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Old 03-19-2021, 02:28 AM   #11
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

As usual with Techniques, it's often hard to see them as being worthwhile unless you have a very specific reason to focus on one. Since they don't synergize with each other, and have to compete with a full bump to the underlying skill.

On the other hand, sometimes such a focus could easily amount to 'the campaign focus'. Parahumans, Organized Crime, or Occult Underground could all be plausible Area Knowledge 'techniques'...and ones some characters might focus on very heavily indeed. To their occasional detriment when they need to engage with more mundane topics...
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Old 03-19-2021, 03:05 AM   #12
RedMattis
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

Techniques have a tendency to be either under or over-powered. I'd hate to see my player with "Extra Attack 1" pick up the feint technique. It would be a 6-point use an action to make enemies have no defenses and make combat boring. Similarly dropping a whole bunch of points into polevault-kick seems... excessive.

Personally I'd rather just tie all that stuff to advantages like Trained by Master or some homebrew advantage that reduces the penalites for a bunch of those cool-but-impractical techniques.

In general I like the idea of using Talents instead of skills as soon as you start getting overlap. Letting an engineer character have a 5-point talent that covers all the supplementary skills to being an engineer is never going to unbalance anything. It just means he won't pay 40 points for the ability to maybe successfully perform space-ship repairs on that one meeting where the group's ship crashes on an alien planet. (If the campaign actually _will_ have a bunch of chances to use those skills, just bump the talent up to 7 or 10-points per level)
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Old 03-19-2021, 09:14 AM   #13
naloth
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

Quote:
Originally Posted by RedMattis View Post
Techniques have a tendency to be either under or over-powered. I'd hate to see my player with "Extra Attack 1" pick up the feint technique. It would be a 6-point use an action to make enemies have no defenses and make combat boring. Similarly dropping a whole bunch of points into polevault-kick seems... excessive.
Personally I've never really used techniques except for MA techniques. I prefer perks or advantages (typically UB) depending on how minor it is. I'd give most of the martial art signature technique moves a similar treatment and lump them in with style perks.

For the engineer that can pull out random skills, I'd use Wild Talent (engineering only) plus any applicable talent to adjust his effective skill level.
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Old 03-19-2021, 03:23 PM   #14
dcarson
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

I get most books via ebook anymore and don't go to bookstores as often. It used to be if you wanted me to know where someplace was it went like

Near X and Y Street
blank look
Foo neighborhood
blank look
near XYZ used book store
oh I know where that is
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Old 03-22-2021, 11:37 AM   #15
Michele
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Udine, Italy
Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

Personally, I tend to allow Techniques only when there is either an example of a penalty to a skill in the rules, or when it is easily conceivable that a given feat, performed with a given Skill, would always require a penalty. In these cases, specializing in that specific feat amounts to training in a specific Technique, within that Skill, and this seems reasonable under the general concept of Techniques.

Just like you can't have "Punching" as a Technique for Boxing (Boxing, say the RAW, is "all about punching", and additionally you don't get a penalty for punching with Boxing), I don't think you can have a Technique such as "bookstores" within your Area Knowledge skill. That's just plain straight Area Knowledge.

Naturally, it might be you want to specialize in bookstores, rather than or in addition to the general knowledge of your city. In that case, I'd use the Optional Specialties solution. It should work only for Average or more difficult IQ Skills, however. If a player really insisted on buying an optional specialty for an Easy Skill, I'd cut him some slack, though.

