Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Kromm

What kids do have is points in Games and Hobby Skills; perhaps some Easy skills like Bicycling, Fishing, Singing, or Swimming; and maybe a harder pastime like Dancing, Musical Instrument, Riding, or Sports. This will depend on where they grow up . . . nothing there is universal. I'm amazed at how common Sports skills are in U.S. high schools, for instance, because that's not the way of things in Canada. Yet where I'm from (Nova Scotia), it's hard not to learn Swimming because the ocean is right there and parents freak out about their kids being unable to swim. Boating and Fishing are super-common, too.

As a child who grew up in the country, I managed to avoid organised sports, because the after-school time they were in was used up getting home on the bus. So for a New Zealander I was sports deprived, as were my sisters. Instead, they learned Riding as their hobby, and I learned to shoot (rabbits and other game, not targets). Summers involved tramping and swimming and such, and riding horses (something I was never great at) and or pushbikes all over.

I think the universal 'sports' skill kids learned at all the schools I went to was throwing (and kicking) small balls - impromptu cricket, tag, etc. with tennis balls was universal.

I'd take back what I once said about Computer Operation; today's "expert systems" have made that unnecessary. I realize that I have this skill when I install and configure software, test cables, set up networks, swap out RAM, etc. and people around me are shocked that I didn't go to an expert for that. I think we've left behind the time when it was a common skill. Those who can't use phones, PCs, and ATMs have an Incompetence quirk, giving -4 to their default. I'd say most modern gizmos give +6, so the average person's IQ-4 default becomes IQ+2 – a "professional" 12 for most – and hard to fail, while incompetents are operating at IQ-2 (or 8) and failing a lot.

I think this has become a skill of a particular age group - older people largely never learned it for lack of need or opportunity, younger people haven't the need unless as a hobby or job. In the middle you get people who had to know this stuff to be able to do anything worthwhile with a computer.

Lastly, you have a job skill, most often one of Administration, Merchant, Research, or a Professional Skill. Those with Hard job skills like Accounting, Engineer, Finance, Law, Market Analysis, and Physician are less common, and generally admired, wealthy, or both relative to those with merely Average skills. But trades like Carpentry and Electrician are solid earners, and also common.

I really wish my younger self had ignored the expectations of my school, peers, etc., and become an electrician. I could've gone into electronics and/or the hardware side of computing from there, or stayed an electrician. Either way, it was and is a good career, with good pay and about as good job security as you'll find these days.

[Tyneras]

Driving is experiencing the same transition a lot of skills have and will go through. You still need the skill, it just becomes the near exclusive domain of a professional, be they a taxi, bus or train driver or AI.

Cooking had the same transition, going from a mandatory survival skill to something most of the population doesn't need thanks to packaged goods, equipment bonuses and expert instructions letting you succeed 99% of the time going off default.

I believe this is also an "apocalypse how" scenario, where everything except games and hobby skills gets exported to unseen professionals/AI and then you lose access to them.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Rupert

As a child who grew up in the country [...] I learned to shoot

Here's a great example of why "universality" is hard to find.

Where I grew up, guns were subject to so many regulations that shooting was extremely uncommon. Moreover, I was in the city, so those who jumped through the hoops to do it got side-eye for being either scary gun nuts or wannabe mountain-men who didn't belong in the city. My uncle, founder of a shooting club and winner of many shooting prizes, was seen as a weirdo by the family – we didn't talk about it. Teaching children to shoot was a strict no-go; older schools had shooting ranges that dated to WWII, and all of these had been repurposed as storage areas. My sum-total experience with guns was seeing a vault that apparently held some firearms under strict lock and key, plus seeing policemen around.

On the other hand, hanging around the city at all hours wasn't all that weird. It was hard not to learn Brawling, Carousing, and Streetwise, at least a bit. Nobody really considered it odd for a leather-jacket-clad teenage punk to be lurking in the city at 3 a.m., getting up to no good. I'm positive that would shock some, though!

Originally Posted by Rupert

I think this has become a skill of a particular age group - older people largely never learned it for lack of need or opportunity, younger people haven't the need unless as a hobby or job. In the middle you get people who had to know this stuff to be able to do anything worthwhile with a computer.

