Skills, skills everywhere
 

Hello sjg GURPS-forum. My username is Trigonomicon, and I'm a skill hoarder.
To be exact, I have problems choosing which skills to take, what skills are important, etc. I once made an airship mechanic with more skills than you can fit on a standard Character sheet. Recently, I tried building a questing knight and ended up with 30 skills, which feels rather excessive. Looking at the character templates available in Basic and Fantasy, few characters seems to have more than eight.

How many skills do your characters usually have, and how do you choose which to take?

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Those templates don't define a complete character. Rather, they provide the essentials for a functional role. You're going to want more than that for characterization.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Depending on the character, I usually end up with somewhere between 15-25 skills. I've seen people build characters with as few as a single skill (didn't work very well), and also once made a character where it actually made sense giving him 48 skills.

Interesting alternatives to huge skill lists might be looking at talents, and then approach with the mindset that some skills are "good enough" at default with the talent added in, while his actual field of expertise would be where he put points in. And then some points in skills outside his talent.

About choosing, I usually break it up into three parts:
1: Essential skills in the society - Area Knowledge is a good example, sometimes even needed more than once.
2: Job skills - what he needs to maintain his role in the group, as well as what he needs for his occupation/dayjob.
3: Hobby skills - what he likes to do, and is good at. This includes weaponry, if it is not included in one of the above. I rarely take any combat skills at all, unless the character is some kind of soldier

The most common skills I've seen are Area Knowledge, Acting, Connoisseur, Games, Current Affairs. Mostly, the games I'm in have a heavy focus on non-combat roleplaying. But yes, in conclusion, 15-25 skills mostly. It's not uncommon to not have enough room on the character sheet.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Looking at the character sheets for player characters in one of my two current GURPS campaigns (the one where the PCs are fairly classic adventurers), I see that they have respectively 36, 24, 30, and 37 skills, or an arithmetic mean of 31.75. So I'd say 30 skills is hardly out of line.

(In my other campaign the PCs started out at fourteen-year-old boys, so they had fewer skills!)

Bill Stoddard

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I usually end up with lots of skills when I make characters, too. It's part of what attracted me to GURPS in the first place. GURPS is a skill oriented game. They define and distinguish characters from each other. Embrace your long list of skills. :)

If you do want to cut down on character sheet clutter, you could ask your GM about taking a wildcard skill or two that cover broad ranges of competence.

Also, if you are taking skills just because you think they are the sort of thing that everyone in the campaign world should have some familiarity with, but your character isn't necessarily more skilled than average at it, and it won't be used in life or death situations, you can probably rely on defaults.

This probably won't help you cut down on your skill lists, but it's a free download and is definitely worth having when you are deciding what skills your character should have: GURPS Skill Categories.

It is also worthwhile to take a look at Kromm's recommended skills every adventurer should have.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

My current character has 36, most of them at [1], but the important ones still reasonably high thanks to talent and attribute choices. Most others are at around level 11 [1], because he had some training to put him above the level of pure defaults. It's a 200-point campaign, and I spent a lot of points on Advantages/templates.

I generally aimed at having 15ish in primary skills, and 11 in the aforementioned 'minor training' skills. Much of the character's breadth comes from the fact that I was expecting to be the only character with any sort of Face-like skill-set, and there was little opportunity to synch stuff with other PCs. (Despite 'blind' chargen, I'd say things have gone very well and very interesting.)

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

GURPS is a role playing game mainly based on skills, indeed. So, it is normal to have characters with a lot of skills, especially if they are supposed to be "skillful" - like movie or novel heroes, skilled cops, special ops, spies, etc.

GURPS is not the only role playing game like that. Call of Cthulhu characters tend to have a lot of skills above the default level too, especially when they are seasoned. Role playing games based on character class and class level (like D&D), to the contrary, don't require so many skills. But they generally still have a lot of other stats that still makes the character sheet quite complex (powers, for D&D)

Having said that, it is possible to lower the number of skills of a given character. Talents, as said by Fnugus. Wildcard skills, as said by Mr Sandman...

And defaults.

