Banestorm Victims And High TL Skills

[scc]

Title is a little off, but easily sums up my question. As a GM if you had one or more characters banished from a higher TL world to a lower one, presumably never to return, how would you treat skills from the higher TL world. As an example lets use the example of someone moved via Banestorm from modern day Earth to Yrth and the Driving/TL8 skill.

Is taking the skill prohibited? If allowed what does it mean? Or is it required?

If the player takes the skill does that mean the party will eventually acquire a car the player can use skill on? Permanently or temporarily? Or is it simply a wasted point or points?

And what if the character doesn't take it and the party gets their hands on a vehicle? On you penalize the player for not spending points on something he had no reason to expect to ever need? If it's temporary do you simply let him drive it as if he had a single point? Or do you require him to go into point debt to buy a point?

[Michael Cule]

The ability to use a thing does not imply the presence of the thing to be used.

A person who takes high tech knowledge to a world without high tech is not only not going to be able to use many of his high tech skills but will be ignorant of most of the low tech skills needed to survive there.

I know exactly one person who can use a scythe (Hi there Roger!) and exactly nobody who knows how to plow.

A person Banestormed to Yrth has all these problems plus the Ministry of Serendipity (and its outland equivalents) chasing them so that they can either be executed or brainwashed into forgetting all the disturbing stuff they know.

The average person Banestormed to a low tech world is in deep doo-doo. Not a lot of call for supermarket cashiers or management consultants. Yeah, the skills they brought there might well be wasted points. But someone with sufficient scientific or academic knowledge might, I say might, be able to turn the whole world on its head. Which is where any adventurers come in.

[whswhs]

I dealt with moving characters from world A to world B, where things are different, in my last book, GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms. It doesn't look, though, as if I specifically addressed this point. But the general pattern I would recommend is that you take anything they had in the original world that truly has NO application in the new world as a zero point feature. Of course as GM you can reject anything that would be implausible ("No, you can't have Computer Programming-25 as a feature!"), but you only require spending points on things that they will get some use out of in their new home.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I know exactly one person who can use a scythe (Hi there Roger!) and exactly nobody who knows how to plow.

I know how to use a scythe, though I'm way out of practice. I'd have trouble with the older scythes with the straight shafts, though.

[AlexanderHowl]

A character with High TL skills should have the High TL advantage because it is valuable. For example, knowing Physician/TL8 and Surgery/TL8 is still better than knowing First Aid/TL3 and Surgery/TL3, even if you lack the appropriate equipment, because you know the best way to do surgery. Even if the skills seems completely worthless, I am sure that the player will figure out some way to exploit it in a campaign.

A character with High TL can also attempt to produce High TL equipment whatever the campaign TL, as they already know that it exists and how to produce it. They would take a penalty for using Low TL equipment to build their High TL equipment, but they would be able to do it because they are not inventing anything new to them.

For example, a TL8 character with Pharmacy/TL8 (Synthetic) should be able to make TL8 antibiotics, even in a TL3 setting. They will suffer a -9 to their skill roll because they are using TL3 equipment, but a character with a skill 25 would be able to do it with an effective skill 16. Of course, a less skilled character will be more likely to produce poison instead of medicine, but they can still try to produce a medicine five TLs more advanced than the setting.

Or, to take another example, a character with Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) could attempt to make TL8 firearms and ammunition even in a TL3 setting. They would take a -9 to their skill, but it would still be worthwhile to them because the resulting weapons would be priceless.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

For example, a TL8 character with Pharmacy/TL8 (Synthetic) should be able to make TL8 antibiotics, even in a TL3 setting. They will suffer a -9 to their skill roll because they are using TL3 equipment, but a character with a skill 25 would be able to do it with an effective skill 16. Of course, a less skilled character will be more likely to produce poison instead of medicine, but they can still try to produce a medicine five TLs more advanced than the setting.

Or, to take another example, a character with Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) could attempt to make TL8 firearms and ammunition even in a TL3 setting. They would take a -9 to their skill, but it would still be worthwhile to them because the resulting weapons would be priceless.

And I say "sure, you can do that. Now, where are you getting your feedstock? And your precision lathe? And your rifling machine?" or, for the pharmacist, the ultra-high speed centrifuge, etc.

You don't get to make that sort of thing at TL3 without also making a bunch of precursor equipment and feedstock first.

[Stormcrow]

Once again, it's important to remember that GURPS is a game designed to be gameable, not a simulator. If the character will really, truly never have an opportunity to use Driving, then it's worth no points. Don't even bother to write it on the character sheet. The skill effectively does not exist.

But what happens, you may ask, if the character ends up being transported somewhere where they can drive a car? Well then your original premise, that Driving will never be used, was wrong. To correct your mistake fairly, you should probably just let the characters have a bonus pool of character points to spend on skills that represent their TL8 training.

Because, since GURPS is not a simulation, there is no "conservation of character points" or anything like that that would prevent the GM just allowing characters to suddenly have "new" skills that just weren't known about before.

[dcarson]

I warn players that something is going to happen and they might want to save a few points for after the first session. I try to find ways for things to carry over. If you have a high gun skill you get transported on the way from a competition so you have your guns and a newly bought box of hundreds of rounds. Lots of skills yeah they don't carry over well. I then tend to count them as unspent points and let them have a chance to learn a useful skill quickly.

[ericthered]

As a GM, when I run into this situation (and I've done so two or three times), my response is usually to give the player a pool of points to spend on "useless" skills. I let the player pick what skills are useless, but I review the list carefully.

Usually, the skills don't provide any advantage, but they do provide background color, and inform a lot about the character. Occasionally, they get used, and its always a fun moment that no one minds because it feels simultaneously unlikely (and thus awesome) and organic.

This technique is not limited to going down TL's. Its also relevant to being abducted by aliens and going up TL's, and I have been known to use it for generally adventuring.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ericthered

give the player a pool of points to spend on "useless" skills

This implies that the player knows the destination setting in enough detail know which skills will be useless. How much of a surprise is enjoyable or tolerable is an often-debated point. But if the Banestorm was supposed to be a surprise to modern characters, then the players don't know that Driving will be useless. If the players do know, then all the characters will somehow coincidentally be low-tech reenactors and off-the-grid hobbyists.

The GM has to decide what sort of story he's telling. If it's high-tech "magic" in a fantasy world, then the characters will need to have their toys brought along somehow (though you might have things like ammo limits to concern them). If it's more "fish out of water", then the fact that they've lost the use of most of their skills is a large part of the point home. But they're also far less effective characters, so the point budget has to be planned accordingly. You might build 250-point characters expecting them to wind up being effectively 100 points after all the TL skills turn into zero-point features. But different players will make different choices, so the characters may not be equal in ability after that winnowing is done.

GM review of the characters is probably going to have to nudge characters aware from pure techie types (no wheelchair-bound network hackers headed for Yrth). You'll probably have to at least drop hints that you might want to unarmed combat and survival sorts of skills, which will tend to make people start thinking about lower-tech solutions to problems (and also hint at the nature of the campaign, if that were supposed to be secret).