The 0-point traitless character.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But how would you justify calculus being an IQ default for a TL/8 character, but not associated with any skill, while it's clearly falls under a skill at its TL of introduction and before that is flatly impossible?

I wouldn't, being able to use calculus is uncommon enough to be worth giving someone a skill point, but plenty of things move from 'rarely learned, and thus worth points' to 'part of standard curriculum', and back. It's just part of your TL.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Why on earth shouldn't IQ defaults change?

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's why skills need to be defined at a high level of abstraction.

IQ defaults do change.

IQ defaults for TL-based skills.

When you define most math as not deriving from any skill, you've given up that infrastructure.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I wouldn't, being able to use calculus is uncommon enough to be worth giving someone a skill point, but plenty of things move from 'rarely learned, and thus worth points' to 'part of standard curriculum', and back. It's just part of your TL.

There's absolutely no reason that the 'standard curriculum' can't include things that are worth points. Something that's worth points being 'standard curriculum' just means most people have those points, not that they get the benefit for no points.

[Gnome]

I think there's a bit of a semantic debate here--some people appear to believe that by definition having points in a skill must differentiate you in some way from the general population, and therefore of course high school cannot leave most of us with any skills, since we all went to high school. On the other hand, if we define having points in a skill as some objective level of competence, then of course many (though not all) high schoolers will graduate with points in skills, because having spent years trying to develop competence in some skill, some of them have succeeded.

I'm a high school math teacher, so I can tell you that there are a lot of different ways to compare what students know or can do.
Some kids have studied a broad range of topics and know a lot about what kinds of mathematical tools are useful in which situations. A student may recognize, for example, that given two angles and an included side one can solve a triangle, and she can apply that very simple process to novel situations (like calculating the height of a tree without climbing). I would argue this is a competence, and I don't believe the average American would know how to do this, even though many of my students could, having studied it more recently. So I think a student who can solve this problem has some small piece of the skill Mathematics (Applied), even if a more educated person looks on the process involved and considers it elementary.
Others are really good at figuring out how to approach novel problems. Last week on a test, I asked my students the following question: two squares are selected randomly from a chessboard. What is the probability the two squares share a side? Many of my students were able correctly to solve this problem, using an interesting variety of creative approaches. I maintain that the average American would fail to solve this problem, so I believe I have taught those students some small piece of what we might call Mathematics (Pure).

Of course Mathematics (Pure) and Mathematics (Applied) are extremely broad, so maybe my students are gaining points in optional specialties of those, but I'm somewhat suspicious of the view that you have to study Mathematics for many years before you're even eligible to put points into it. And I don't think most Americans are Innumerate (they choose not to learn math, but they are not unable to learn it). By the time you finish elementary school, you should be numerate and ready to learn some basic math. It may take a few years before you get your first point, but if you actually bother to pay attention in school, you should walk away with some level of competency greater than you started with, and greater than the average person who a) didn't pay attention in school and b) has since long forgotten the few things they learned. Ditto for Writing (many of my students are horrible writers--but so are many of the adults I run into), History (if you want to see general ignorance of history on display, look no further than politics), etc.
While none of my students are professional Mathematicians (skill 12-14 costs a lot of points to achieve!), they have the ability to do a thing that you're not born with and the general population usually cannot do. How else to represent this in GURPS than with points in skills?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I could teach a hunter-gatherer how to operate a motor vehicle in a few hours (and I've never even driven myself).

I presume you're talking about a modern-day hunter-gatherer who has seen automobiles before, and is thus not shocked or frightened by them, and who shares a language with you? If those two barriers apply, it's a lot more than a few hours of work.

[Flyndaran]

I've ridden in cars my whole life, but that doesn't mean I could drive 50 feet without hitting something.
Knowing traffic laws alone should be a "micro-skill" in addition to operating a car semi-instinctively which is what any legal license requires.
Most accidents are about inattention, altered mental states and/or aggressive driving, not lack of skill specifically.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I presume you're talking about a modern-day hunter-gatherer who has seen automobiles before, and is thus not shocked or frightened by them, and who shares a language with you? If those two barriers apply, it's a lot more than a few hours of work.

No. I'm referring to some hypothetical hunter-gatherer from 50,000 BC whose language I've learned.

Them being shocked or frightened of the technology isn't what I'm interested in exploring here, so we can handwave that away. Perhaps I've gotten them accustomed to other unrelated modern technologies. Whatever.

My point here was that it doesn't take all that long to figure out the basics of operating a vehicle. What the gas does, what the brake does, how the steering wheel works, and so on. There are many places on earth where there are a lot of people driving on the roads with little more knowledge than this. Traffic in those places is extremely dangerous. A quick Google search reveals that Eritrea has the most dangerous traffic on earth, which was what I expected. As economic situations change, people gain access to technologies without gaining access to the structures and institutions that lead to knowledge of how to use them.

