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Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti
In GURPS, it's simply not reasonable to spend more than one point on nonessential skills. You should put the minimum investment in each of your backup and emergency skills, and spend the savings on attributes. This has been the case for twenty years, though the exact numbers have changed.
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That's because most GMs entirely forget about task modifiers, positive or negative. So default-level skills are useless. The GM makes a PC do a Driving roll the moment they start up a vehicle, and gives them no bonus for being under no pressure, taking time and having a nice straight road to follow, and so on.
When GMs forget about task modifiers - as most do, just as they forget about Reaction Rolls - then default skills are useless, so PCs need to spend points in skills if they don't want to be entirely useless. This leads to long skill lists.
Long skill lists mean it's more cost-effective to raise attributes than raise skills; if I have 20 DX-based skills with 1CP in them, or 10 with 2CP, or 5 with 4CP, then it's better to raise DX than raise those skills. I learned this well in a recent game where I had a character who had Observation, Tracking, Survival and Scrounging - once they all had at least 2CP in them, it was better to improve Perception than improve any one of those skills. And even if I only really wanted to improve one of them, once they had 4CP in them, well it was only 1 more CP to get all four improved - and default-level Detect Lies, etc, went up along with them.
That applied for my character with his short skill list (less than 20, short by GURPS standards), because so many of the skills were based on one attribute (Per). It applies more strongly still for the typical GURPS character with 30+ skills, usually based mostly on DX or IQ (most characters will tend to focus in one area).
In theory you'd not want to raise just the one attribute because the skills would sometimes go with other attributes, but in practice most GMs never do this, "do an IQ-based Broadsword roll", etc.
If GMs were to remember to use task modifiers properly, then skill lists would become shorter, and players would tend to spend CP on a few skills, rather than a token 1 or 2CP in the skill, and then 20CP in attributes. Players will create specialists when the GM does not force them to become generalists by forgetting task modifiers.