Back to the proliferation of Training packages and what they are used for.
The most annoying thing about training packages is that they often don't tie in with new supplements when they are released, and then you have to manually work them out yourself.
Case in point. Construct Companion. No costs at all....
You can find them at: http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item182
Training Packages started as a RMSS means of adding more roundedness to characters, inspired by Arms Companion and probably Warhammer careers progression. Once the crucial breakthrough was made of attaching new spell lists to TPs, it became clear that many RM2 professions could be boiled down to a single new spell list and be reincarnated as a TP. It was also clear to the Old ICE that TPs quickly became the "professions" of RMSS/FRP in terms of the rules crunch that made people buy the new books (RM2 Companions were bought because of the new professions in them, TPs filled the same role given that profession proliferation was being stamped on.)
The disaster of the TPs was that the old ICE kept the secret formula for costing them to themselves and one Editor would arbitrarily change it, so this became an editing nightmare as the number of professions steadily increased and the TPs exploded in number.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
You could only replace an RM2 profession with a TP and some spell lists where it had the same skill costs as an existing profession, though, at least if you keep (as I do) the idea of professions as aptitude templates sancrosanct, because TPs are a choice that can be made every time you have DPs and although the total cost of the TP is fixed for your aptitude template, if you have them as an
alternative to a profusion of professions then the underlying variety in character aptitudes no longer exists. For me, that's a big deal (and that's why, for me, TPs aren't an alternative to professions). Furthermore, although superficially it looks like you can just stick some new spell lists plus the availability of a TP, that does commit to buying the basket of skills in the TP wheras an aptitude template/profession is about how much they'd cost you
if you wanted them; the TP is about synergies when you develop skills at the same time and the profession about your ability to learn them at any time.
Some spell-using professions, of course, are really just differentiated by spells lists and a few skill costs, in which case, sure, they can be "As X apart from these skills and these spell lists" as shorthand.
I guess that my point is that you may have the right of the ICE reasoning (or at least the reasoning on the part of a significant fraction or majority of the ICE people of the time) but I think that, in addition to the other problems that people have with TPs, that underlying reasoning is, itself, mistaken. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that I am representative -- while many other people, like me, didn't move to RMSS/FRP, there are presumably many reasons for that -- but the idea that professions reflect aptitudes (and the consequent fact that there ought to be many, many of them) has always been a key attraction of RM for me.
For myself, the existence of additional professions wasn't the
primary motivation to buy RM Companions, although it was a good part of the motivation. After all, one doesn't create new characters that often, compared to how often one might use some of the rules options, for that to be the main attractiion. Some of them were good additions to the game (the pre-existing core MM rules on running, for example, really
didn't make sense and the optional replacement was much better; the new language rules from one of the companions were also welcome, plus a whole host of other examples and also other examples that were interesting to read but which I never planned to use).