Many skills give access to interesting defaults. So, carefully read the default of each skill before taking it. Your character may already have a good enough level in it.

A merchant who has Merchant-16 for instance, automatically has Administration-13. Taking Administration is not anymore required. A doctor with Physician-16 automatically has Diagnosis-12 and First-Aid-12. So, taking Diagnosis and First-Aid may not be necessary (unless you want to be better than a professional in those two other skills). A warrior with Shortsword-16 automatically has Knife-13, Broadsword-14 and Saber-12...

Brief, having some high skills automatically give quite good defaults in a lot of other skills. Think about it when you choose your skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Looking at my last couple sheets, somewhere in the 25 to 40 range to start, with 10 or so more picked up later.

Incredibly focused characters can sometimes get away with fewer than 10 - and that's what you are seeing on the templates, those are the minimum required for a character focused entirely on the template's niche - but you are likely to be a burden to the party outside your niche, and feel like a cardboard cutout with no personal life or interests. Generally it will be that 10 or so skills that soak up most of the points though - they're the skills you are going to be rolling against in situations failure means something pretty horrible, so you want them at 15 or more, stuff your life won't depend on and you aren't going to use under stress is fine at 10 or 12.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Hum ... my personal record seems to be 76 skills, totalling 138 points, on a character that totals 406 points. Being a counter-intelligence agent can involve a lot of different tasks, and he's the party's non-specialist.

There's a PC in my Infinite Cabal campaign who demonstrates a particular kind of focus. !6 points in Two-Handed Sword, plus some more in techniques. 8 points in Holdout. No more than 1 in anything else.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

My characters generally have 30-40 skills... I think you're just fine.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

My advice is that you build characters you want to play, and characters that don't clash too violently with the rest of the group and don't worry about the exact composition of said characters. Ultimately, the game is about having fun and following exact pre-planned recipes are rarely a way to fun.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I dont think 30 skills is excessive, its all about what makes sense.

Last time I made a character that had less than 30 different skills was a viking warrior and he almost hit 30.

I guess this is probably because of the abolisment of the 1/2 point in 4e, making taking a skill a much more serious investment of ones character

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Not unusual. It isn't.

Given 100-200 point characters, I usually have around 50+ skills. I general spend about 1/2 of my character point total on attributes, 1/2 on skills, and as many advantages points as disadvantage points. To help keep me from missing anything obvious, I make sure I look over relevant templates, lenses, and GURPS Skill Categories. I also read up on my advantages and disadvantages and pick skills that compliment them.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I'm definitely a skill-o-holic as well, and probably come in around 40 skills as a baseline, often supplemented with a level of Dabbler for some fractional skill goodness to go along with it.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

The freedom to add a plethora of skills for all the reasons suggested above is one of the best things about GURPS. Getting away from the confines of class and level restrictions allows a much richer characterisation process. Go with it!

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

My player's characters have a few dozen skills, usually; even when I'm allowing Wildcard skills in that campaign.

I encourage them to spend about two-thirds of their points in attributes and advantages, with the remaining one-third in perks and skills. (... in campaigns that have point budgets anywise.)

I give them a list of skills I expect everyone to be professionally competent at. They determine which skills their character needs to fulfill their core competencies, take those up to the campaign's suggested skill level and then spend the rest on fluff and background skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Starting skill list from a junior early-medieval noble (150pts):

Area Know. (Welsh march)
Bow
Brawling
Broadsword
Diplomacy
Disguise
Fast-draw (sword)
Hidden Lore: Family history
Leadership
Knife
Naturalist
Riding: Equine
Savoir-faire
Shield
Spear
Stealth
Streetwise
Survival (Forests)
Tactics
Tracking
Hiking
Teaching
Knife Throwing
Scrounging
Strategy (Cavalry)
Animal Handling (Equine)
Observation
Intimidation


Starting skill list from a Traveller adventure face-man (200pts):

Acting
Performance
Disguise
Prof.skill (Vid production)
Merchant
Mimic (speech)
Savoir Faire
Body Language
Carousing
Area Kn.(Sylean Federation)
Observation
Diplomacy
Leadership
Propaganda
Dancing
Singing
Beam Weapon (Pistol)
Guns (Gyroc)
Fast-draw (pistol)
Stealth
First Aid
Tactics (Space)
Knife
Computer Operation
Photography
Prospecting
Autohypnosis
Karate
Breath Control


