What's with the modesty about stats?

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by naloth

That is a bit of an exaggeration. You can only default things you could potentially know. If it's something completely outside your background you can't claim a default for it. Defaults aren't for knowing nothing, it's just less knowledge than you would get if you had studied/trained enough to justify a point in that skill.

Coming back, after a 10 hour night of sleep... That I really needed!

Yes, when I said "without the least hour of training", it was a bit exaggerated. But not very much...

If we take an average modern man as example and read the Skill List from Accounting to Zen archery, we can see that our IQ 20 character would have a lot of mental skills by default, coming from high-school, TV, ordinary life... "the default from Scuba skill assumes you are from a world where scuba gear exists and where most people would have some idea - if only from TV - of how to use it.", page 173.

Let's see that... My mother was an accountant and spoke a lot about his work. So, I've got the Accounting default skill. I was on the stage several times during high school and college. So, I've got the Acting default. My job requires me to deal a lot with administrations. So I've got the Administration default. I have two cats, had a lot of dogs, my parents breeds broads and ducks. So I've got the Animal handling default. I studied philosophy and read text from Levi Strauss and several other anthropologists. So I've got the Anthropology default. Etc.

Since my IQ would probably be something like 11 in GURPS, it wouldn't be a problem. It would give me a score of 5 or 6 in all those skills, that is a maximum of10% chance of succeeding an average task. I'd better avoid saying I can do this kind of job!

But our IQ 20 guy would really have all those skills at level 14 or better! This is very different.

Is it a problem? No. Tintin, Indiana Jones, MacGyver and James Bond can do a lot of things like that. And GURPS is intended to allow to play such characters.

Now, these are not what we name "realistic characters".

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Lamech

Yeah, sure. First sleep:
Not how GURPS does fatigue for missed sleep. If you fail to go to sleep at your bedtime, you lose one FP. So example worked day by day:

Day 1: Guy is at full FP, 7 hours of sleep and stays awakes 17 hours, losing a FP
Day 2: Guy is at FP-1, 7 hours of sleep and stays awake 17 hours, losing a FP
Day 3: Guy is at FP-2, 7 hours of sleep and stays awake 17 hours, losing a FP
...
Day N: Guy is at FP-N+1, 7 hours of sleep and stays awake 17 hours, losing a FP.
So at day 14 he is at -13 FP, and in the negatives. At which point he will have no more than a few minutes of movement left in him or her.

I read again the rules this morning. It's easier after a good night of sleep! You are absolutely right.

Originally Posted by Lamech

Defaults being unrealistic: It you want to be a surgeon you might as well skip surgery classes and buy up physician. That gives you the physician skill you need, and it defaults to surgery, and diagnosis. Which you also need.

Or consider engineering. If you are an expert with say... electronics you are also competent with civil engineering, nanomachines, spaceships and the rest of the engineering specialties. Sometimes the best way to learn survival is by studying naturalist instead.

Here again, you are right.

But, actually, this kind of problems appears in every other roleplaying game I played. Or the reverse problem.

Either there is no default roll (Call of Cthulhu), and a champion of car race has about no luck to drive a truck, either there are default rolls and the players can inevitably go too far with the rules to optimize their character...

But the GM is always free to forbid a character concept, like a surgeon without the surgery skill, for instance.

Originally Posted by Lamech

The rules for learning under study are unrealistic. (At least if you go with the 15=expert, 50ish equals normal person) Someone coming out of medical school should have 60-70 points in their medical skills at least. And another 40 in whatever they did in college.

I debate longly from this topic in another thread and, as soon as the number you choose remains "realistic", the study rules remain "realistic" too.

No teacher will teach you a subject 8 hours a day, for instance. Even if you are very rich and can hire a private teacher. So, the best numbers to take into account for long term study are 5 CP per semester.

Furthermore, no job involves only one skill. Lets take your surgeon example. To be a surgeon, in real life, you have to know Surgery, of course. But also Administration (hospital), Biology, Chemistry, Diagnosis, First Aid, Pharmacy, etc.

Of course, some of theses skills default to others, but a surgeon apprentice really learn them. He spend time doing so. So, as GM, I would require the player to invest some CP in them.

Originally Posted by Lamech

The rules for starvation are awful. I'm sitting five or six meals down right now. Yet, I'm pretty sure I'm well above the half move threshold.

The rules for gravity changes are awful as I mentioned. If a guy can lift a ten kilo weight and you halve the gravity he can lift more than a twenty kilo weight. His arms no longer need to spend as much force on the arms themselves. However not so in GURPS.

Yes. As said above, geometric curves would do the job much better here. But the game has to remain playable. And GURPS designer wanted it to be as much playable as possible.

Which is the case. I don't need a pocket calculator during game. I wouldn't like to need one.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

The Last Gasp article does a lot to make physical exertion fatigue geometric and workable, for the most part.

Where can I find it, please? I didn't read it...

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by DCB

To my eye, at least, the "14=expert" designations for skill levels are just meant to give an intuitive description, not an iron-clad ruling. There's no reason not to say, for example, "most pure-math professors are experts at Mathematics(Pure)".

Absolutely!

When we say that a skill level of 14 makes the character an expert, it doesn't mean that all experts have only 14 in their skill. Some have 14, some others may have 16 and some others 20 or better.

The Choosing Your Skill Levels box is explicit, but it is only intended to help players and GMs to know what mean skill levels, and to avoid them creating a expert accountant with an Accounting skill of 12 or a violin beginner with a Violin skill of 18.

Furthermore, if you read this box well, you will notice that it doesn't give flat numbers but ranges.

