Minimum Skill Count

[Kromm]

The plausible minimum for me is probably three skills:

1. A hobby. This could imply an actual Hobby Skill, but it might be something else: Combat Sport (if you study karate at the gym), Connoisseur, Dancing, Driving (if your idea of fun is cruising around in your lowrider all day), Games, Musical Instrument, Sports, Swimming, . . . almost anything. Those old guys who sit on the park bench all day, every day would take Area Knowledge or Current Affairs of some sort as a hobby, for instance.
   
   
2. An occupation. This might require a Professional Skill, a trade (Carpentry, Masonry, etc.), or something else: Driving for a cabbie, Housekeeping for a maid, Panhandling for a beggar, Savoir-Faire for a trust-fund kid, and so on. If it's how you obtain your money – or the necessities of life directly – it counts.
   
   
3. A lifestyle. The relevant skill covers negotiating your daily life, whether that's Carousing for staggering through booze-filled nights, Housekeeping to fetch the groceries and heat up food, Streetwise to avoid getting stabbed, Urban Survival to sleep in the streets, or something else.

Plenty of hobbies, occupations, and lifestyles demand multiple skills. In practice, it's hard to be a card-playing, hard-drinking cabbie in a big city if you don't have all of Area Knowledge, Carousing, Driving, Gambling, Games, Streetwise, and maybe a bit of Intimidation or Merchant for collecting certain fares. Interesting people are likely to have six to nine skills.

Which has nothing to do with the heroes of adventures, of course. Those are generally not only interesting people, but also exceptional ones.

Even a "pure combat monster" in fantasy will want a Melee Weapon skill and Shield; Knife for backup; a ranged combat skill; Fast-Draw for their melee weapon, knife, and/or ammo; and unarmed striking and grappling skills. That's seven to nine skills just for violence, and their friends will likely insist that they also take Climbing, Hiking, and Stealth so they're not a liability. Now we're up to 10-12 skills, and the GM might be unwilling to accept the character if there's no context, be that Armoury for a mercenary who has to look after his own gear, Leadership and/or Tactics for a captain, or Riding and Savoir-Faire for a knight. Call it a dozen skills.

The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying game offers a good case study. That game has a greatly condensed skill list relative to GURPS. Even so, discounting spells, the 15 pregenerated characters for it have 17-31 skills apiece, with 22 skills being the mean and median, and one of the modes. So heroes are going to be boasting close to two-dozen skills even in narrowly focused campaigns such as those featuring little but dungeon crawls. I'd expect even higher numbers for broad-focus campaigns where the PCs must be self-reliant and ready for anything: Age of Sail explorers, modern-day commandos or spies, futuristic space crew, etc.