessons in TRPG Design. 10 years of blogging Game in the Brain.

My Work Fuels my TRPG musings, TRPG musings inspire my work.

I know break things down to 5-10mh (manhours), then ordeals of 20mh. Its based on the load I have to juggle at work and how difficult it is to have time to Write and Concentrate until there is greater level of mastery (in the form of Predictability and Systems set up to use this predictions).

A TRPG booklet where I apply a lot of the Gamer Systems Thinking lessons and skills.

An A5 or Statements sized booklet that makes it easy to carry around. Optional and Expansive rules are easily added on physically. Example expansive Character creation tools - allowing for other regions, ethnicity, backgrounds, etc... modularly designed. Designed with a particularly LOAD out in running games or with Phones in mind.

Handbooks is something that work has migrated towards. Particularly Pocket sized handbooks where I work. When I need to transmit a body of knowledge - like Material Handling (Inspection of Delivered Goods, Their Custody, Care, and Reporting on their COnditions, security, and Quality), to Basic Project Management, and other Skills that people do not have the Luxury to Study but I have since I'm the (child of the Owner and a Gaming nerd that is skill obsessed). Its strange Listening (using an App to read to me the text and my brain learning to recognize context despite the robotic nature of the reading) to all these books and textbooks and picking up applications and uses of some of  the skills and learning What skill covers what.

Small Pocket sized Handbooks is a remnant of a lower Technology Level that is natural for an Emerging Market of the Philippines - that is needed even when Phones can contain all that data. It is that mixed nature of Technology and the World where we have Analog and Digital despite creeping closer to 2020.

Revolving around this is the Analogue skills of Note taking and writing. The ability to write with the barest and most basic of tools. This is an inportant skills because Writing is still one of the best techniques, a thousand manhour pursuite, that allow us to train our thinking. Blogging and Writing constantly is a Valuable skill - since you have learned to express yourself in a way Everyone (especially yourself) can Pick Apart the Thesis to Learn from its Flaws. A BAD IDEA stays a bad idea until it can be viewed objectively in context with a Ton of Other Data.

I want the Character sheets are not sheets but Notebooks and a note how to plan, layout, or arrange the Stats and the character's goals, experiences and progress. Its basically the kind of note taking you would eventually have if you were religious in note taking and approached everything with a PDSA/PDCA. A skill for your character but also for yourself - how you take stock of your status in life and how you plan for the pursuits and challenges that lie ahead.

I have a sprained wrist right now. This is kinda painful to type.

So yeah I'm in a many year hiatus because I have to fix the family business - as I'm in a strange position of Using a ton of skills I learned because of gaming and applying that Gamer Approach to life. I learned to do Costing, Bill of Materials, Bill of Scope/Scope of Work, Analysis, Tables-Data Arrays, etc... from Gaming in TRPGs. Its weird how "Fun" it is to enjoy a textbook when one grows up with TRPG books.

I'm in a weird position coming from a nouveau rich family - in the emerging market of the Philippines - and to see the wild untamed worlds of Philippines and my neighboring regions  as well as Studying Chinese and China. Because of the 0.61 education index - that incredible skill gap and unstable conditions of an Emerging Market - its a strange time to be alive and to look at the world. We are a generation different from the Technology Literate world and we are playing catch up - and so much resources are concentrating around various people who can either abuse it or enrich those around them.

been blogging since 2003, and this blog is practically 10 years old since I started this branch of my life at 2008. You can see pretty much the evolution of studying arcane gaming stuff evolve and escalate to practical skills.