• Professional: 12 to 13.
• Expert: 14 and more.
• Master: 20 to 25.

This box even doesn't speak about Amateur. But we can suppose that amateur (who are not as good as professionals) are supposed to be in the 9 to 11 range.

With my long experience, for instance, I'm not anymore a beginner in Driving. But I'm neither a professional. So, my Driving skill is between 9 and 11. If I choose 12, I'm going too far. The Choosing Your Skill Levels box is precisely designed to help a player or a GM doing that kind of reasoning.

It is vey useful. But it is not supposed to be hindering. Some amateurs, for instance, are as good as professionals...

And, to came back to the topic of this thread, it helps to know what attribute scores may be adequate for a given character in a given genre.

Are you sure that your character is able to be as good as an expert in most mental skills?

Originally Posted by Vynticator

That line of thinking just seems odd to me. I don't object to saying 'my game is embedded in harsh realism and I will stat cap at 14 for PCs' at all, it's the idea that the most renowned figures in human history had peak stats at 16 or so.

The main question here is not a question of cap. It is: what sort of characters do you want for your campaign?

Heroes able to do almost everything without training, like James Bond, Indiana Jones, Mac Gyver or Tintin? Or people like us, who would better not trying to pilot a plain if they didn't learn to do it... for a long time?

GURPS is designed to allow you to play both. And even more. Any character, in any genre. Anything you want... So, with such a game, you have a choice to make. It is inevitable.

[Vynticator]

If the problem is with default skill levels, as seems to be the case from most posts, then that's a reason to be much stricter with allowing skills to default. Defaults seem to be the mental equivalent of a 'wild swing'; maybe one should never allow default rolls on higher than 9 effective skill after modifiers.

That would free up a wider range of IQ or DX scores. But I admit it is quite a drastic house rule.

I think the post suggesting IQ is too composite makes a valuable point, though 4e does a much better job of allowing variety in mental scores. With Talents, negative Talents, advantages/disadvantages like Low Empathy, Will and Per scored separately, it is much easier to express the kind of intelligences people may be trying to express.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Where can I find it, please? I didn't read it...

Pyramid #3/44, Alternate GURPS II.

[Vynticator]

I should add, my thought about 9 as a cap for defaults was only a suggestion related to defaults off raw stats - I think there's a good case for higher defaults from closely-related skills, eg. Shortsword skill when used to Broadswords.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Vynticator

If the problem is with default skill levels, as seems to be the case from most posts, then that's a reason to be much stricter with allowing skills to default. Defaults seem to be the mental equivalent of a 'wild swing'; maybe one should never allow default rolls on higher than 9 effective skill after modifiers.

Personally, I disagree strongly that familiarities shouldn't affect defaults. The effect of that ruling is to make a journeyman professional and someone who saw the tools of the trade used on TV once equally proficient when confronted with a task falling under the skill, but under strange circumstances or using different equipment.

Normal people with 9-11 in Driving skill, but perhaps used only to a series of diesel-powered, manual-transmission economy cars they've owned one after another, and any active teenager (DX 10+) whose driving experience consists of watching Vin Diesel perform Tokyo drifts are thus made equally inept at driving an automatic luxury limosine in traffic. The thousands of hours of experience driving in traffic, albeit in a different car with a different transmission, translate into no benefit at all, because the character with the skill suffers -6 in familiarity penalties but the character using defaults is somehow exempt from them.

By the same token, a professional rifleman (skill 12) and a civilian who has watched a lot of Rambo movies but never touched a gun will have the same skill level (namely skill 6) with a bolt-action .308 rifle on a bipod unless the soldier has had time to familiarise himself with the weapon.

This is unrealistic and it encourages high stats at the expensive of skills, which will tend to produce characters that are disturbingly alike and who will be about as good at tasks far removed from their supposed specialities as they are within them. Clearly the highest IQ and DX that can be afforded within their point budget will be preferable to spending the points on skills if these come with professional levels at nearly all skills which are, moreover, immune to familiarity penalties.

By the same token, I think a good way to distinguish people who have done something before, even if they haven't trained enough to rate a point in the skill, from true novices whose default is the result of watching TV, is to have the former be familiar with the most basic tasks and the latter be unfamiliar with more or less everything that falls under the skill.

I think a liberal application of familiarity penalties to defaults will sharply cut-down on the cinematic ubercompetence of characters with Attributes even slightly above the norm and if GMs link the appropriateness of a character having a given familiarity with his number of points in the skill*, players have a good reason to sometimes opt for an experienced, well-trained and educated character over a naturally gifted one.

*Most neatly done by linking the number of permissable familiarities to the relative skill level, if familiarities are written down. If they are, instead, worked out in play on a case-by-case basis, I like having the character make a roll against their relative skill level + 10, modified by the rarity of the familiarity and how likely it would fit into the established background of the PC. Success means that the character is familiar with the desired tool, method or environment.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

By the same token, a professional rifleman (skill 12) and a civilian who has watched a lot of Rambo movies but never touched a gun will have the same skill level (namely skill 6) with a bolt-action .308 rifle on a bipod unless the soldier has had time to familiarise himself with the weapon.

Shooter A and Shooter B both have DX 10. Shooter A has seen guns used in movies (Default), Shooter B has practiced a bit with his uncles AR-15 (1 point in Guns (Rifle)). Give them each an AI AWM (different action, chambering, and mount from the AR-15), and Shooter A is better for his lack of practice than Shooter B. Unless there is a rule that familiarity penalties can't lower skill below default.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Pyramid #3/44, Alternate GURPS II.

And one of my favorite articles to date, along with the realistic bows ones.
I really must find out who wrote them and thank him some time. ;)