[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Gollum

To my mind, Improvement through study and Improvement through adventure are closely linked. A skill (or any other given ability) improves with both. The first is slow and always at the same rate. The second represents sudden boost thanks to experience and sudden understanding of something important. Both together are quite realistic. One without the other is not as much.

And Improvement through adventure discriminate a bit what is improving: it has to be something which is used during the adventure. Which makes a huge difference with D&D like improvement, for instance, where a character suddenly get a new ability without having learned or tried to use it during his adventures.

It doesn't matter because it's still in the same paradigm that, controlling for how you study, a point in one thing takes the same time to gain as a point in another thing. Which is wrong because it's harder to increase very high skills than low ones. The point isn't that that's not realistic per se. It's that because it's not realistic you should not use the Improvement Through Study rules to conclude things about other areas of the rules.

Originally Posted by Gollum

Of course. In reality, learning depends on so many different factors than it is impossible to be realistic here. A rule of that kind can just be plausible and consistent. It cannot correspond to a real number of hours...

In reality, it is impossible to say ow many hours I will need to fully learn a given technique with a given weapon.

Just because being able to achieve perfection is dubious does not mean that rules couldn't be made that are more realistic.

Originally Posted by Gollum

It's still impossible to do something else in GURPS. Even if you say +1 to the skill, rather than +X character points, +1 to the skill do correspond to a given number of character points (most often 4).

It's extremely trivial to remove the insert-time-get-points part of GURPS. You just ignore the Improvement Through Study rules.

Originally Posted by Gollum

If a fifth edition is published, I'm enforced to buy the new Basic Set or I won't be anymore able to take benefit from the new fifth edition publications...

I would not describe that as being enforced to do anything. It's not true either. Just like many third edition books are quite usable with fourth edition there are many fourth edition books that are quite usable with third edition and I would expect this pattern to continue. It's not like there aren't any books in fourth edition that require other books in order to be usable without ever having to deal with any referenced rules you don't have access to either.

Originally Posted by Gollum

New stuff go on being published, yes. But it is slowed down. Because rewriting the old one inevitably takes time. And since Basic Set, and other major books are very dense, they take a lot of time to be rewritten.

Well yes, a new edition isn't free. Nothing in the GURPS line is free though. Every book takes resources that theoretically could go to another book and the GURPS fanbase is very broad in the sorts of books they would like. Any expenditure of resources will look bad from the point of view of people who are more interested in other things it could have been invested in.

Originally Posted by Gollum

Yes. I fully do agree. And I don't think that GURPS need a true rewrite. Just some corrections here or there.

Then we have very different philosophies about RPG systems because the only thing I'd recognize as something that doesn't need a true rewrite is some sort of magical platonic version of an RPG system that has nothing to do with actual books.

Originally Posted by Gollum

There aren't many, indeed. But when you read a third edition book and you see something interesting (yipee!), there is always another feeling that come at the same time (draft! I will have to convert it in the new rules). That don't make things easy.

How often do you see something mechanically interesting though? When I read third edition books it is for things like the historicals where the most important parts don't rely on mechanics. Off the top of my head there is Vehicles of course. Third edition Martial Arts still has some things that aren't entirely superseded (the fourth edition Focused Defense is better at what it covers but there is still room for an official treatment of "I adopt a stance obviously optimized to defend my [insert magically significant organ] and entirely ignore any other attacks because they can't kill me"). I wouldn't want to just convert third edition animals when there is Animalia to at the very least to check out. There are guns that haven't been updated to fourth edition but given the number of fourth edition guns they must be very few. Third edition magic items probably work nearly seamlessly. Settings have stuff that needs conversion but much of that has already been done. Hidden Mechanical Treasures of Third Edition is probably worth a thread of it's own though.