Cost of HT.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Okay, as an experiment, looking at the first 20 skills in Basic (excluding ones that are already part of something else)

1. Accounting: discard; becomes part of Merchant
2. Acrobatics: keep
3. Acting: keep
4. Administration: discard, becomes part of Leadership
5. Alchemy: discard, it's either supernatural ability (becomes part of the magic system) or Knowledge(chemistry)
6. Animal Handling: typically it's just a Profession; extraordinary ability in this area is a power.
7. Anthropology: discard, becomes a Science
8. Architecture: discard, becomes a Science
9. Area Knowledge: probably put into a general Knowledge category.
10. Armoury: discard, becomes a Profession
11. Artillery: becomes a Combat skill.
12. Artist: expand to becomes a category
13. Astronony: science
14. Autohypnosis: delete; buy appropriate advantages
15. Beam Weapons: combat
16. Bicycling: becomes a Vehicle skill
17. Bioengineering: becomes a Science skill
18. Biology: becomes a Science skill
19. Blind Fighting: becomes an advantage.
20. Blowpipe: becomes a Combat skill

That looks entirely reasonable to get all of GURPS skills under 50.

Okay, you make Anthropology, Architecture, and Biology into parts of Science; does that mean that someone can take Science and be knowledgeable in all (as well as whatever else you've lumped into Science)? Is there just one Science skill for everything? If so, that would be absurd. If not, you haven't eliminated the skills, only cut and pasted them.

I agree with whoever said GURPS is stuck with a big skill list as long as it's a universal system. It would be relatively trivial to cut down a skill list for a single campaign; pick all the ones that matter and make everything else into a profession or hobby that might be useful once or twice a campaign. But you can't do that for every campaign simultaneously.

[Flyndaran]

Combat oriented games likely only have use for bang skills like Science! or History! but at normal cost for their very limited help.
But a hypothetical "solving mysteries man was not meant to know" games could use skills split into all sorts of sub-disciplines. You may know all about Ancient Egypt and that helped you a lot last adventure facing Imhotep's Ka, but today's monster came from alien-Inca hybridization and only professor Peters understands that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Okay, you make Anthropology, Architecture, and Biology into parts of Science; does that mean that someone can take Science and be knowledgeable in all .

What I meant is that "Science" is effectively a category of Skills with mandatory Specialization and what Sciences are available being GM-controlled and defined rather than being enumerated explicitly in the corebook..

This would be similar t the way Hobby and Profession "Skills" are treated now.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

But what worries me is the 'becomes an advantage' approach.

I was using a simple rule: supernatural or cinematic abilities become advantages. Game-useful autohypnosis falls into that category.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Okay, you make Anthropology, Architecture, and Biology into parts of Science; does that mean that someone can take Science and be knowledgeable in all

No, it means that there's an indefinite skill category called Science, similar to a Profession, and which sciences exist is up to the GM and/or players (if a player wants to specialize in some obscure field that the GM hasn't heard or thought about, he's free to put it down on his character sheet. It may never actually get rolled, of course).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

1. Accounting: discard; becomes part of Merchant
2. Acrobatics: keep
3. Acting: keep
4. Administration: discard, becomes part of Leadership
5. Alchemy: discard, it's either supernatural ability (becomes part of the magic system) or Knowledge(chemistry)
6. Animal Handling: typically it's just a Profession; extraordinary ability in this area is a power.
7. Anthropology: discard, becomes a Science
8. Architecture: discard, becomes a Science
9. Area Knowledge: probably put into a general Knowledge category.
10. Armoury: discard, becomes a Profession
11. Artillery: becomes a Combat skill.
12. Artist: expand to becomes a category
13. Astronony: science
14. Autohypnosis: delete; buy appropriate advantages
15. Beam Weapons: combat
16. Bicycling: becomes a Vehicle skill
17. Bioengineering: becomes a Science skill
18. Biology: becomes a Science skill
19. Blind Fighting: becomes an advantage.
20. Blowpipe: becomes a Combat skill

Artist already is a category.

I think I might make Accounting and Administration Professional Skills.

Alchemy and Armoury would be Craft Skills.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

What I meant is that "Science" is effectively a category of Skills with mandatory Specialization

Yeah, that's a cut and paste job, not a simplification. You have all the same skills, you've just hidden some of them under rugs.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Yeah, that's a cut and paste job, not a simplification. You have all the same skills, you've just hidden some of them under rugs.

No, because you're eliminating special case rules and rules text, and you're actually making it more generic, because the actual way sciences are divided is setting-dependent.

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Okay, you make Anthropology, Architecture, and Biology into parts of Science; does that mean that someone can take Science and be knowledgeable in all (as well as whatever else you've lumped into Science)? Is there just one Science skill for everything? If so, that would be absurd. If not, you haven't eliminated the skills, only cut and pasted them.

I agree with whoever said GURPS is stuck with a big skill list as long as it's a universal system. It would be relatively trivial to cut down a skill list for a single campaign; pick all the ones that matter and make everything else into a profession or hobby that might be useful once or twice a campaign. But you can't do that for every campaign simultaneously.

I agree with both sides here.

To me, collapsing the sciences into Science skills (as we have Expert Skill and others) is still useful even though you're right that . It takes a mishmash of traits and distills them into one regular set of rules. It makes for both good formatting and helps us group them and treat them collectively for rule purposes. It makes the game neater, and games benefit from the resulting clarity.

With that said, Architecture in particular isn't so much a science as a design/crafting skill. There are plenty of other options that will work well in GURPS for consolidation. Certainly the business skills (finance, market analysis, economics) have a ton of unnecessary overlap.

(And BTW, you can have Science as one skill- it's called Science! It's not absurd, just appropriate only in a certain style of game. )


(Edit: Lots of people beat me to it. )

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Yeah, that's a cut and paste job, not a simplification. You have all the same skills, you've just hidden some of them under rugs.

You appear to have ignored the part where I said that the list of exactly which Science Skills are available is controlled by the GM and there is no list of Canonical ones in the corebook. Just like for Hobby and Profession.