Explain to me about Professional Skills

[Inky]

My first post on here!

Pretty much what the title says. Basic Set seems as if it might be implying that they're meant to be used for earning money on the side, not for adventuring. Can they be used for practical on-stage purposes? And if so, how do they differ from wildcards, which are more expensive but follow a silimar pattern of "things someone who does x for a living might be expected to know"? I'm generally all in favour of things that allow you to simplify a bunch of specialised skills!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Inky

MCan they be used for practical on-stage purposes? And if so, how do they differ from wildcards,

Professional skils are realistic skills known by realistic people who use them to earn their livings. If you can think of a use for things like "Bartender"ign an adventire such as possibly masqyerading as a bartender while undercover or even jst mixing the perfect dry martin for the King of Who-Ham then Professional Skills can be used on adventures.

Wildcard! Skills are utterly unrealistic and are meant to model the Cinematic competence of the msot impressive TV and Movie characters. The mother of all wildcard! Skils is Scicne! and that is meant to protray the fantastically broad base of scientific knowledge of characters sucha s Mr. spock from Star Trek. Realitic people do not ahve Wildcard! Skills.

[Donny Brook]

This may not be strictly by the book but to me Professional Skills represent the specific knowledge and capabilities that someone in a given skilled job would be expected to have. This comprises two basic categories:

1) integral job stuff not covered by existing named skills which would be rolled at full skill; and
2) related job stuff that is covered by existing named skills which would be rolled at a default.

Take a bartender for example. To mix drinks, and set up and maintain a bar area she would roll against Professional Skill (Bartender). To source and purchase liquor, she might make a Merchant roll at a reasonable default from Professional Skill (Bartender).

Or take a soldier. She would roll against Professional Skill (Soldier) to keep her kit properly or to identify vehicles and uniforms. On the other hand, to get a transfer to a desireable posting, she might make an Administration roll at a reasonable default from Professional Skill (Soldier).

Also note, while it's not explicitly said, Professional Skills are on a sort of rough continuum of catch-all skills: Hobby Skills (Easy), Professional Skills (Average), Expert Skills (Hard) and Wildcard! skills (triple Hard). This is not formalized and there are qualitative differences in how these are each described, but it's worth thinking about them in relation to each other.

[malloyd]

Professional Skills - like Expert Skill, Hobby Skill, Divine Curse, Unusual Background etc. - are actually generic placeholders for skills, disadvantages, advantages etc. that aren't otherwise defined, given a bit of fluff to make them seem like something more.

Specifically they are not something that exists for every possible profession that is the only skill you would need to do that particular job. Yes I know the Basic Set fluff makes them sound something like that, but it's not the authorial intent, nor are they used that way in most predesigned characters or NPCs. They are not intended to be catch-all skills on the pattern of Soldier. Most characters should not have one, they're there to give the GM a place to stick new traits that seem necessary but don't quite fit anything already defined.

The vast majority of professions require one or more skills that are already defined. Others simply don't have enough learnable content to be worth a skill at all (though I do use a perk, Job Experience, for those if you are absolutely determined have something on your character sheet that indicates you are already familiar with how to do them and will not need the two days of on the job training that might otherwise be required to get up to speed on them). The GM should only be creating new Professional Skills when that isn't working.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by malloyd

are actually generic placeholders for skills

This. Notice that we have Expert, Professional, and Hobby categories, not coincidentally corresponding to Hard, Average, and Easy skills. Is it really the case that all job skills are average, none of them Hard or Easy to learn? No. These are just places to put skills that might come up that don't exist. (And with the length of the GURPS skill list, that doesn't happen often. The most common place is, in fact, professions, which is probably why they got the names that they did. It's more suggestive than "Generic Average Skill".)

I've rarely felt the need to use these skills (really categories) in a game.

