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Old 07-04-2013, 06:56 AM   #1
Trigonomicon
 
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Default Skills, skills everywhere

Hello sjg GURPS-forum. My username is Trigonomicon, and I'm a skill hoarder.
To be exact, I have problems choosing which skills to take, what skills are important, etc. I once made an airship mechanic with more skills than you can fit on a standard Character sheet. Recently, I tried building a questing knight and ended up with 30 skills, which feels rather excessive. Looking at the character templates available in Basic and Fantasy, few characters seems to have more than eight.

How many skills do your characters usually have, and how do you choose which to take?
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Old 07-04-2013, 06:59 AM   #2
whswhs
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Quote:
Originally Posted by Trigonomicon View Post
Hello sjg GURPS-forum. My username is Trigonomicon, and I'm a skill hoarder.
To be exact, I have problems choosing which skills to take, what skills are important, etc. I once made an airship mechanic with more skills than you can fit on a standard Character sheet. Recently, I tried building a questing knight and ended up with 30 skills, which feels rather excessive. Looking at the character templates available in Basic and Fantasy, few characters seems to have more than eight.
Those templates don't define a complete character. Rather, they provide the essentials for a functional role. You're going to want more than that for characterization.

Bill Stoddard
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Old 07-04-2013, 07:24 AM   #3
Fnugus
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Depending on the character, I usually end up with somewhere between 15-25 skills. I've seen people build characters with as few as a single skill (didn't work very well), and also once made a character where it actually made sense giving him 48 skills.

Interesting alternatives to huge skill lists might be looking at talents, and then approach with the mindset that some skills are "good enough" at default with the talent added in, while his actual field of expertise would be where he put points in. And then some points in skills outside his talent.

About choosing, I usually break it up into three parts:
1: Essential skills in the society - Area Knowledge is a good example, sometimes even needed more than once.
2: Job skills - what he needs to maintain his role in the group, as well as what he needs for his occupation/dayjob.
3: Hobby skills - what he likes to do, and is good at. This includes weaponry, if it is not included in one of the above. I rarely take any combat skills at all, unless the character is some kind of soldier

The most common skills I've seen are Area Knowledge, Acting, Connoisseur, Games, Current Affairs. Mostly, the games I'm in have a heavy focus on non-combat roleplaying. But yes, in conclusion, 15-25 skills mostly. It's not uncommon to not have enough room on the character sheet.
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Old 07-04-2013, 07:33 AM   #4
whswhs
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Looking at the character sheets for player characters in one of my two current GURPS campaigns (the one where the PCs are fairly classic adventurers), I see that they have respectively 36, 24, 30, and 37 skills, or an arithmetic mean of 31.75. So I'd say 30 skills is hardly out of line.

(In my other campaign the PCs started out at fourteen-year-old boys, so they had fewer skills!)

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Old 07-04-2013, 07:39 AM   #5
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

I usually end up with lots of skills when I make characters, too. It's part of what attracted me to GURPS in the first place. GURPS is a skill oriented game. They define and distinguish characters from each other. Embrace your long list of skills. :)

If you do want to cut down on character sheet clutter, you could ask your GM about taking a wildcard skill or two that cover broad ranges of competence.

Also, if you are taking skills just because you think they are the sort of thing that everyone in the campaign world should have some familiarity with, but your character isn't necessarily more skilled than average at it, and it won't be used in life or death situations, you can probably rely on defaults.

This probably won't help you cut down on your skill lists, but it's a free download and is definitely worth having when you are deciding what skills your character should have: GURPS Skill Categories.

It is also worthwhile to take a look at Kromm's recommended skills every adventurer should have.
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Old 07-04-2013, 08:03 AM   #6
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Quote:
Originally Posted by Trigonomicon View Post
How many skills do your characters usually have, and how do you choose which to take?
My current character has 36, most of them at [1], but the important ones still reasonably high thanks to talent and attribute choices. Most others are at around level 11 [1], because he had some training to put him above the level of pure defaults. It's a 200-point campaign, and I spent a lot of points on Advantages/templates.

I generally aimed at having 15ish in primary skills, and 11 in the aforementioned 'minor training' skills. Much of the character's breadth comes from the fact that I was expecting to be the only character with any sort of Face-like skill-set, and there was little opportunity to synch stuff with other PCs. (Despite 'blind' chargen, I'd say things have gone very well and very interesting.)
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Old 07-04-2013, 09:17 AM   #7
Gollum
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

GURPS is a role playing game mainly based on skills, indeed. So, it is normal to have characters with a lot of skills, especially if they are supposed to be "skillful" - like movie or novel heroes, skilled cops, special ops, spies, etc.

GURPS is not the only role playing game like that. Call of Cthulhu characters tend to have a lot of skills above the default level too, especially when they are seasoned. Role playing games based on character class and class level (like D&D), to the contrary, don't require so many skills. But they generally still have a lot of other stats that still makes the character sheet quite complex (powers, for D&D)

Having said that, it is possible to lower the number of skills of a given character. Talents, as said by Fnugus. Wildcard skills, as said by Mr Sandman...

And defaults.

Many skills give access to interesting defaults. So, carefully read the default of each skill before taking it. Your character may already have a good enough level in it.

A merchant who has Merchant-16 for instance, automatically has Administration-13. Taking Administration is not anymore required. A doctor with Physician-16 automatically has Diagnosis-12 and First-Aid-12. So, taking Diagnosis and First-Aid may not be necessary (unless you want to be better than a professional in those two other skills). A warrior with Shortsword-16 automatically has Knife-13, Broadsword-14 and Saber-12...

Brief, having some high skills automatically give quite good defaults in a lot of other skills. Think about it when you choose your skills.
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Old 07-04-2013, 09:54 AM   #8
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Quote:
Originally Posted by Trigonomicon View Post
How many skills do your characters usually have, and how do you choose which to take?
Looking at my last couple sheets, somewhere in the 25 to 40 range to start, with 10 or so more picked up later.

Incredibly focused characters can sometimes get away with fewer than 10 - and that's what you are seeing on the templates, those are the minimum required for a character focused entirely on the template's niche - but you are likely to be a burden to the party outside your niche, and feel like a cardboard cutout with no personal life or interests. Generally it will be that 10 or so skills that soak up most of the points though - they're the skills you are going to be rolling against in situations failure means something pretty horrible, so you want them at 15 or more, stuff your life won't depend on and you aren't going to use under stress is fine at 10 or 12.
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Old 07-04-2013, 12:47 PM   #9
johndallman
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Hum ... my personal record seems to be 76 skills, totalling 138 points, on a character that totals 406 points. Being a counter-intelligence agent can involve a lot of different tasks, and he's the party's non-specialist.

There's a PC in my Infinite Cabal campaign who demonstrates a particular kind of focus. !6 points in Two-Handed Sword, plus some more in techniques. 8 points in Holdout. No more than 1 in anything else.
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Old 07-04-2013, 12:57 PM   #10
the_matrix_walker
 
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Default Re: Skills, skills everywhere

Quote:
Originally Posted by Trigonomicon View Post
Hello sjg GURPS-forum. My username is Trigonomicon, and I'm a skill hoarder.
To be exact, I have problems choosing which skills to take, what skills are important, etc. I once made an airship mechanic with more skills than you can fit on a standard Character sheet. Recently, I tried building a questing knight and ended up with 30 skills, which feels rather excessive. Looking at the character templates available in Basic and Fantasy, few characters seems to have more than eight.

How many skills do your characters usually have, and how do you choose which to take?
My characters generally have 30-40 skills... I think you're just fine.
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