A professor/amateur mage in a monster hunters campaign (300cp):

Acrobatics
Acting
Area Know: Europe
Area Know: Languedoc
Brawling
Carousing
Climbing
Connoisseur (Film)
Current Affairs (Headline)/TL7
Current Affairs (Pop Culture)/TL7
Diplomacy
Expert Skill (Conspiracy)
Fast-Talk
Guns/TL7 (Pistol)
Hiking
History (Classical era Gaul)
History (Roman Catholicism)
Knife
Linguistics
Naturalist
Observation
Occultism
Propaganda
Public Speaking
Savoir-faire (High Society)
Semiotics
Sex Appeal
Sleight of Hand
Sociology
Stealth
Streetwise
Teaching
Throwing
Wrestling
Archaeology
Architecture/TL7
Artist (Drawing)
Computer Operation/TL7
Computer Programming/TL7
Sewing
Math (Applied)
First Aid
Intel Analysis
Literature
Musical Instr (Lute)
Philosophy
Psychology/TL7
Research/TL7
Swimming
Writing

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Yeah, 20-30 skills to start is pretty normal for me.

If you really want to cut down on skills for some reason, you can think "what are the MOST important or frequent things the PC should be able to do?" and narrow the list down to just those skills. Of course, if you do that, you'll be relying on defaults for everything else, which is hard to do unless you have a GM willing to hand out bonuses for easy tasks, taking extra time, having helpers, etc. You can get away with that more in larger groups, too, because someone will probably have the skill you don't.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Whenever I make a character, I go down the skill list in Characters and take down every single one that makes sense for the character concept and that I can justify the character having.

This strategy often does result in a character having a lot of skills, but I don't see anything wrong with that. Because the skill list is very big and many of the skills are fairly specific, I would expect characters to have many, unless they were meant to be young, inexperience, and/or particularly inept.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

It might not be exceedingly realistic, but most of my characters at more than 200 points have at least 50-60 skills. Having said that, characters with more than 200 points aren't that realistic either, unless you're talking high society movers and shakers or special forces.

For my lower point characters it depends on the character concept, but I would consider 30 skills to be the floor for adventurer types. A focused gladiator or non-combatant citizen might get away with less, but both concepts mandate a special kind of campaign.

Even with really low-point characters the use of the Dabbler perk (or a less abusive version of 1/2-point skills) would see a skill list in the middle twenties at least. If you want to play ultra-realisically you might get away with a modern working drone with half a dozen actual skills and another six to eight in improved defaults from Dabbler, but where's the fun in that?

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

In our modern western world, most of us learn a lot of different things: at school, at university, during our job, our leisures, etc. Of course, we also forget a lot. But we still remember a lot of different skills at low level.

Just try to create yourself as character. It's hard to do it without taking less than 20-30 skills as soon as you aso take into account all your leisures (Chess, Role Playing Games, Wargames and Poker are also Skills in GURPS), all the things you regularly do at home (Cooking, Gardening, Housekeeping...), etc.

So, having a lot of Skills is normal as soon as you want to create a realistic character, one who is not like D&D characters: only focused on the skills and abilities which are absolutely necessary for his class.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Don't forget Dabbler! If most people are 25 point characters with no severe disadvantages, we probably don't actually have 30+ points in skills. Especially when you consider that most of us have one or two job related skills at professional levels.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Cooking, as most people use it, is covered by the -3 default from Housekeeping (which in turn is usually known only at the 1-point level, except by professional housekeepers, stay-at-home wives, and the like). Many other such skills many of us think about putting on our character sheets are covered by defaults for the extent to which we use them; it's mostly the main skill of your profession, the main skills you trained for in college if you actually went there, a point or maybe two in your most dedicated hobbies, and a point each in major life skills like Driving, Housekeeping, and Current Affairs.