Personally, I've never really been happy with the catch-all skills like Soldier. That seems to be an attempt to address the fact that the system doesn't have tiny micro-skills to put a number of everything someone would probably know how to do, without going all the way to Wildcards. Little things not worth having a skill of their own, but where someone still wanted a skill roll, as well as the ability to distinguish between people that were better or worse at it. You could use Professional skills to lump together all those little bits of specialty knowledge. (A chef knows how to maintain and sharpen knives, but they don't have Armory; they're familiar with measuring devices, but they're hardly Expert (Metrology); they know how ripe produce is, but not by having a specialized sort of Farming, etc.) But that's minor stuff not likely to come up in an adventure.

[AlexanderHowl]

Professional Skill (Chef) is more about running a professional kitchen. It should replace Accounting, Leadership, Merchant, etc in relation to running a kitchen only. It does not have anything to do with cooking (which is covered by the Cooking Skill). A kitchen manager would be an example of someone with Professional Skill (Chef) who might lack Cooking.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Personally, I've never really been happy with the catch-all skills like Soldier.

Inversely I love the Hobby, Professional, and Expert skills.

Note also that Housekeeping is one of these skills, as depending on the TL and setting, someone can use Housekeeping to repair a garment (Sewing), prepare a meal (Cooking), start a fire (Survival or Cooking), program a device (Computer Use, Electronics Operation), preform minor home repairs (Carpentry, Mechanic, Masonry, etc), treat very minor wounds (First Aid), track supplies and 'to-do' lists and keep family members on task (Administration), balance the household books (Accounting), clean up semi-dangerous spills (Hazardous Materials), as well as keep the home clean and well kept.


See also Gardening (Hobby) and Farming (Professional) as further refinements of these sorts of skills...

[hal]

My two cents:

Professional skills are those skills that are specific towards getting a job done. They contain snippets of training that overlap more specific skills without the full knowledge contained within the specific skill. Soldier isn’t about demolitions, but simple explosive knowledge might default to Soldier-2. A chef might not have full understanding of accounting, but might roll at Chef-3. A person who makes a living making people over so that they look better might not have barber skills outright, but default to their professional skill-2 to cut hair in a pleasing fashion. Think of professional skills as a synthesis of techniques that work together well enough to perform specific tasks reliably

[maximara]

Originally Posted by hal

My two cents:

Professional skills are those skills that are specific towards getting a job done. They contain snippets of training that overlap more specific skills without the full knowledge contained within the specific skill. Soldier isn’t about demolitions, but simple explosive knowledge might default to Soldier-2. A chef might not have full understanding of accounting, but might roll at Chef-3. A person who makes a living making people over so that they look better might not have barber skills outright, but default to their professional skill-2 to cut hair in a pleasing fashion. Think of professional skills as a synthesis of techniques that work together well enough to perform specific tasks reliably

By contrast Expert Skills could be viewed as 'a poor man's wildcard skill'. It certainly doesn't help that some of the examples by their very nature would include more general forms of the skills they cover.

For example, Egyptology would require a more general knowledge of Anthropology and Archaeology. Sure someone with this skill couldn't tell you about the Native Americans but they would still know how to excavate a site there.

Similarly, Computer Security is a little on the broad side as such security would involve having a good handle on what the weakness of the OS they working with are.

For example, the poor sod who had to insure his Windows XP network is secure is going to have a wildly different skill set from his Windows 10 counterpart and both will have a different skill set from one who has to deal with MacOS classic or one of the many flavors of Linux out there (which includes the current version of the MacOS)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by maximara

By contrast Expert Skills could be viewed as 'a poor man's wildcard skill'. It certainly doesn't help that some of the examples by their very nature would include more general forms of the skills they cover.

For example, Egyptology would require a more general knowledge of Anthropology and Archaeology. Sure someone with this skill couldn't tell you about the Native Americans but they would still know how to excavate a site there.

It doesn't work that way. The writeups of Expert Skill in the Basic Set make it clear that they are bodies of factual knowledge. There's no "how to" aspect. It's stated explicitly that Expert Skill never grants the ability to do practical tasks—and that would include the practical tasks of a science that produces new knowledge. Setting up an experimental apparatus, or doing a dig, or dissecting a corpse would take a non-Expert skill.