[House Rules] Crakkerjakk's Reduced Skill List

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Parachuting is closer to Flying, no?

No. Flying is like Running or Hiking (all HT/A), it's meant to represent practice at sustained movement.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Well, thing is you either say it's DX/H with Aerobatics, Aquabatics techniques, or you have it as DX/VH and most every player who takes it will take Incompetence(Aerobatics, Aquabatics)[-2] to make up for the wasted points.

They can still take Acrobatics (DX/H). And it's only a point crock at very low levels. If they buy Acrobatic Movement up to attribute+0, even with Incompetencies it's 6 points v. 4 points just for Acrobatics at attribute+0. Plus, if any of my players took a skill then an incompetency for the point crock I'd slap em' upside the head.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

I can see a lot of Incompetences getting listed...

Only if you want to represent a certain specific type of character. If you want a specialist you take skills just like normal.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

This is where Hard techniques come in.

I don't understand how. If you make a Hard skill that includes the functionality of two Hard skills plus some others, how is it not "better" than the two Hard skills in an absolute sense?

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

It's also listed as Cinematic, not a real skill.

I'd be okay with dropping the difficulty to VH in a realistic game.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Expert Skills are setting specific, if you're simplifying skills it's a valid way of doing things.

Not while maintaining one of my design goals of allowing people who like the more granular RAW skill list to still use it and keep it balanced with the new version.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

How much utility are they really worth in your games?
If you're reducing skill numbers, are the skills left really worth a premium beyond VH?

Skills aren't priced on utility, skills are priced on actual difficulty. If we were pricing based on utility, Guns would be way harder that DX/E. And yes, as mentioned above one of my primary design goals is to leave the player who takes Surgery and the less specialized player who takes Medicine balanced against each other.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Yeah, there was a recent thread about that, Revisiting Talents for Combat:

Hmmm, I'll check it out.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Meh, you can use a broadsword like a rapier too, it's a pain, but you can do it, it's mostly just an issue of getting used to different stances when switching between styles.

Right, but Broadsword is the skill of swinging and thrusting a certain way. Smallsword is a different way of swinging and (mostly) thrusting. While you can use either skill with a rapier or broadsword, when you're a medieval knight I think it's going to take a fair amount of practice to be as good at fighting like a fencer as opposed to trying to half-sword your rapier.

Originally Posted by SCAR

Several skills could be changed to Professional or Hobby quite easily, but I'd agree with Ze'Manel Cunha about some of your choices between Professional and Hobby. Then again, Professional and Hobby are more 'labels' and the real distinction is Easy vs. Average difficulty.

Right, this is one of those situations where GURPS has it's own terminology that doesn't really match up with the real world.

Originally Posted by SCAR

Combining all of the Influence Skills into a single Persuade skill seems like a bad idea to me. How are you going to deal with the distinct special effects of the different influence skills, in particular the fact that use of the Diplomacy skill mean no worse than Neutral reaction?

I'll still allow the varying uses of the different skills, Persuade is just a streamlined way of writing down a bunch of skills that certain types of characters (the face) tend to take.

Originally Posted by SCAR

I suspect you might also need to give some specific consideration to Talents and the effect your changes will have on their cost/benefit. Some of your 'Super Skills' are pretty close to Talents, and some Talents are only going to have 1 or 2 skills now.

A very good point.

Originally Posted by SCAR

You could simply drop Jumping and Lifting (and possibly others) and simply use the standard Attribute based rules - Jumping is based on Move and/or DX and Lifting rolls against ST.

Right, but I'd like some way to represent people like powerlifters or olympic long-jumpers. All these skills are pretty much "use a skill in place of an attribute for certain specific situations."

Originally Posted by SCAR

Some specifics:
- Urban Survival as a Survival Specialisation seems reasonable, but the defaults are entirely different (none for Urban!)

True.

Originally Posted by SCAR

- Esoteric Medicine is not just low-TL Physician, Chinese Medecine (among many others) coexists alongside Physician in our TL - perhaps it should be a Specialisation of Physician, with little or no defaults.

I'd allow you to take Physician/TL4 in a TL8 game to represent someone trying to heal someone with Chinese Medicine.

Originally Posted by SCAR

- Economics might be better as a 'Business' skill alongside Finance and Accounting, rather than a 'Social Sciences' skill.

I thought so at first, but Finance notes that it's the "applied" skill, implying that Economics is the "theoretical" skill. And I figured the science of the behavior of markets fits in with the science of the behavior of societies, humans, and languages.

Originally Posted by SCAR

Fast-Draw off Weapon Skill seems like a good idea, but what would Kromm's Fast-Draw (Rose) base off?

DX-4, +1 for CR, and I'd allow a perk to bring it up to attribute for one-off things with no associated weapon skills. I figure it's a rare enough situation.

Originally Posted by SCAR

I think you also need to be careful not to cut some Niches down too much, Thief might have been reduced a little too much by your choices (I haven't checked, so it might be just fine). And Face Man from Action will certainly suffer from the loss of distinction on the Influence skills.

A good point. I'll admit, I am a little concerned about this, but I think for the most part the people who are just diplomats can have the one skill, while the people who are broadly competent can be good at a wide variety of skills yet only write down the one super-skill on their sheet. I mean, it's not like someone with Persuade-16 can't do Fast-Talk. They do it at 16. It's just not explicitly on their sheet.

But I am worried that for the Thief, Face, and Wheel Man archetypes the new skills are too good, and no one will ever use the RAW methods. I'm not sure if I really should be worried, though, so long as people with more focused character concepts can still be better at their specialties for the same number of points.

Originally Posted by SCAR

I think anything like this has 2 important considerations:
1) Campaign Specifics -
2) GM Style -

Like I said, on the one hand, I WANT less skills on the character sheet. But on the other hand, I don't want to make certain archetypes so cheap that anyone can play the Face + Shooter or Face + Medic. But I think that quite a bit of those archetypes are in the advantages they select. I'm not sure whether the new version is balanced or not, but I don't think it's obviously unbalanced.

Originally Posted by warmachine

The Investigate skill stomps on too much of this difference whereas the natural science skills aren't that important.

Way I see it is the Forensics guy can still take Forensics and be better at it than the Investigate guy for the same amount of points. It lets specialist specialize, while allowing generalists not to clutter up the sheet. It may favor the generalists a bit too much, but in many cases I think you can fix this by cranking super-skills up another difficulty class.

Originally Posted by warmachine

You could reduce the difficulty of super-skills by two steps for campaigns where the GM deems it not so useful but not useless.

I have taken a different approach in my house rules, emphasising usefulness. Depending on the campaign, the GM chooses amalgamations of less useful skills, making it cheaper to be proficient in a set of less useful skills.

On the one hand, I like the idea of scaling skills based on usefulness. On the other hand, that'd be a PITA to do for every campaign, and it's not how skills are priced in RAW. As I mentioned in the OP, I tried to stay as close to the spirit of the RAW as possible, and while pricing skills based on utility might be a good idea in general, it's not the point of this particular exercise.