Average people are only supposed to have 12-20 skill points total.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Driving is supposedly a default for most people according to Kromm (but he lives in Montreal and not say Yucca Valley California so maybe he's talking about urban Canadians).

At any rate Dabbler plus sizable TDMs covers most everything everyman fairly well.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

This may only apply to young people.

The time use rules should give 2 or 3 points a year from "on the job" use of stuff you do all the time - i.e. when you aren't even trying to learn anything. Yes, after a while anything gets so routine you probably don't learn anything more from it, but before you've earned the first point? If you've spend a thousand hours doing something in your lifetime, you probably *should* have for a point in the skill. That's a few years of daily commutes or meal preparation or routine cleaning, but not decades worth. Likewise if you've worked a job for most of a year, you really should have a point in its key skill. If you make it to middle aged, you really ought to break 20 skill points. Admittedly they'll mostly be points in stuff adventurers consider "boring background", but still.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

You also will start to lose skills you don't use (specifically an IQ roll modified by Eidetic/Photographic Memory every six months).

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I have always thought that this was a poorly worded section. It is a single paragraph, but it is an oversimplification that distorts the relative skills of PC's and NPC's alike. Realistically, your OTJ skill development is going to be tied to the occurrence of new situations or constraints, and after a while (a few months or a few years) those things realistically go away. From that point on, your improvement OJT essentially stops - you can try to improve, but there just may not be any real opportunities.

Plus, in most jobs you are not even improving the base skill - you are improving specializations and techniques instead.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

That is because Driving skill, is more focused on High Speed control aspect not the getting from a to b commute aspect of the task

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Yeah but when the eternal driving thread came up most of us agreed that the average commutter is probably operating at default too.
Most get a TDM bonus with a penalty for texting or other distractions while driving as well. Anyone who has a point in driving is someone exceptional rather then the norm IMHO. Or professional driver.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I see dabbler mentioned a lot in this thread, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere in my books, what is it/were can I read more?

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

It's perk the gives you a bonus on default use of a couple of skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

It's not in Basic Set. I'm not sure where it was first introduced, but it's included in Power-Ups 2, pg 16. I find it instrumental in creating believable low-point characters.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I'm pretty sure it was introduced in that book. At least half the perks in Power-Ups 2: Perks are original and not compiled from other sources.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Over the course of my campaign series I have trimmed the skill list down a great deal. My current skills chapter for my campaign sourcebook has only 98 skills listed in it, including all combat skills. Truth be told, I would like to see it trimmed down even further. As a GM, I have to create a lot of NPCs; and as an uptight, OCD weirdo, I tend to make complete characters. I rarely need to take more than 15 or so skills and still end up with pretty well-rounded characters. But I, like you, can often get carried away with the skill list and end up with 40+ skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Skill category browsing has always struck me as a good component of character creation strategy. That's one reason, probably the main one, that I was unhappy to see them removed in 4th Edition.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Having worked a lot of different jobs while working myself through college, I interpret "professional" to mean "at least as good as a normal employee in a given field", which actually means awful* for any skill you're supposed to be able to perform under life-and-death stress.

Which fits a GURPS skill level of 11-12. That's not something movie main characters have in the skills that they use to respond to the plot-significant problems. No, when it comes to that, you generally need 16+ to apply.

The takeaway, I guess, is that most fictional heroes actually have reams of skills at high levels, regardless of their supposed backgrounds or informed attribute of being "normal people". A GURPS character with 30+ skills isn't a bloated monster of skill-inflation, he's a natural response to a system which has seperate skills for diving athletically through a window (Acrobatics), jumping over a table (Jumping) and rounding a corner efficiently (DX-based Running).

*My experience of people who started careers at shipyards, gas stations, convenience stores or similar fields instead of getting any degree beyond the mandatory education (which ends at 15 here) is that in game terms, their highest job skill is pretty low. As in, lower than the default others may get from some of their secondary skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Yes. Learning-by-doing being 1/4 efficient as being taught by a skilled teacher is outrageously unrealistic. And on top of that, the benefits of learning-by-doing should depend on the degree of challenge you face while you're doing the doing part.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I don't remember having seen the Dabbler Perk anywhere in a 4th Edition product, prior to Power Ups volume 2. The idea of splitting 1 CP into smaller fractions existed in 3rd Edition, but officially you could only split it in half, although I'm sure some GMs and some groups allowed 1/4 and 1/8 point skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

My current character is a mage (Order of the Blue Star by MZB in the Sanctuary anthology) so <in theory> he could live until the end of time...if he does not get killed and his secret remains so.

