Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
A third way to do it is to have enough IQ and Talent that you don't need to put many points into each skill.
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Pretty necessary, yes. For the main game I had in mind (GURPS Traveller), I wound up with 39 skills* on the design/repair/use chart I made to show which ones of them were used together on what sorts of equipment. Even at 1 CP per skill, that's a pretty hefty investment, turning the engineer into a one-trick pony (at least at the usual 150-ish CP budget). Going heavy on the IQ runs the usual risk of turning the engineering into the all-IQ-skills character (Spock rather than Scotty!). An Engineer Talent winds up being not terribly different from an Engineer! wildcard. (Needing that kind of Talent also comes pretty close to turning the builds into a class-based system, so I'm a little leery of them being too focused and stacked too high.)
* I did wind up even adding one skill, for Power Plant Operation, just to complete the design/repair/use triad with Engineer (Power) / Electrician, Mechanic (Fusion) / ?. I couldn't find a skill in RAW for running a power plant. And a few of those 39 are "use" skills that are a little more generic, that most of the characters would have, or even other specialties where the "engineer" may not be particularly good at all (Spacer, Guns, Pilot). So that's not an exact count, but gives you an idea of the size of the job. It's much wider than most GURPS archetypes seem to call for.