Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
The thing that most bothers me about Hidden Lore is the unifying feature isn't anything about the material covered, but the entirely peripheral fact that it happens to be hidden.
What skill do I take to know this stuff in a world where they teach courses in this at the local community college? If you can answer that question, why wouldn't you use the same skill in the world where it's hidden? If you can't, that's seems like a pretty big hole in the skill system. Surely if this stuff is worth spending points on where it is secret, it can't *all* be rendered not worth knowing just because somebody prints a textbook.
|
GURPS lacks an open-ended "Knowledge" skill. But having those in RPGs is a non-trivial design decision. D&D 3rd Edition had an open-ended Knowledge skill, but in the Revised Edition they changed it to closed-ended, that is with a finite list of topics that a character could know a about. My homebrew RPG doesn't currently have an open-ended Knowledge skill. I might add one, but I'm not sure.
In GURPS, Hidden Lore seems to fulfil that role, as a limited version of an open-ended knowledge skill, although GURPS DF seems to mean to make it closed-ended, with a finite list of subjects as implied by the Templates in volume 1 and 4 (the Sages volume).
My beef with Hidden Lore, predictably, is that there's no mechanic for players to purchase the right during character creation to start with Hidden Lore. I think that it'd be better if Hidden Lore was renamed to Knowledge (I'd suggest Esoteric Knowledge but that could cause confusion with Esoteric Medicine), and then the worldbuilder designates the mandatory specializations that Knowledge can have, and he also decides which of the mandatory specializations are freely available and which costs an UB, and of these which UBs are 1 point, 2 point, 5 point, 10 point, 15 point or 25 point ones.
Thus, in a world in which Knowledge (Demons) or Hidden Lore (Demons) is taught in every cathedral school, there'd be no UB associated with it (there might be a
general 1 point UB for Cathedral School Educated but that UB Perk would give you access to a wide variety of scholarly skills, not just one), whereas in the pseudo-world implied by DF the privilege of being able to have extensive and factually accurate knowledge of Demons costs an UB of 1 or even 2 points, and in a world in which knowledge of Demons is
very rare, it would cost a 10 point UB, or 25 points in a world where Demons are very widely assumed to not exist.