Even tho he works very well in the party environment, due to the nature of the order, he has extreme reluctance to be dependent on anyone. Basically he is trying to learn/master anything that will give him an edge against Primal Chaos in the (hopefully) distant future.

So thats the backround:

At Character Start (150 pts/-50 dis/-5 quirks) he had 35 pts in skills, 34 pts in spells <all were 1pt so numbers=pts> and 16 pts in languages (for 10 spoken/8 written all at at least accented).

He was basically a mage who had worked with a fantasy/low tech spec ops group for the last year or so during a war. (He covered mage/some ftr/pro soldier/pro mage skills/alchemy).

Now (2-3ish years later) he is at (238 pts) 50 skills (60 pts), 54 spells (56 pts) and 19 pts languages (12 spoken/9 written). (he has added physican/legal skills/face skills/spy skills/hidden lore skills and a number of contacts).

He is a whale of a lot of fun to play and is the most generalist character I've ever put together.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

For a given campaign, I usually mentally cut down the (massive!) skill list quite a lot, so it's probably only about a hundred for a specific setting. Even then, 30+ skills is not unusual for a given character.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I don't know that perk. I begin to understand how it works (thanks to this thread) but, as far as I understand it, it doesn't sound to be a miraculous solution: how many skills are involved when you take it?

Did you ever try to stat yourself as a GURPS character?

For myself, it's impossible to do it with only 25 points. I'm not at all a superman, neither a hero, but I learned a lot of different things. So, I have a lot of skills and not just at the default level...

The "problem" of GURPS 4th edition (which is not really a problem, since it is a game mainly design for adventures) is that there is not anymore the half-point of the third edition. This half point was interesting to create ordinary people who know a lot of things at a low level.

Another "problem" (which is neither a true problem) is that GURPS skills are very specialized. Take Games, for instance, or Sports. If you know well enough 3 of them, you have to take 3 different skills.

I can play chess, checkers, several card games, several wargames and game master at minimum 5 different role playing games. Add to that the fact that my karate style requires two different skills (Judo and Karate), and a dozen of different techniques (if I use Martial Arts) and you will quickly understand that my character sheet will have more than 10 different skills just for my leisure activities!

The 25 points are made to design an average NPC or very quickly made PC for games where they die often (like an horror one shot adventure): a job, only one leisure activity, and a couple of other skills to customize it.

But a soon as you want to create a detailed realistic character, you need more than that.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I contributed a lot to these eternal driving threads and, in my humble opinion, most of us agreed on the fact that the default level is not sufficient for someone who drive for many years.

The default level is just fine as soon as there is no danger... But we all meet a danger from time to time (bad weather, ice, road hog...). And then, the default level is not anymore sufficient to avoid a disaster.

So, drivers who drive for many years, especially in areas with bad weather conditions, surely have 1 or 2 points in the Driving skill.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Yes, you're right. And that's even what I wrote in the previous pages of this thread...

Having said that, there are many little skills that don't default to each other, as Games (role playing games), Games (chess) and Games (poker) for instance and that a lot of people know well without being professional for all that...

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Real people usually have a lot of skills in the range that GURPS doesn't handle very well. If someone lazy ekes out a PhD, then going by the physician skill levels thread, then they have skill 11.

And since a normal use of a skill gives between +4 and +10, with equipment bonuses for a lot of the things modern people do, that means most normal people are operating in the skill 7, 8, 9, and 10 range with their skills. And those are the levels that are jumped over all at once--with the levels in-between ignored--when you put a single point into a skill.

Another thing is that once you raise an attribute a level or two, say IQ to 11 or 12, then you can't get those lower skill levels at all anymore once you put a point into the skill.

This is sort of solved by the Dabbler perk, but I think it would be better to have some way to purchase those lower skill levels. I do that in my games with fractional points.

