Half Point

[warmachine]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Scientific skills change your mind (a scientific don’t think like an artist, for instance).

Despite being off topic, I have to agree with this. It has a biological basis: the left brain/right brain divide. The left brain is good at language, mathematics and analysis. The right brain is good at emotions, relationships and creativity. A lot of skills tend to emphasise one or the other. Few people are brilliant at both besides Leonardo Da Vinci. I regard the the GURPs IQ as a very broad brushstroke, though Talents means it matters less.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Low Will is (or includes) the general inability to resist pressures, a specific addiction is its own Disadvantage.

Exactly. See Will Rolls (p. B360). When you in particular have a specific disadvantage, you use its self-control number -- but when you have a chance to give in to disadvantage-like behavior that might affect anyone, you use your Will. The effects might be otherwise identical, but the rolls aren't. Someone with low Will and no specific mental disadvantages is still going to have that extra drink he shouldn't have, buy things he doesn't want, and volunteer for things out of guilt far more often than someone with no special problems and high Will. He doesn't have to be suffering from Alcoholism, Compulsive Spending, and Charitable. In the case of martial-arts lessons, since that's where it came up, Mr. Low Will can't say "no" to another chance to learn about butt-kicking, because it's fun and cathartic, and he doesn't know when "enough" training has become "too much." I've known more than one martial-arts instructor who was Mr. Low Will.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by NorthSaber

I don't think real life is as clean-cut as that though - going through high school has given me knowledge of over a dozen individual skills most people with no high school background don't have, and yet those people (assuming same IQ or Gurps IQ) have the same defaults on skills I wasn't taught in high school.

Actually, I would rule that those individuals don't belong to a society where those skills are known, as defined in Who Gets a Default? (p. B173). It is, after all, quite possible to be from a different society within the same population . . . and "uneducated people" is its own subculture, which is part of what Social Stigma (Uneducated) (p. B156) is trying to represent.

The GM must be aggressive about allowing only those defaults that make sense given a character's background. I certainly don't let cloistered monks default Carousing, Erotic Art, and Sex Appeal, and I wouldn't let a high-school dropout default Literature and Physics. I feel that those rulings demonstrate the spirit of the rules. Making "defaults to anything" an inalienable right of all PCs -- regardless of background -- is strongly against the spirit of the rules. Who Gets a Default? exists to make this clearer.

People arguing for half-points on the basis of a few hours of high school or swimming lessons are missing the above point, I think. Minor training like that is worth 0 points and simply an excuse to have a default. It's background color. Real training starts at 1 point. While 200 hours is probably too rigid a figure, "points in a skill" represents something on the order of 200 hours -- say, between 60 and 600 hours, if I interpret "order" geometrically.

[roguebfl]

I particauly liked that Idea you posted to GURPSnet.

Originally Posted by Kromm

As for me, if I had to model low-level competence, I'd just call things like "undergrad education" a perk that gives default+1 in a handful of common learned skills; "grew up on a farm" a perk that gives default+1 on common farm skills; and so on.

8)

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

I particauly liked that Idea you posted to GURPSnet.

Yeah, perk-level "Talents" that only give +1, and only to default use, aren't a bad thing if the GM wants to quantify PC backgrounds. I suppose that quirk-level "Group Incompetence" that denies defaults on similar-sized groups would be fair, too.

[Mark Skarr]

We were discussing the skill system from Hero and how it related to GURPS this weekend. Our Hero GM was actually surprised with defaults and how they worked. He even admited that he'd have to look at that and see how to transfer that into Hero.

On the other hand, one of the other gamers tried to argue that every skill should have a default, regardless of how difficult it is. Every argument he had we countered with "that's a perception roll." We explained that my room mate and I could default Armoury (Guns) to field-strip an M-16, but our Hero GM could not (he has no military experience). We also explained that most people drive at default.

I do miss the ½ point though. I think my gaming group is planning a wake for it.

[Luther]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Go with 1/4th points instead. 1 point on skills that default = default +4 for the most part, quarter points would allow you to hit every level between default and what you get for a point, and thus permit greater customization of the character.

If some players will ever need such a level of detail, I will do this. It's balanced and fair.

This makes a slight difference from the previous editions in that 1/2 points bought the equivalent of what 3/4ths of a point will buy here.

That's ok and intentional. Putting 1/2 point in easy skill for a Attr-1 was munchkinable in 3rd edition. The variation mentioned in the original post (#1) is less abusable but still believable.

[Christian]

I'd like to throw in a group of skills that is rather badly represented: languages.

My GURPS group is playing in the holy roman empire of the year 1300 (plus magic leaking in through some accidently opened gates).

Now lets look at the languages:

my char knows french, and latin, both perfect (including writing).

to be able to speak german (lets better say to interpret the many dialects) he had to invest 400 hours of learning or 200 with a teacher. The same is true to learn the german/gotic alphabets. And same would be true for italian, spanish and many other languages.

Now I as a player know severall european languages, including reading and writing them. I know that it needs MUCH less time to learn the basics of a language of the same group.

For example I (german) picked up swedish (to a fluent degree) in France during 2 weeks speaking english and swedish with Swedes. All together maybe 70 hours of work without a teacher (none of the girls ;) had teaching skills of 12+). Lets assume that the prettyness of my "teachers" can be counted versus the fact that I was learning in a third language.
Still 70 hours is much less then the 400 hours which would be needed to get to Broken level, and I reached an intermediare between Broken and Accented in this time.

Same goes for alphabets. I know at the moment only 3 different alphabets (latin, kyrillic, old greek), but I know that I didn't need 400 hours to pick up the basics of writing russian or greek.

Just as comparison, 200 hours at school is the equivalent of 2,5 years, learning 2 hours a week, 40 weeks a year.

Thus to reach "Broken status" in word and writing you'd need 5 years of such a teaching.

Afaik 2 years with a 2 lessons a week schedule should be enough to speak and write a language with basic skills (including a vocabulary of 1000 words).

Thus with an indo-european mother tongue you should be able to learn any indo-european language in maybe 80-100 hours (with teacher) to a broken level in word and writing. More distant languages (hungarian or asiatic languages) would need longer. So a learning base time of 100 hours per CP seems much more appropriate.

And intelligence should severly reduce the time required (though not the point cost), especially as languages aint get any other bonus from IQ anymore.

Maybe every point of IQ above 10 could reduce learning time by IQ%? Thus IQ 11 would reduce the learning time by 1*11% to 89 hours without a teacher, while IQ 15 would decrease the time by 5*15=75% to 25 hours? And cap at 25%?

Believe me, a person with an IQ of 140-150 CAN learn a language 4 times faster then a person with an (slightly more then) average IQ. I have a specific real life example for that (and none of both has a language talent or disadvantage).

[Luther]

Yeah, GURPS' language rules are a bit weak, but they do the work most of the times. If you want more details, or if languages are an important part of your campaign, I suggest you look at Hero System language rules and try to adapt them back to GURPS (there's a very neat language group table).

[elustran]

I might go so far as to say that the language rules from the hero system could be used directly, as written.

One of the things I ruled was to charge people less for writing with languages that use the same alphabet, and to cheapen the cost of learning a new alphabet or simple syllabary, while maintaining the higher cost for ideograms. I'm also using the language table in Hero to provide some cost reduction for related tongues.