08-10-2014, 12:58 PM | #31 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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08-10-2014, 01:02 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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Bill Stoddard |
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08-11-2014, 02:12 AM | #33 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
Somewhat curiously (in retrospect), Bicycling is probably the most common of the three skills in our games, and Driving and Piloting are about equal. The former is mostly taken as a 'hobby' skill.
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08-11-2014, 02:24 AM | #34 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
On reflection, I've seen a difference in the way Driving and Piloting get bought. I've seen a number of high DX characters, who weren't transport specialists, put a point each into several specialisations of Driving. Pilots, by contrast, tend to buy one specialisation up to high levels and sometimes buy up defaults in other specialisations.
What this seems to mean is that I'm not seeing characters buy Piloting unless they're specialists in it. Which is probably a due to a combination of "fewer aircraft around than ground vehicles" and "failures on Piloting are really dangerous", but I wonder if this pattern repeats in other groups? |
08-11-2014, 02:57 AM | #35 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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(Sorry, couldn't resist.) And yeah, Win8 (maybe other versions, not sure) support the iFilter that allows searching through PDFs in Explorer as if they're txt files or the like. |
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08-11-2014, 04:33 AM | #36 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
Bicycling is slightly more generous than Driving, in that it allows you to make simple repairs rather than just diagnose the problem. I think that's really more an aspect of the vehicle than of the skill: many of the things that go wrong with a bicycle really can be fixed by the side of the road with a minimal toolkit, whereas this is rather less true of cars. I'd certainly be inclined to give the Driving benefits of map-reading and knowing rules of the road to a character with Bicycling.
John, you may wish to look up the Roper and Michaux-Perreaux Steam Velocipedes, both from the late 1860s. Kenneth, I know people who think that adult bicycling experience should be a prerequisite for a driving licence, because drivers who've bicycled as adults tend to be more considerate towards cyclists, but I don't know anyone who'd argue that one skill depends on the other. I'd certainly never cycled before I learned to drive. I'd be inclined to put changing a car tyre and similar simple repairs in under Driving, except that I know that there are people who drive every day who can't change a tyre; they call the breakdown service even when it'll take much longer. I've driven vans a few times (Ford Transits and similar), and while they're well under the 5-ton cutoff for Automobile I'd definitely say I was suffering a familiarity penalty more severe than when I've driven strange cars. (Perhaps one -2 for body shape, another for the vertical steering column?) I don't think I've known PCs use anything that would tip over into Heavy Wheeled. In the first adventure of my Madness Dossier campaign I noted that one of the PCs had Driving (Construction Equipment) and that in the real world there was a heavy equipment training and rental site (bulldozers, cranes, diggers, etc.) right next to the old manor house I'd selected as the bad guys' base. The players found out about it, but didn't choose to take advantage of it. I tend, going against the rules as written, to use multiple piloting skills for different aspects of the same vehicle, especially when it's spacecraft: High-Performance Spacecraft is about orbital and long-distance flight, while Aerospace is about those nasty sticky atmosphere things, and I think it's reasonable to have a pilot who's competent at one and not the other. (And when the ship's hovering on its fusion ram-rockets, that's Vertol.) I do this mostly because I find it an interesting way to distinguish characters. I ask for a lot of Vehicular Dodges, and I suspect I should apply Combat Reflexes. As Mailanka points out, anything that's focused on a single character should either go relatively quickly (but not too quickly, otherwise it's just "apply keyword to problem, continue with adventure"), or involve the other PCs. I aim for the latter. Looking through my character archives, practically everyone in a modern setting has a point in Driving, and some of the Bughunt PCs have Heavy Wheeled (for the APC) and Mecha (for the legged APC). Quite a few of the Reign of Steel PCs have Automobile, since they started working for the government in Zone London. In my Tempt Not the Stars campaign, three PCs had decent levels of general piloting, while one picked up some Aerospace for emergencies. In the WWII game, two of six have Light and Heavy Airplane (High-Performance hasn't quite happened yet), and one has Contragravity thanks to some dubious Nazi experiments (nobody can use the skill any more, thanks to actions of the PCs at Stalingrad, but he hasn't forgotten it). It was about the same in Crimson Skies, minus the contragravity. Everyone in the Transhuman Space Vacuum Cleaners game had a bit of piloting, because (like driving in most settings) it was an every-day sort of skill. In Bughunt, the aerospace pilot was also a sniper, which worked quite well to keep the character involved after landing (the big ship was handled by NPCs).
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08-11-2014, 08:37 AM | #37 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
I've noticed a strong correlation between player region of residence and method of transportation, and character skills in that direction. For instance, I've gamed entirely in cities, and much of that in a big city (if c. 3.8 million people qualifies) that has bicycle lanes, a bicycle sharing system, etc. I've had plenty of players with bicycles but not cars or driver's licenses, and who leave the city only in trains or planes. Such people see Bicycling as a basic "Of course everybody needs this!" skill but Driving as the skill for the group's wheel man or whatever. And generally, they expect Bicycling to allow a fair amount of stunting: bouncing up and over things, even off walls, because good urban cyclists do this stuff . . . I don't find it especially weird to see a few guys doing Parkour-like moves on bikes in my back alley.
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08-11-2014, 08:49 AM | #38 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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For example, there is a fairly good, fast light rail system, which I can use to get to San Diego State University—but it doesn't go to the University of California at San Diego, or within miles of it, and apparently there is active resistance to letting the trolley lines onto the campus, which would seem like an obvious amenity for students. The people who do stunts in the alley behind our building are skateboarders. Bill Stoddard |
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08-11-2014, 10:18 AM | #39 | |
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: South Dakota, USA
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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A second person should add a significant modifier to changing a tire, at least in my experience; its really a 2 person job you can manage with one person. Even though none of it is especially cerebral, allowing two smaller people to work together on ST-based skill rolls (because something always seems to be sticking and cards aren't light), to help watch for traffic, to split the few tasks that can be done together, to make sure the car is perched on the jack properly... my first hand experience is that while any one of those is minor, all of them together is huge. Oh, and as always: average people are average and Driving is an Average skill: 1 point in it means rolling against a 9 for any "average" action. Depending on where you're changing the tire, it might even qualify as "adventuring" conditions (fast, busy freeway, remote areas with wildlife that probably won't investigate but you can't be sure of, bad part of town, etc.).
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08-11-2014, 10:58 AM | #40 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Bicycling, Driving and Piloting
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Since getting my license, I've always needed a car to get where I was going; my current car has put on about 10,000 miles or so in cross-country travel alone, much less driving for an hour or so to get to work. Again, I grew up in a rural area; you needed a car because there is no public transportation out in the sticks. Even when I live in a city (Austin, Vegas, etc), I tend to drive because that's what I'm used to.
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