[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Andreas

....No I did not say that. I said that you don't need skills to not do stupid things (unless you have an applicable disadvantage). You might very well have to roll for a lot of things while staying hidden.

The things you are calling 'stupid' are generally unavoidable for people without extensive preparations, training or experience and connections. Which in GURPS implies skills that you roll against. For the vast majority of the people reading this, if you don't use electronic banking or credit cards, you couldn't afford to go on the run, disappear or even lay low. Most people I know either have no cash at all on them, or they only have a minimal amount that would not buy more than one trip by taxi or one meal. Having enough cash on you at all times to pay for a train ticket away from where you live and then a place to stay when you get somewhere else, that's really unusual.

And basically no one has enough cash on them at all times to be able to live on while hiding for a long time. In fact, most people don't have that much money, never mind cash. The only way many regular people have of surviving the next month without working or using their own home to live in is by going to the people they know best and asking for their help. Avoiding everyone you know sounds like it would help you disappear, but unless you are a drug dealer or recently robbed a bank, it's just not practical.

Actual, professional people who are either trained or self-taught at disappearing and living as fugitives need extensive preparations to obtain enough cash and they generally also try to obtain either false papers or a passport which isn't theirs. Even regular people who have been forced to become refugees and then try to avoid deportation to an undesirable country under the Dublin Regulation by disappearing will nearly always be using a stolen passport (obtaining which calls for a roll against Streetwise, at default or not) if they aren't using their own.

I spent one summer working as a contract employee for the Directorate of Immigration, specifically investigating the claims of people who claimed to be fleeing for their lives, either from their own government, organized crime or terrorists. Since then, I've been a defence attorney for five years. My clients, obviously, sometimes find it desirable that police do not find them, they skip court dates and a certain proportion of them are immigrants without official authority to settle, work or live here. Both for the Directorate and as a defence attorney, I either had to find people on my own account and/or receive all the paperwork regarding the police's attempts to locate them.

I can honestly say that I have never found evidence of someone trying to avoid notice that I would characterize as having had an easy enough time of it not to require any kind of skill roll. In every case, the case history indicates the use of Area Knowledge, Contacts, Streetwise and a host of other skills, mostly social, but almost universally Streetwise and/or Filch to obtain some form of papers that aren't theirs for anyone trying to stay hidden for more than the length of time they could get to stay on a friend's couch.

Originally Posted by Andreas

If you are unfortunate enough to be in such a country, that does make it harder. You could try to convince someone else to buy it for you, or get a compatible foregin phone.

About half of the world, in terms of numbers of countries, requires registration of pre-paid phones to a specific identity. Even if specific countries don't have such legislation, individual service providers often do, if only because personal information about their customers is valuable to them.

It's not trivial merely to discover whether whereever you choose to flee has such legislation, especially if you are trying to do so without using your own phone or computer. And as for finding a source of unregistered burner phones in areas where the majority of providers require registration, even if it's not a legal requirement, well, that's Area Knowledge, Merchant, Research or Streetwise.

Most things that aren't completely automatic are skill rolls in GURPS. If they are really easy, there is a high positive Task Difficulty Modifier, enough to make default use enough to succeed often enough. Disappearing and staying undetected in the modern world is not one of those really easy things. If anyone is looking, it's actually fairly hard and it requires resources, connections and, yes, skills.