The 0-point traitless character.

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Note that, while I can't speak to your characters specifically, I don't think it's all that unusual for somebody's commute to be driving in a teeming metropolis (+2 to +3) where there's sometimes snow or ice on the roads (unclear modifier but definitely a penalty.)

And to do so with much better than a 1-in-2 chance of mishap. In warmer climes, I know people would avoid driving in snow or slow to a crawl, but in places where snow is normal in the winter, the locals usually only slow 10mph and you see only a few extra problems despite being thousands of cars on the road. The rate of accidents is close to the rate of critical failure only. A driver with default would be like a friend of mine; she know that the steering wheel turns the car, and that brakes and accelerator stop and make-go, but she’s never learned how to drive and never been in the driver’s seat. She knows what the skill is and can attempt it, but she literally doesn’t know how to drive. Perhaps others have various levels of dabbler perk, but I’m pretty sure the driver tests (at which some people do fail) define a base skill closer to 1CP than 0CP. Add years of driving and you have people that can split their attention and drive in unfamilar surroundings as well as new drivers can in familiar places. Our traitless human won’t drive a car well unless in a parking lot.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I do not really see where it is broken to have high school graduates having a wide variety of skills at 10 and a couple of skills at 12. People use to get employed straight out of high school all of the time. Even now, there are people who go to work as carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, welders, etc based off the skills that they learned in high schools.

For example, a quarter of my high school graduating class went into the skilled trades after graduation and were making an average of $40,000-$60,000 a year from what they learned in high school after five years in their trade (and I doubt that my high school was unique). In order to qualify for their apprenticeships, they had to have already shown enough competency to be trusted to work alone, which would have placed them at skill 12 when they graduated from high school. Twenty years later, they are probably at the equivalent of skill 16 (since they would have used their 'on the job' training to diversify their skills rather than to improve their skill beyond expert level), and some of them are earning $80,000-$120,000 per year.

I would not expect a starting apprentice in a trade to be skill 12. I'd generally expect 12 to be more of a 'journeyman' skill level, though I'm not sure how much that term is used in modern trades. If the starting apprentice is trusted to work alone, presumably it's not on the same things that the master works alone on...otherwise nobody would ever hire the master.

[Sam Baughn]

There seems to be a lot of talk about average or typical young adults here. I'm sympathetic to the idea that most of them have what GURPS would class as points in some skills. What I question is whether all of them do. You might have had 20 points in skills by the time you finished high school, but surely there are some people who had none at all. Likewise, it's a rare workplace where everyone is competent in their job. Many of them will lack skills which would seem essential but keep their employment through luck, incompetent management or social connections (which need not be significant enough to be a trait in GURPS terms).

Of those incompetent people, many will have some kind of disadvantage, advantage or incidental skill. Of the remainder, most will have at least a perk or quirk. But a few will simply have nothing that costs or grants points and they won't stand out as bizarre aberrations. They will have personalities, maybe some interests, know quite a few things, just nothing that costs points. They don't need to be clones fresh out of the tank or something. They are just ordinary people who just happen to be 'average' in every way GURPS cares about.

Alice is a normal-looking young woman who lives in a place where prostitution is legal. Having no serious hang-ups about it, she decides to work in a brothel where she makes good money, but not great because she has never really studied how to make herself attractive to men (no Sex Appeal skill). Maybe in time she will learn to appeal to her customers better and get points in a skill and more income.

Bob lives in an area where demand for coal miners is high. As he has no useful skills, he applies for the job. He is lucky in his interview and gets it. The starting pay is good, although many of the people who try it give up when they realise how hard the job is. But Bob persists and stays. Soon he will put points into raising his ST and learning some skills, which will bring his income up, but for now he is a default character.

Claire gets a junior management position in her father's business, despite being unqualified for it.

Dennis is a scribe in a medieval city. His handwriting and skill at composing letters are indifferent, but as it happens there is enough demand for just writing things down that he can still make a good living without being able to do much more than that.