Yeah, I think that Computer Operation is a valid skill, but what I believe the game has wrong is that it's "Computer Operation/TL." As time goes on, I'm fairly certain that it was a peculiarity of TL7-8, and less a true technological skill with a "/TL" label than a skill with a bewildering network of familiarities. Prior to late TL7, it didn't properly exist because all the things you'd do with computers were covered by Computer Programming and Electronics Repair (Computers). As of mid-TL8, it's ceasing to exist because it isn't needed.

I'm sure there are other skills like that . . . ones that get a "/TL" in the game but really only exist in a narrow slice of time, making the skill irrelevant or nonexistent on both sides of that time slice.

Originally Posted by Rupert

I really wish my younger self had backed the expectations of my school, peers, etc., and become an electrician. I could've gone into electronics and/or the hardware side of computing from there, or stayed an electrician. Either way, it was and is a good career, with good pay and about as good job security as you'll find these days.

I hear you. My original career plan was to go into electronics – what GURPS calls Electronics Repair and maybe Engineer (Electronics) if I was good enough. But my aptitudes for maths and science were spotted by well-meaning adults. So I was channeled into first chemistry and then physics – largely through the use of bribes, a.k.a. scholarships and bursaries – while a mathematics professor who was friends with my best friend's father literally accosted me at bus stops and parking lots, trying to convince me to switch to maths.

Flash forward to today and I'm not doing any of the above. Instead, I'm an editor of roleplaying games. Meanwhile, contemporaries I know who went into setting up and repairing computers, electronic synthesizers, phones, security systems, etc. own businesses and/or are retired at age 50-55, their bills paid entirely by the present-day obsession with all things electronic.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Driving is experiencing the same transition a lot of skills have and will go through. You still need the skill, it just becomes the near exclusive domain of a professional, be they a taxi, bus or train driver or AI.

That's where it's going today. We have a lot of taxi, mass-transit, and delivery drivers still; it's family vehicles that are starting to become less common.

Also, I think cars are headed toward the same automation as phones and PCs. Already, I have friends whose car parks itself – 100% hands-off, I mean. I suspect GPS-guided, self-driving vehicles will go from fascinating proofs of concept to consumer products within a generation.

Originally Posted by Tyneras

I believe this is also an "apocalypse how" scenario, where everything except games and hobby skills gets exported to unseen professionals/AI and then you lose access to them.

I find that a little fatalistic.

Technology is ever-expending and ever-complexifying, and advances because subcomponent technologies that used to be specific skills and professions can be automated out of conscious existence. That isn't new or specific to our age, but a consistent trend through all of history . . . I rather doubt that, say, the average Roman living in Rome could mine ore, smelt it, forge it into metal artifacts, etc., yet Romans had plenty of metal artifacts. That's the way of things: populations grow, better technologies are needed to support them, and the earlier technologies behind those better ones become "assumed." The fact that this has been a consistent trend for millennia leads me to doubt that we're suddenly on the brink of apocalypse.

Now whether individual people in our society like the fact that automation is closer than ever to "forcing" them to spend their life on games and hobbies instead of work is a whole other matter. I think that for every person who's petrified at the thought there's one who's sighing, "Oh, finally."

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I'm inclined to just scrap the skill altogether and replace it with Computer Administration, to emphasize the use case. Computer illiterates either lack familiarities (how many alleged computer illiterates have no trouble using software they're accustomed to?) or have Low TL (possibly at a quirk level; these are the "the cup-holder is broken" types).

It could be treated like Literacy, with a perk/quirk relationship, depending on what we choose as the baseline.

[Tyneras]

I wasn't thinking so much a realistic prediction as a (silly) After The End explanation of
"Why is there so much loot still around?"
"After some super hacker killed the central planetary AI, most people had no idea where the delivery drones brought their food from and starved in their apartments. I'm just glad leather with spikes was fashionable when it happened!"
Real systems tend to be too distributed and redundant for single point of failure apocalypses.

