[New Release] GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills

[Steven Marsh]

Wildcard!
You make my best bard!
You make many skills... groovy.

Wildcard, I... I think I love you.
But I wanna know for sure!
Come on and boost me.
I love you.

And thus perhaps the lamest song parody I'll ever attempt crawls to an end. But, hey! Wildcard skills! Fun, exciting, and more useful than ever, thanks to [TRUMPET]... GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills! This Sean Punch penned parcel provides powerful possibilities for protagonists pining for a PDQ pace in their PCs. Unleash the potential of Swashbuckler!, Memetics!, Detective!, Computers!, and much more. New rules and options, plus over 60 wildcard skills to use in your own hero.

More than any other supplement ever, with GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills, you'll literally get the most bang for your buck!

[mehrkat]

It was a cruel cruel joke to drain my bank account with a sale first. :)

Well I know where $10 of my beginning of the month is going.

I see more wild card skill games coming my way.

[Michael Thayne]

Okay, mini-review...

I've been waiting for this one for a long time. Wildcard skills were initially just a brief sidebar in GURPS 4e, but there was obviously a need for the concept, and they've gotten a lot of play in subsequent supplements. However, for a long time, no supplement seemed to quite get them right. The problem was, there was no clear official rule for how broad wildcard skills were supposed to be, so many wildcard skills in published supplements seemed either distinctly overpowered, or distinctly underpowered (more often the latter). Gun! was one a lot of people complained about on the "underpowered" front. The many examples in Supers also tended to run distinctly underpowered.

Then, PK just showed how great wildcard skills could be in Monster Hunters. Some skills were added, while others were tweaked to get their breadth right. Wildcard skills also got some additional benefits added in the process, particularly "wildcard points," which could be spent to influence the outcome of a skill roll. In the process, PK even managed to redeem "Gun!" (So much so, that after typing that last sentence, I wonder if anyone will even remember how much people used to hate Gun!)

The only flaw in Monster Hunters's treatment of wildcard skills is that it was limited to nine skills designed for one specific genre. This left me hoping there'd be a Power-Ups item that would expand the Monster Hunters approach to wildcard skills to other genres. When it was announced that PK was doing a Power-Ups item, and Kromm dropped some hints that it would be a wildcards item, I got really excited.

Now that I've seen the final product, it wasn't quite what I expected. Most of the book is actually devoted to "how to design your own wildcard skills"; by my count it actually sets a record low for the Power-Ups series in terms of percentage of the book devoted to usable-out-of-the-box crunch. None of the wildcard skills are entirely new, either. All have been published in one source or another before. The catalog does, however, suggest additional benefits beyond just substituting for ordinary skills that each skill could have. In some cases, the entries also have notes on how to expand what was originally a very narrow wildcard into something players might actually want to buy. (Boat!, Drive!, and Pilot! from Supers all get the latter treatment—and they needed it badly.)

I wish the catalog had been a bit meatier, and more willing to flat-out ignore past supplements where past supplements went wrong (rather than say things like "on the one hand, Supers said X, on the other hand, you could do Y.") That said, the "how to design your own wildcards" stuff looks very good, and provides a nice "peak behind the curtain" at the reasoning that went into creating the wildcard skills used in Monster Hunters. Particularly useful is the rule of thumb that wildcard skills should cover 12-14 Average skills, with additional guidelines for handling overlapping skills, skills of other difficulties, and so on. I have no doubt that I, as a GM, could use that material to create Monster Hunters-style wildcards for other genres—it just makes the book slightly more of a time investment to use than if it had had a more "out of the box trait catalog" focus.

So personally, I'd like to vote for Power-Ups 8 (whatever it happens to be—Techniques?) sticking closer to the "trait catalog" approach of previous Power-Ups supplements. That said, I recognize this is a personal preference which not everyone may share. I can't give this supplement anything less than an A+ in terms of quality.