All those people seem quite plausible characters and all of them have effectively the same character sheet, with absolutely no traits which cost points.

[whswhs]

[QUOTE=AlexanderHowl;2178276]I do not really see where it is broken to have high school graduates having a wide variety of skills at 10 and a couple of skills at 12. People use to get employed straight out of high school all of the time. Even now, there are people who go to work as carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, welders, etc based off the skills that they learned in high schools./QUOTE]

It seems to me that to be a carpenter, for example, you would need to have the primary skill at 12, and you would need not to be Innumerate or Math-Shy (since you're going to have to be figuring dimensions and such), and you plausibly might have a couple of other skills, if not at 12—in particular, you might very well have some points in Driving, if you haul your own tools around. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just as plausible as a high school athlete having some points in sports skills, or a band member having points in Musical Instrument. You could even have those skills and Social Stigma (Uneducated), if you were nonverbal and/or not inclined to book learning, though it would also be perfectly fair and at least as likely that you would have the normal education that's expected of adults—the craft skills are open to people without book learning.

I'm making narrower points:

The academic/scientific skills are not available if you're Uneducated (unless you buy a perk that lets you learn one such skill), and in our society high school graduation or the GED is the point where you stop being Uneducated, so most high school courses count toward general knowledge (including defaults in academic skills) rather than toward skills in academic subjects.

Since most college students spend their first two years mainly on general education, it makes sense to treat most lower divisiion courses as adding to general knowledge; and the same thus applies to many AP courses, though I wouldn't be rigid about that (especially not for PCs).

In any case, it just doesn't make sense to say that all of the hours you spend in school up through age 18 count toward gaining skills, or that you can divide them by 200 and get that many points of skills. The 200 hours figure is a convenient guideline, but not a fixed relationship. Some of that time is spent on repetition, busywork, or goofing off; or on learning content just long enough to pass a test; or on learning things that don't count as skills—reaching adult levels of language use, buying off Innumerate, buying off Social Stigma (Uneducated), and arguably part of buying IQ. Spending 200 hours and gaining a point in a skill is a tool for use in moving a character forward after you create them; it's not an argument for giving them any specific point values or abilities at the start of a campaign.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Sam Baughn

There seems to be a lot of talk about average or typical young adults here. I'm sympathetic to the idea that most of them have what GURPS would class as points in some skills. What I question is whether all of them do. You might have had 20 points in skills by the time you finished high school, but surely there are some people who had none at all. Likewise, it's a rare workplace where everyone is competent in their job. Many of them will lack skills which would seem essential but keep their employment through luck, incompetent management or social connections (which need not be significant enough to be a trait in GURPS terms).

Of those incompetent people, many will have some kind of disadvantage, advantage or incidental skill. Of the remainder, most will have at least a perk or quirk. But a few will simply have nothing that costs or grants points and they won't stand out as bizarre aberrations. They will have personalities, maybe some interests, know quite a few things, just nothing that costs points. They don't need to be clones fresh out of the tank or something. They are just ordinary people who just happen to be 'average' in every way GURPS cares about.

GURPS doesn't say that average people have no skills. Indeed, you'd have to try pretty hard to conclude that it doesn't say the opposite. And Kromm's on the record that having no skills is noticeably abnormal.

I don't think a social connection that lets you hold down an Average-pay job with no job skills, in an environment where that is unusual (which is, I think, most of them) could fairly be considered "not significant enough for a Trait".

Originally Posted by whswhs

The academic/scientific skills are not available if you're Uneducated (unless you buy a perk that lets you learn one such skill), and in our society high school graduation or the GED is the point where you stop being Uneducated, so most high school courses count toward general knowledge (including defaults in academic skills) rather than toward skills in academic subjects.

It cannot possibly be okay to define what falls within Mathematics (Pure) and what doesn't as depending on your reference society. If stepping through a portal into a new world means I have to reconstruct my skill list, you've broken GURPS.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It cannot possibly be okay to define what falls within Mathematics (Pure) and what doesn't as depending on your reference society.