Is there a penalty to any Area Knowledge roll under the RAW? Yes, secret knowledge (the RAW don't state the amount of such a penalty). So you could indeed allow a Technique, not for mundane bookstores, but, say, for bookstores secretly selling forbidden occult knowledge tomes. That might start from a -2 penalty, I suppose; after all, if those tomes are for sale, the customer base might be small and select but it exists, thus demand-driven knowledge should be not too hard to get.
State-wide or continent-wide Area Knowledge of vampire tombs or carefully concealed ancient ley lines would probably be -4 or -5 to start with, OTOH.
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Old 03-22-2021, 02:20 PM   #16
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

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Is there a penalty to any Area Knowledge roll under the RAW?
Technically, of course there is, because ad-hoc TDMs are applicable to every skill or attribute roll, but I assume you're looking for specified ones. I want to say yes, but to my bafflement Social Engineering takes the view that Area Knowledge is never used directly for search rolls, only as a complementary skill, so there goes the example I would have offered.
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Old 03-22-2021, 02:55 PM   #17
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Technically, of course there is, because ad-hoc TDMs are applicable to every skill or attribute roll, but I assume you're looking for specified ones. I want to say yes, but to my bafflement Social Engineering takes the view that Area Knowledge is never used directly for search rolls, only as a complementary skill, so there goes the example I would have offered.
Why would you use Area Knowledge for a search roll? A search roll is "Is there an X in this city, and can I find it?" If your Area Knowledge tells you that there is an X in the city, then it doesn't seem as if you need to search. It's like the way you can use an Influence roll to get a good reaction, as opposed to having the other person make a reaction roll; they're two different ways to accomplish the same thing.
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Old 03-22-2021, 04:11 PM   #18
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

Well, I have stumbled over some explicit penalties to Area Knowledge, though probably not good candidates for Techniques: Geographic and Temporal Scope, B176.
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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Why would you use Area Knowledge for a search roll? A search roll is "Is there an X in this city, and can I find it?" If your Area Knowledge tells you that there is an X in the city, then it doesn't seem as if you need to search. It's like the way you can use an Influence roll to get a good reaction, as opposed to having the other person make a reaction roll; they're two different ways to accomplish the same thing.
You'd use Area Knowledge to inform where you look. You may not know of an expert in alchemical derivatives of ectoplasm, but you know what places such an expert would likely be found if they're around.

More to my point though a Search roll's characteristics mostly seem to fit well to the otherwise poorly supported question of whether searching your Area Knowledge turns up what you want. It would probably be fast to perform, not permit repeated attempts, and not use some of the modifiers of a more physical search (advertisement isn't really applicable) but there are substantial parallels.
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Old 03-23-2021, 02:56 AM   #19
Michele
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Technically, of course there is, because ad-hoc TDMs are applicable to every skill or attribute roll, but I assume you're looking for specified ones.
Yes, sorry. I mean specific examples provided within the Skill description.

For instance, I once created a hostile NPC who was a fraudster; among other things, she used Fortune Telling to dupe her targets. Since the Skill description mentions that you are at -3 with that Skill if you use it to replace Interrogation (to subtly extract information from the target) and Fast-Talk (to dupe the target), I decided one could specifically develop a Technique for this sort of thing. The reference Skill was Fortune Telling (Tarots), and the default starting level was of course at -3.

In the case of Area Knowledge, the Skill description tells us you can roll against it for secret knowledge - but at a penalty. So I suppose you could have a Technique for finding area information about, say, places of power, transdimensional gates, or witch covens. If you studied that Technique, you'd gradually erase the penalty you'd start from when looking for such secret knowledge.
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Old 03-23-2021, 02:59 AM   #20
Michele
 
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Default Re: Technigues for Area Knowledge

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Why would you use Area Knowledge for a search roll? A search roll is "Is there an X in this city, and can I find it?" If your Area Knowledge tells you that there is an X in the city, then it doesn't seem as if you need to search. It's like the way you can use an Influence roll to get a good reaction, as opposed to having the other person make a reaction roll; they're two different ways to accomplish the same thing.
Well, yes, I agree. When looking for something in a place (say a city), I'd roll against Area Knowledge if I had that Skill for that location, or (at a penalty) if I had that Skill for an area including the location or included in the location.

But if I were in a city for which I had no applicable Area Knowledge at all, I'd probably prefer trying with a straight Search roll.

That's what I'd do, one's mileage might vary.
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