Savage Worlds (or other reduced) skill list?

[Keampe]

One thought that I had on this topic was to use the "Optional Specialties" rules on pgs 169-170 for all skill catagories. For example you'd combine Melee into 1 skill at DEX/H and have things like Shortsword as the Optional Specialty at DEX/A. So you can buy up Melee to use all weapons or buy the cheaper Shortsword and use all other Melee skills at -2.

Things like Filch, Pickpocket and Slight of Hand would all be the same. Probably using Slight of hand as the base, higher cost skill. All influence skills could be under "Influence", etc.

This allows someone to specialize if they wish or not if they don't. In addition, if they do specialize, generally it'll only be the one skill.

Just a thought.
- Shane

[Celjabba]

A few other skill substitution that may make sense, or not ... :

Packing > Teamster
Mimicry > Acting
Falconry > Animal Handling
Mount : replaced by perk : trained mount.
Ventriloquism > Acting
Photography/TL > Artist
Makeup/TL > Artist
Stage Combat > Performance
Poetry> Writing
Combat Art†> Performance
Accounting > Finance
Market Analysis > Finance
Boxing > Karate
Main-Gauche > OHT
Jitte/Sai > Knife or Broadsword + perk
Saber > Broadsword + Perk (fencing weapon)
Smallsword > Rapier
Shortsword > Broadsword or Knife
Spear > Polearm
Staff > Polearm +perk (staff parry training)
Thrown Weapon > Throwing
Filch > Sleight of Hand
Pickpocket > Sleight of Hand
Poisons/TL > Pharmacy
Typing > Leveled Perk : trained Typist

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by DaosusLeghki

To be honest, looking through people's arguments and also reading through the recently purchased Monster Hunters 1 and 2, I'm pretty sure I've got my solution. I'll be using Wildcard skills for most stuff.

Another game I was thinking of running wouldn't be appropriate for Wildcard skills, so I might just aggressively prune the skill list and organize it for my players. Something like listing all the Influence skills together and listing the differences. Similar to what Mook did on page 45 of How to Be A GURPS GM. That way, they're not looking at the monstrously huge skill list when they're making their characters, they're only referencing it when they are looking up a specific skill.

And to be honest, reading through Dungeon Fantasy RPG has assuaged my fears somewhat. It' s a really good example of a fully adapted version of GURPS. I don't think I want to produce something with that level of detail, but it's a nice example.

Let us know how things turn out. I'm curious to see how a Wildcard focused campaign would work in practice.

[Raekai]

Originally Posted by Kallatari

My go-to wildcard skill list is based on the Niches of GURPS Template Toolkit 1 - Characters, with the exception that I divided Combat into Melee Weapon Combat!, Ranged Combat!, and Unarmed Combat!, and that I've added a wildcard skills per each focus of a power (e.g., each magical college, or psionic power, etc.)

I like this breakdown as the niches basically represents the various types of challenges you will encounter in a game, and thus every wildcard skill has a specific game purpose. There are also about 30 of them, so it's a nice limited list. (Excluding the wildcards for the various power focuses)

For what it's worth, I have one player (out of almost a dozen in two weekly campaigns) that doesn't like the complexity of the full skill lists and uses these wildcard skills almost exclusively. Most of the my other players use the full skill list without any wildcards, and I have a couple that are mostly normal skills with one or two wildcards skills.

Reading this changed everything for me. Using Niches is now my current favorite way of handling this. I made the switch immediately, and I have been using that for the past two weekends. My players love it! It's still very pared down, but there's a good amount of nuance there that allows for some great synergy between (and even within) characters.

I merged Animals and Plants into Nature, but I broke out Ranged and Melee from Combat. Each one is roughly worth a VH×2 Wildcard, which also keeps them a bit more competitive in price. I've also been using Talents alongside these Niches because I think of Niches as vertical and Talents as horizontal. A rootin'-tootin' cowboy might have high Nature, Outdoors, and Ranged, but it makes sense to throw the cowboy a bone with the newfangled Cowboy Talent that gives the cowboy specific bonuses to working with cows and horses, shootin' revolvers, etc. Of course, I also generalize talents a bit more instead of mentioning skills by name—just +1 to working with cows and horses, using typical cowboy weapons, and knowing the lay of the land out West. I figured that was worth about 10 points.

Originally Posted by Ninja Monkey

Mailanka in his review of Powe-ups 9: Alternative Attributes tackles this:

http://mailanka.blogspot.com/2020/01...butes.html?m=1

I'd love to see this developed further.

Now, this is also a great approach. This feels very GURPS-like to me, and, if I wanted even more granularity, I would definitely go this route. As mentioned, IQ is definitely still a powerhouse, but I don't mind that too much.

[Infornific]

One last note - those who like the detailed skills but find building concepts (journalist, doctor, etc) tricky, Action 4: Specialists and its 25 point skill packages is useful. It's Modern Action but most could be adopted to other genres. That makes sure the PCs start with the right skills. The niches from Template Toolkit: Characters would make a good base for Specialist type lenses as well.