With eight to ten hours of actual practice (not hours of mindless operation; someone can have thousands of hours of mindless operation at a task and not improve. I've seen this with many skills, but game master is perhaps the most relevant here; I know some people who have been running That Other Game for decades but are just absolutely atrocious at it--they likely haven't improved since the first time they sat down to run their first game), I think someone is able to operate a motor vehicle in a way that's not suicidal or even more dangerous than most people on the road. They would probably be better than a lot of people on the road now. If the skill levels assigned by GURPS are so low that said individual can't even make it down the highway, then I think that's a problem with the rules.

As an aside, I don't drive. I hate cars. I hate riding in the contraptions. It seems every time I sit down in one of the things, one of the other drivers on the road attempts to kill us. The last time I road in a car, someone attempted to change lanes directly into us without the use of their turn signal. If we want to try to make the most sense of the GURPS rules, I would suggest that these sorts of incidents are the result of failed Driving rolls. It's not that you slam into something, totaling your car. You might simply require another driver to make a Perception roll or something, and only if they fail is there a risk of an accident. I don't know what would have happened if my friend who was driving hadn't noticed the car attempt to change lanes into where we were. Would the cars have touched and bumped off each other? Would we have been driven off the road? Would the car have flipped over? I don't know, but these sorts of situations seem very common. If this is what a failed Driving roll looks like, then it might well be the case that most people are failing them almost every commute; it's just that the consequences aren't usually that bad. I suspect, however, that the TDM for average driving might not be giving a large enough bonus. Maybe city driving should be a +6 and we should treat the average driving as having Dabbler for a skill level of 8. In that case, both drivers in a potential accident would have a skill level of 14. If we required each driver to fail a roll to have an accident, then that results in an accident roughly every twelve thousand times.

If we were to require a Driving roll every forty miles, require both drivers to fail a roll to get an accident, and then use a modified reaction roll table to determine the severity of the accident based on margin of failure, we could get something fairly realistic. I might be entirely on the wrong track with how we could best handle this, or what assumption we would need to make if we wished to do so.

I feel this is one of those things where it's interesting to see what rules we can come up with, but where the rules will have very limited applications. Perhaps there would be some use in coming up with systematic rules for Driving so we could handle the dangerous Driving activities that come up fairly often. I don't know.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Gnome

How else to represent this in GURPS than with points in skills?

By giving them access to a Default roll or giving increasing their skill as part of a Dabbler perk.

I think GURPS handles this poorly. I wish the game just had you set each skill level independently at where you have it, but the game doesn't do that, so we're left with abstractions on top of abstractions.

I do think the underlying goal ought to be to figure out what the given character's skill level is. Is it -4? Is it 3? 8? 12? GURPS does that in a rather roundabout way by using defaults.

My understanding would be that your students have raised their skill level high enough that they have some chance of success at this task, whereas the average person (who can't possibly succeed) hasn't done that.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I tend to think of a default for these skills as being the basics you would pick up in a few hours of training. I could teach a hunter-gatherer how to operate a motor vehicle in a few hours (and I've never even driven myself).

If you've never driven yourself, I think you probably underestimate the gap between your own driving ability and that of someone who does it regularly (even just for their commute). When I took driver's ed, the high school had a customized car with a second brake peddle in the shotgun seat. The first time my parents took me out driving, they started me in an empty parking lot. Both of these were very good things.

Really, the argument boils down to whether there's a difference between doing something regularly and having seen something done a lot. With driving, at least, there definitely is.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

IQ defaults do change.

IQ defaults for TL-based skills.

When you define most math as not deriving from any skill, you've given up that infrastructure.

I'm sorry, but I just don't think that works.

Let's look at a much lower level of math: simple multiplication, like, say, 12 x 15 = 180. That's grade school arithmetic, and I don't think it's reasonable to say that you need to roll against a skill to work it out; at least a large minority of Americans can do that one, on paper, or perhaps in their heads, and it's likely easy enough so many of them don't even need to roll.

If your culture has positional notation for numbers, solving that problem is easy; you just apply standard algorithm. If your culture has nonpositional notation, like Roman numbers or ancient Egyptian numerals, it's not easy. You can struggle with the complexities of XII taken XV times, or you can do

12 15
6 30
3 60 *
1 120 *

60 + 120 = 180, in the Egyptian style, or you can get out an abacus. If you have no numerals, it's even harder, though there were African cultures that did that sort of thing. And if you count "one, two, many," you can't even express the problem.

Those are TL differences (in GURPS, position notation is TL3, I think, and the Maya and Mesopotamians were advanced in mathematics; numerals are TL1; tally marks and oral counting are TL0). But they affect your ability to do arithmetic that at worst requires an IQ roll.

More generally, what you can do with an IQ roll necessarily depends on your TL and cultural background, and sometimes various other things.