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Old 01-03-2012, 10:15 AM   #21
aesir23
 
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pragmatic View Post
Sorry, can you give a book/page number for this talent?
Sorry, my memory invented it. I thought there was a talent in Mysteries for Genius Detectives that covers this sort of thing, but I guess I made it up.

Hmmm, a talent for people who are good at remembering information and know a lot about general knowledge...the closest I can find in Power Ups 3 is Trivia Sponge, but this should be bigger than that one.

I suggest:
Quote:
Knowledgeable 10/Level:
You are great at remembering facts and have a great store of general knowledge about the world. Many character types with high levels of this talent should also have Eidetic Memory.

Area Knowledge (Any), Connoisseur (Any) Current Affairs (Any), Expert Skill (Any), Games, Heraldry, Hidden Lore (any), History, Hobby Skill (Trivia), Research.

Reaction Bonus: Academics, Trivia Buffs, anyone who greatly values knowledge.
Alternate Bonus: A Bonus to Default Rolls for any IQ based skill, only if the roll is to see if you know a piece of information, never for practical applications. For example: you could add your talent to your Physics default in order to know the half-life Carbon 14, but you would not receive this bonus if you were trying to design an experiment or develop a new theory.
Alternate name "Mind Like a Steel Trap".

Last edited by aesir23; 01-03-2012 at 10:19 AM.
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Old 01-03-2012, 10:31 AM   #22
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

Someone with less book learning than is normal in his setting sounds like a candidate for someone with lower IQ than Per, no academic talents, and no points or Dabbler in academic skills.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka View Post
Someone who has better defaults than someone else should be worth more points. Someone who can't default at all to skills most people can default too should be worth less points.

Either way, general education should have a point-cost that differentiates it from someone raised by wolves or strapped to a chair for the first 18 years of their life.
There are hundreds of skills in GURPS. Do you really want to have to track people's exact defaults in each? You would need to track general education (which is quite setting-specific), physical education, general life experience (did the character's parents keep a garden and some chickens?), part time work, reading, hobbies ... Just saying "everyone has a default to every skill common in their society" is a playable simplification like giving most characters one ST score or combing injuries into generic HP loss.
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Old 01-03-2012, 11:08 AM   #23
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

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Originally Posted by robkelk View Post
What new skills are needed in the system?
Esotericism or Esoteric Doctrine for things that can't be covered by Theology nor Philosophy. The discussion about this is in the Expert Skill (Pneumatology) and Hidden Lore (Spirits) thread, starting at post #18.

Quote:
Originally Posted by demonsbane View Post
(. . .) According to this, we could have things like these portrayed in a suitable way:
  • Esotericism (Pythagoreanism)
  • Esotericism (Ancient Freemasonry)

    or

  • Esoteric Doctrine (Pythagoreanism)
  • Esoteric Doctrine (Ancient Freemasonry)

    along with

  • Esoteric Doctrine (Buddhism)
  • Esoteric Doctrine (Jewish Kabbalah)
  • Esoteric Doctrine (Islamic tassawuf)
  • Theology (Roman Catholic)
  • Theology (Islam)
  • Philosophy (Stoicism)
  • Philosophy (Aristotelian)
  • Philosophy (Marxism)

etc.
Also, leaving aside this particular case, I really think that at the very least a small section for creating new skills should be included in the Basic Set. I don't get how someone could think that the GURPS skill list were definitive and absolutely comprehensive.
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Old 01-03-2012, 11:22 AM   #24
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

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Originally Posted by demonsbane View Post
Also, leaving aside this particular case, I really think that at the very least a small section for creating new skills should be included in the Basic Set. I don't get how someone could think that the GURPS skill list were definitive and absolutely comprehensive.
There already is a section for creating new skills in the Basic Set. There's a few of them, actually. See, for example, the section on Expert Skills.
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Old 01-03-2012, 11:55 AM   #25
gruundehn
 
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

I want to thank everyone who has responded. However I think what I said was not exactly what I meant. Let me try again. Defaults are nice but someone from different regions/society classes/wealth classes will default to the same number if their attribute is the same. There should be modifiers to adjust for this. A forester coming into the "big city" should have serious penalties on any skill that would be more specific to the urban enviornment. General education would offset those penalties as opposed to a forester who didn't take the skill. General education would apply to a wide range of skills as opposed to a technique which is skill specific. The skill would be to offset standard or ad hoc penalties applied to a skill based upon the character's background.

Again, thanks to all who replied.
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Old 01-03-2012, 12:25 PM   #26
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

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Originally Posted by gruundehn View Post
The skill would be to offset standard or ad hoc penalties applied to a skill based upon the character's background.
This is Jack of All Trades [10/level] from DF11 and PU3. You can limit the scope and cost of that "Talent" to your liking. They give as an example: IQ+1 to +3 (only for defaults, -80%) [4/level]. I put "Talent" in quotes because within it's description (in PU3 at least) it is acknowledged that's not like any other talent; but it's not like there's anything better to call it.

Last edited by Captain Joy; 01-03-2012 at 12:46 PM. Reason: spelling grammar errors
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Old 01-03-2012, 12:44 PM   #27
roguebfl
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

Dreding this up from way back in 2005 in Half Point thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
It also represents "baseline" training that isn't specifically divisible into skills; that is, the reason for all your IQ-based defaults and the foundation on which learned IQ-based skills are built. I'd say that someone who lacks high school education and has no access to mass media in Western society is at -1 IQ relative to someone who has one or the other. You can be a mountain man with a real-world IQ score of 100, but if you've never taken Science 101, seen Jacques Cousteau mess with diving gear on TV, etc., then you're going to have crummy technical defaults and be at -1 to your GURPS IQ attribute. Of course, you'd get the points back if you were a PC!

The mountain man is likely to have IQ 9 [-20] and Per 13 [20], which will give him vastly superior learned or default levels at Fishing, Observation, Scrounging, Survival, and Tracking. He'll also do well with Body Language, Detect Lies, Lip Reading, Search, and Urban Survival, so when the city boys give him a hard time in town, they may be surprised to learn that he knows about their plans and concealed handguns, and can lose himself just as quickly in an alley as in the woods. He just isn't any good at jump-starting cars, criminal politics, or lying to cops.
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Old 01-03-2012, 01:36 PM   #28
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

The Genereal Education skill is already in the game, under the name Games (GURPS).

Having read every 3e historical supplement, and having spent time researching campaigns in every genre, often at a deeper level than wikipedia, I find that my game-related emails confuse the heck out of gmail's advertising engine. I can get links to psychics, environmental remediation engineers, and military academies from one short message! How general is that?

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Old 01-03-2012, 06:44 PM   #29
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

Quote:
Originally Posted by Langy View Post
There already is a section for creating new skills in the Basic Set. There's a few of them, actually. See, for example, the section on Expert Skills.
Yes, Langy, thanks for your answer. However GURPS Expert Skills aren't suitable for some cases, like the aforementioned one, since Expert Skills portray narrow specializations:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Basic Set, p.193
An Expert Skill represents cross-disciplinary knowledge of a single, narrow theme.
My point is just that in many cases, Expert Skill is perfect, while in others it isn't suitable at all.
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Old 01-03-2012, 07:57 PM   #30
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Default Re: Skill: General Education

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Originally Posted by demonsbane View Post
My point is just that in many cases, Expert Skill is perfect, while in others it isn't suitable at all.
We also have Hobby and Profession and Games.

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