Cost of HT.

[simply Nathan]

I think 10/level is a fair price for IQ once Per and Will are removed and turned into their own attributes. DX is okay at 20/level but would be better at 15/level. I think HT is priced fine the way it is, but I'm removing its influence on Basic Speed as silly and a conceptual mess.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

I think 10/level is a fair price for IQ once Per and Will are removed and turned into their own attributes.

It's still a bit overly broad, in that social skills are poorly correlated with academic skills in either fiction or reality, and linguistic vs mathematical, while more correlated, are still not strongly correlated. That leaves out fields such as art, which also aren't very correlated but usually doesn't matter that much to games so making them into stats seems off.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's still a bit overly broad, in that social skills are poorly correlated with academic skills in either fiction or reality, and linguistic vs mathematical, while more correlated, are still not strongly correlated. That leaves out fields such as art, which also aren't very correlated but usually doesn't matter that much to games so making them into stats seems off.

Most things aren't really correlated in reality. Making a game that way would be unplayable.
There isn't any such thing as generalized intelligence. There are easily over a dozen types, or basic modules, of problem solving abilities.

I could argue that every skill could be its own type since real world talents don't have to cover more than a single skill or even tinier focus.

[McAllister]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It is not the job of the name of abilities to facilitate character concepts.

+1

I think 10/level is a fair price for IQ once Per and Will are removed and turned into their own attributes. DX is okay at 20/level but would be better at 15/level. I think HT is priced fine the way it is, but I'm removing its influence on Basic Speed as silly and a conceptual mess.

By my count, IQ is the basis for 144 skills in Basic Set. I searched for "IQ/" and got 158 results, of which the first 6 and last 5 weren't in the Skill List, and 3 were in Dai's character sheet. So, yeah, I'm willing to price it at 20/level independent of Per and Will.

EDIT: DX appears to have 93 skills, Per 12, Will 13, and HT 13. On that basis, I'm willing to concur with Kenneth about splitting Basic Speed off of HT and DX, except that I'd keep DX at 20 and HT at 10, except in games using The Last Gasp, which bumps HT up to 15. Also, if we're splitting off Basic Speed, might as well rename it Speed. It can sit over in the corner with Strength and commiserate about not having any skills.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's still a bit overly broad, in that social skills are poorly correlated with academic skills in either fiction or reality,

They are however strongly correlated with having lots of willpower.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

They are however strongly correlated with having lots of willpower.

Pretty much everything is correlated with 'willpower', to an extent that I'm inclined to remove the attribute entirely and declare it a feature of being a PC.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by McAllister

+1



By my count, IQ is the basis for 144 skills in Basic Set.
.

Yes but I've never seen a character who would benefit by having all of them. There is a point beyond which having more Skills on your character sheet is more useless clutter. You're just putting Skills there that you wa=on't be able to remember that your character has and that aren't very likely at all to ever come up in that character's career.

So the actual value of all those IQ-based Skills is much less than any theoretical value based on sheer number of Skills.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There is a point beyond which having more Skills on your character sheet is more useless clutter.

You seem to think a lot of things are useless clutter. Talents, Skills... you could probably simplify GURPS considerably if you eliminated IQ, DX, and individual skills altogether and picked, say, a dozen or so Wildcard-like traits covering appropriate niches that players could choose from. It would play a bit like Risus: "I've got three levels of Sweaty Barbarian and one in Annoying Sage." It would certainly make the character sheet simpler, at the expense of more GM arbitration ("Are Sneaky Buttstabbers good at haggling? What if it's for daggers and black leather?")

(I'm being a little supercilious here, but I would seriously consider this approach for a super-stripped-down GURPS aimed at crunch-averse, drunk, or new-to-RPG players. They can get the hang of task resolution and roleplaying now, and tackle detailed chargen later, if ever.)

But really, all IQ skills that don't significantly overlap add value, up to the limit of what the campaign can realize. Most games won't be able to adequately reward or utilize someone who is a doctor, lawyer, merchant, historian, architect, violinist, computer programmer, Army general, sculptor, herbalist, counselor, diplomat, actor, sailor, dog trainer, all-terrain survivalist, theologian, chemist, and radio engineer.

If you really want to take this approach and say that no one will ever need, say, more than 25 IQ skills for a whole campaign, then you could lower the cost of IQ accordingly. I figure 10 points for +1 to 25 skills, plus the cost of any secondary effects, which makes the RAW cost for IQ about right (and DX a little overpriced). But, again, keeping the cost of DX and IQ low encourages people to buy DX and IQ instead of skills. That is of course unless you trim the list of useful skills so much that any particular niche only needs a few skills to be effective, at which point it's a better strategy to only buy those few skills and pump them up to "can't lose" levels. Just don't split the party...

(Thinking more on this, my formula for Talent pricing assumes players hedge and then look for ways to leverage broad competence, and some skills are rarely useful or function mainly as flavor. If you're really cutting the skill list down to a small number of essential skills that will certainly be used often, then the skills themselves are each much more valuable, which means they should cost more - perhaps even twice as much! - and this also affects what +1 to a bunch of those skills should cost, which alters my Talent formula and means the correct price for IQ and DX creeps upward again...)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There is a point beyond which having more Skills on your character sheet is more useless clutter.

There is also a point where putting more Skills in your game system is useless clutter. Most game systems do fine with somewhere in the range of 20-50.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There is also a point where putting more Skills in your game system is useless clutter. Most game systems do fine with somewhere in the range of 20-50.

For my own purposes, I've shortened the list down to <10 combat skills because that's where players generally want very fine character differentiation and =/=20 noncombat skills because that's all of them I find necessary for low-tech fantasy adventures. I plan on chopping up the spells from Magic into a similarly abbreviated list.