Alternate GURPS: Seeking a minimalistic (25-50) skill list . . .

[Bruno]

If I am building an Outdoorsman who has most or all of the Talent skills, I don't feel like making him a sooooper genius, and I do want him to be very skilled at those skills (like, I was targeting Stat+3 or +4 kind of area) you darn right I'm going to go straight for 4 levels.

Number of levels of talent bought has a lot more to do with desired final skill levels than "brokenness" - a forest elf Scout in DF is going to go straight for 4 levels of the elf talent because he would have got Bow skill astronomical anyways. A forest elf wizard is not going to bother; he's got no real intentions on being a survivalist or archer (why is he playing a forest elf instead of a high elf? he doesn't like music).

[arconom]

I like dividing skills into core competencies.


Conflict Resolution
- Movement
- Combat
- Social


Acquisition
- Intel
- Combat
- Transport
- Food and Shelter

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by arconom

I like dividing skills into core competencies.


Conflict Resolution
- Movement
- Combat
- Social


Acquisition
- Intel
- Combat
- Transport
- Food and Shelter

Those look like interesting skill categrories; but they strike me as too broad to use as skills.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Nah, it did work fine. The thing that tended to be irritating was the fixed values, not what you rolled against. There's no real difference between "Roll vs INT" and "Roll vs Knowledge Skill" or "Charisma" and "Social Skill"

Rolling against your sweeping and innate intelligence attribute and rolling against your trained knowledge of poisons seem very different to me. One is for a game that lacks the kind of detail I need to make a good setting.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There are several purposes for it. Here are some that seem to be more common IME:

• Consolidating skills reduces the chance of having 'orphaned skills' in a campaign - skills that had points spent on them, but never used in-game even though their skill group was relevant. That is, instead of hoping a default or a rare skill comes up, you are essentially guaranteed to use a default-like benefit regarding to a skill-group.
• The long 200-ish skill list looks intimidating to players, and runs a huge risk of a player missing some skill that was important for a concept, particularly if they for some reason haven't memorised the names and bodies of all those skills.
• On the contrary to the above, a modest number of consolidated skills means that a character meant to cover a niche will in fact be able to cover said niche. E.g. a street thief will not somehow manage to miss the somewhat-obscure Filch skill, a xenobiologist will not miss Hazardous Materials (Biological) and NBC Suit etc.
• The current skill list makes skills priced too expensively compared to attributes, but directly reducing skill prices will make achieving high levels too easy. Consolidated skills will instead allow generalists to be priced fairly while preventing cheap 30s.

If 25 skills is better than 200, then why not go all the way and have say 6-10 character classes instead?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

If 25 skills is better than 200, then why not go all the way and have say 6-10 character classes instead?

What makes you think skills somehow conflate to character classes?

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

If 25 skills is better than 200, then why not go all the way and have say 6-10 character classes instead?

Thing is, in GURPS terms most classes are a package of skills, Advantages and Attributes. Furthermore, the balance between them varies - Fighter types sink more points into Attributes while Magic Users sink more points into Advantages. In a lot of cases, it's Advantages that distinguish templates most of all.

It's not a question of "better" - the long skill list allows for great precision and means two characters similar in concept ("Big Guy", "Knight", etc) are very distinct in execution. The problem as already mentioned is that the long list can be intimidating, can take a lot of time to create characters and makes it easy to miss some minor but logical niche function (Hazardous Materials, etc.)

One approach to handle this is to create Wildcard skills which by nature cover everything in the character concept. The downside is that this can be too simple and make it seem like all the characters are distinguished by one skill. In addition, Wildcard skills often feel more like professions rather than broad skills, especially for the more esoteric ones.

So this thread is exploring a way to make the skill list simpler while keeping the system skill focused and not distilling it to a single digit skill list.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Infornific

The downside is that this can be too simple and make it seem like all the characters are distinguished by one skill. In addition, Wildcard skills often feel more like professions rather than broad skills, especially for the more esoteric ones.

And that they're crazy expensive, especially if you want to use them as a replacement for the normal-granularity system in which case it's often logical to try to put more than one such skill on a character.

For me it's the skill granularity of wildcards with the price of "normal" skills that feels most reasonable.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Bruno

What makes you think skills somehow conflate to character classes?

I don't think that, but it seems to be the natural progression of this project.

[PencilBoy99]

Did any progress get !ade on this re OP. I have the same desire.