Yes it can. Mathematics is a /TL skill, and that means what it is depends on the TL of your reference society.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It cannot possibly be okay to define what falls within Mathematics (Pure) and what doesn't as depending on your reference society. If stepping through a portal into a new world means I have to reconstruct my skill list, you've broken GURPS.

An ancient Greek with Mathematics (Pure)-16 would not be able to differentiate a function, or even graph it, but both skills seem to me to fall under Mathematics (Pure) at TL5—graphing at TL4. There are also issues of familiarity even at a given TL.

But other than that, I take TL8 as the general reference point for deciding what falls under Mathematics (Pure). The whole list of academic skills is defined in TL8 terms.

So what do you do about the medieval mathematician who's never heard of calculus? I would say that the *skill* there is not so much knowing, say, the postulates of geometry (which are part of general education in many societies, from ancient Greece to high school in the 1960s), but having the skill and art of devising geometric constructions to address problems. Archimedes figuring out the method of exhaustion to find the area inside a curved figure was using Mathematics (Pure); a student reciting a memorized theorem, probably not.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I don't think a social connection that lets you hold down an Average-pay job with no job skills, in an environment where that is unusual (which is, I think, most of them) could fairly be considered "not significant enough for a Trait".

Where it's unusual no, though in fact this probably isn't most of them.

But this does get at the core issue - I think the fundamental problem here is that GURPS doesn't charge you for stuff that *is* usual, even if it isn't worthless. It gives you disadvantage points for lacking it, and much of what you get out of schooling or general socialization is those "free" points that allow you not to suffer those disadvantages.

Stuff like that free Literacy, or all those Background Knowledge perks you aren't buying to give you default skills, or Cultural Familiarity, or access to that Average pay job, or having a network of acquaintances who'll at least vouch for you being a real person even if they wouldn't do anything else for you - things that *could* have cost you points if the system were designed differently are actually stuff "zero point" characters have that the guys fresh out of the clone tank would not - it's not that they aren't worth points, it's that the fresh clones actually ought to have a fairly substantial negative point total for them.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Yes it can. Mathematics is a /TL skill, and that means what it is depends on the TL of your reference society.

In a sense, but the /TL also means that the societal information is loaded into the definition of the skill on the sheet. If you go somewhere else, the skill you have goes with you.

But how would you justify calculus being an IQ default for a TL/8 character, but not associated with any skill, while it's clearly falls under a skill at its TL of introduction and before that is flatly impossible?

Originally Posted by malloyd

Where it's unusual no, though in fact this probably isn't most of them.

But this does get at the core issue - I think the fundamental problem here is that GURPS doesn't charge you for stuff that *is* usual, even if it isn't worthless. It gives you disadvantage points for lacking it, and much of what you get out of schooling or general socialization is those "free" points that allow you not to suffer those disadvantages.

I'm not sure, but I think you may have misunderstood me - I meant that holding down an Average job without skills was unusual, not holding down a job based on a social connection. The former I believe, the latter I only want to believe.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

In a sense, but the /TL also means that the societal information is loaded into the definition of the skill on the sheet. If you go somewhere else, the skill you have goes with you.

But how would you justify calculus being an IQ default for a TL/8 character, but not associated with any skill, while it's clearly falls under a skill at its TL of introduction and before that is flatly impossible?

Why on earth shouldn't IQ defaults change?

In our society, adding up a column of numbers is a commonplace skill; theoretically any high school graduate can do it, though in practice some may be Math-Shy and find it uncomfortable at best. It would be fair to ask for an IQ roll to do it right, though most people would take extra time as needed. But in ancient Rome, adding up written numbers was a far harder task; if you knew how to use an abacus, you'd do it that way, and only use writing to record the result. In our society the multiplication table is grade school arithmetic, but in ancient Egypt they didn't even try to multiply; they used a roundabout method where you repeatedly doubled one number and halved the other, which any scribe would know, but which hardly anyone learns in our society.

That's why skills need to be defined at a high level of abstraction.