On a more serious note, retirement disease is a real thing, a lack of purpose and social role will actually kill you. But I also know people who consider work a necessary evil to sustain their real life in our (crude) virtual worlds, so I'm not worried about people keeping occupied as AIs take over everything productive.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

I wasn't thinking so much a realistic prediction

Got it!

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Real systems tend to be too distributed and redundant for single point of failure apocalypses.

Very much so. One thing I've learned as a writer is that plausible apocalypses require overwhelming, gamma-burster or at least asteroid-strike forces. Global viruses, biological or computer, and similar things that don't simultaneously wipe out almost all people, settlements, infrastructure, and natural resources on a global scale only seem to work . . . a cunning playtester or gaming group will soon poke too many holes in it for it to survive.

Originally Posted by Tyneras

On a more serious note, retirement disease is a real thing, a lack of purpose and social role will actually kill you. But I also know people who consider work a necessary evil to sustain their real life in our (crude) virtual worlds, so I'm not worried about people keeping occupied as AIs take over everything productive.

And even that probably isn't universal. There are societies or segments of societies where work and work ethic are at the apex, sure. There are also ones where those things are regarded as necessary evils to be eliminated as soon as we're up to the task.

On a more mundane level, there are "live to work" people and "work to live" people. I'm a "work to live" person . . . I have no problem admitting that if I won the lottery, inherited from a rich uncle whom I didn't know I had, found a shipping container full of small, unmarked bills, or the like, I'd stop working for a living tomorrow and feel zero guilt. I don't believe that I need to have an external purpose to matter, or that some supernatural entity is keeping score based on what I do in this life. I'd devote my time to Argentine tango, which is entirely my internal passion, and more than enough to give me a reason to go on. If someone told me, "How can you dance when your mind and money could be doing better things?", I'd just walk away from the conversation because I doubt I could find common ground with such a person.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

On a more serious note, retirement disease is a real thing, a lack of purpose and social role will actually kill you.

That's something that should be possible to work around. Part of the pre-apocalypse backstory to Death Stranding involved humans still doing deliveries (and one presumes other tasks), despite drones and the like being perfectly capable of it, precisely because some of them started going a bit crazy without a job to do. In a "future of leisure" setting, you could easily have some humans with what roughly amounts to make-work to help them feel more fulfilled (these may well be the PC's!).

[Kromm]

Thinking about it, my last point is something to bear in mind if you're creating characters for a game.

Games aren't always or mostly reality simulations. Even campaigns set in the present are often escapes in which the PCs are idealized selves – alter-egos who get to do what the players would like to do rather than what they must do. People like that can have utterly different skill sets from what we consider "necessary" and/or "universal," yet remain plausible in the stories they're part of.

It's a bit like how all cast members in many films and TV shows are good-looking people with great voices. The roles they play depict people with a weird level of social and professional competence, and far nicer homes, cars, and wardrobes than their ostensible jobs could pay for. And they can set aside such mundane things as housekeeping, taxes, or childcare – unless a specific plot calls for them not to – without dire consequences.

For instance, I'd happily be some guy with high DX, HT, Appearance, Charisma, Independent Income, and Wealth, whose main "on screen" skills are Dancing, Professional Skill (Mixology), several Connoisseur specialties, and a nice cross-section of social skills . . . say, Carousing, Diplomacy, Public Speaking, Savoir-Faire, and Sex Appeal. Would that be a realistic person? Probably not. But alter-egos don't need to be.

That's something to consider, too.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

It could be treated like Literacy, with a perk/quirk relationship, depending on what we choose as the baseline.

Hm. Maybe spread it as:

-> Computer Literacy, the ability to use computers
-> Familiarity, understanding how to use a skill with computer equipment. Knowing how to use Final Cut Pro is obviously different from splicing film by hand, but both are film editing (not sure of actual skill). Working with a massive General Ledger on paper is different from Quickbooks (or whatever is used in enterprise), but both are Accounting.
-> Computer Administration/TL (IQ/E) [Average?], which is the skill of IT professionals (who aren't programmers). DBAs, Security, Sysops and others end up here. Definitely necessary if you want "realistic" computer hackers.