Professional skill (Spy)

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by nerdvana

That's exactly my point. The two views seem contradictory and I want to resolve where the contradiction lies...

I think once in a while Kromm just gets the RAW and his house rules confused.

[pawsplay]

There is no contradiction. They are placeholder skills, for skills people want that are not already covered by existing skills. By definition, a hypothetical Profession (Spy) skill cannot replace functions of already existing skills and is primarily for non-adventuring purposes. Such a skill may or may not exist. It's definitely not something I would encourage someone to spend points on without a good explanation of what they were planning to do with it.

Placeholder skill does not mean "make up anything you like." It means, "Here be Skills," where said skills are things unlikely to be of great adventuring value or which are primarily informational rather than practical. GURPS 4e purged most purely informational skills from the main skill list (and with good reason) in order to maintain clarity. Characters with informational skills are going to be specialists, so the skills are left open such that you can define your informational or vocational skill appropriately rather than being straightjacketed into what someone else consideres a discipline.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

There is no contradiction. They are placeholder skills, for skills people want that are not already covered by existing skills. ...
Placeholder skill does not mean "make up anything you like." It means, "Here be Skills," ...

But on the other hand:

Originally Posted by Kromm

... there are three generic skills in 4e that serve as placeholders for future author creations: Hobby Skill, Professional Skill, and Expert Skill. These are nothing more nor less than "generic Easy skill," "generic Average skill," and "generic Hard skill" for future use.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Professor Phobos

"Tradecraft" might be a fun skill in and of itself.

I think so too. I don't know that I'd consider it a professional skill though. It's most closely related to the part of setting up a con game that isn't covered by Fast Talk, which also doesn't have an obvious GURPS skill to use for it, or something akin to stage magic (another missing skill?) with a really odd kind of Tactics mixed in.

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I think so too. I don't know that I'd consider it a professional skill though. It's most closely related to the part of setting up a con game that isn't covered by Fast Talk, which also doesn't have an obvious GURPS skill to use for it, or something akin to stage magic (another missing skill?) with a really odd kind of Tactics mixed in.

There are various ways to do this. I'm not sure which would be "canon."

While I'm a big fan of Professional skills, one issue is that you want to avoid making pay for skills that don't do anything for them. Actual tradecraft (i.e., doing the things spies do) seems like a combination of skills like Observation (to make sure you are not being followed), Filch (to let you pick up things without being noticed), etc. I don't think it's a skill just to know spies use techniques like dead drops, honey traps, etc. (Heck, even I know they do these things.) I think if you wanted to be sure that someone knew about them, and knew how to set up the operations, then I'd say the character should have Intelligence Analysis.

The same thing is true of confidence games. I'd say just knowing what confidence games are, etc. is part of Streetwise. Doing them is covered by skills like Acting, Fast-Talk, etc.

My recommendation for what we should do with con artists after we catch them is covered under Professional Skill (Tanner), but that's another issue entirely.

A lot of basic stage magic would be covered under Slight-of-Hand, but for designing major tricks, I would add "Stage Magic" as a specialty of Group Performance, with Slight-of-Hand as the prerequisite. So a high end stage magician like David Copperfield would have Performance, Slight-of-Hand, and Group Performance (Stage Magic) to cover designing and performing major illusions.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

Mark

[pawsplay]

Like I said upthread, I spy might have a skill in a particular kind of spying. For instance, Expert (Spy Recruitment) would tell you all about methods of recruiting people from the other side. But actually recruiting people would still be Psychology, Administration, Int Analysis, etc.

Something a good spy might have his History (Modern Espionage).