I agree that the learning rules are much too generous with the on the job training stuff. I wouldn't allow those for anything other than removing a familiarity penalty (which I would also apply to defaults). That would explain how people improve a little at their jobs and then hit a brick wall. If you can only improve your skills from deliberate practice, then most people are only going to do enough to reach the bare minimum.

There's also the issue of human learning not being in relation at all to any kind of attribute. There aren't people out there who learn skills at multiple times the rate of other normal people (though the inverse of that isn't true; there really are people with learning disabilities).

If you wanted to have realistic characters, their sheets would probably be littered with skills in the 7 and 8 range, with the rare 9s and 10s. To regularly handle those skill levels like we do in real life, I think we would need to more fully integrate the task difficulty modifiers. I often find myself playing with GMs who have very different ideas about what TDM different tasks should have. This encourages taking higher skill levels.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

What it does is rather than a single point going into a single skill and giving what is usually +4 to default, you divide it into eight smaller units; each 1/8th of a point gives +1 to a default, 1/4 of a point gives +2 to the default, and 1/2 point gives +3 to default. And there is no realistic limit on the number of times you could take this Perk, just a gamist limit on the number of Perks to take before your character sheet is too cluttered to play with.


Many times, vastly overestimating my competency. Now that I know about Dabbler and the meaning of default skill values, I wouldn't give myself IQ 12-13 and a point total around 100 anymore; I don't actually have many skills at a workable level

Same here, but this is because I have a decent attribute spread, very few Disadvantages, and several of those minor 5-point Advantages like Resistant to Poison, Resistant to Disease, and Eidetic Memory. I'm a person in the 50-75 range.

You very likely don't qualify for a full point in more than one dozen skills, but if you really are well-read and have a broad education you might have as many Dabbler perks as needed to have better-than-usual defaults in a few areas.

Checkers gets a decent default from chess from what I can tell, and is a fairly simple game. Being able to play it doesn't even indicate much if any more familiarity than default. And as for RPGs, I'd say that's a single skill of Games(Role-Playing) with Techniques for different rulesets, since the basic principles are shared between systems for the most part.

25 is the low end of "normal person", the range is 25-50. That's plenty of points to give someone 20 points' worth in a dozen or so skills, which covers detailed and realistic people just fine.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

An ironic phenomenon is that the proponents of 'typical drivers use default' probably let PCs increase their Drive skill for doing something once in an adventure that many typical RW people do repeatedly throughout their life.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

CP expenditure and hours-of-training don't match nicely anyway.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

This rule is very interesting! Exactly what is missing to my games... Indeed, as perfectly said by ErhnamDJ, what was missing in GURPS 4 without it was precisely that: something between the default level and 1 point.

I'm not a very good driver, for instance, not even a good amateur one: I never took part in amateur races or other "sportive" training with cars; I just content myself with driving for ordinary travels. But I like driving, do it almost every day for more than 25 years, so I've certainly not only 5 or 6 in my driving skill! I sometimes avoid hazards like a little girl suddenly crossing the street just in front of my car (last year) which would not be possible in GURPS rules with such a low base skill.

I wouldn't either. My basic attributes are surely in the 10 to 11 range. But I have a lot of different skills. As a school teacher, I learn a lot, in a lot of different fields of knowledge. This is part of my job, and I love that. People who know me usually say that I'm very cultivated.

That is why default levels are not sufficient. I these skills, I know more than ordinary people... But not as much as people who learned these skill and have a diploma.

So the Dabbler perk is really a great help here.

The problem of the default level is that it doesn't make any difference between a beginner, who just learned the rules the day before, and someone who play for leisure, like I do. I'm not very good. A skill level of 10-11 would be to high for me. But a beginner would still have no chance to beat me (unless being much smarter than I am, of course).

I fully do agree. I was just answering to Sir Pudding post who meant that 30 skills was impossible for most average people. Average people are designed with 25-50 points, indeed, and may have a lot of different skills if they learned a lot of different things rather than focusing on fewer ones at higher levels.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

However, I was not talking about hours of training.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Then what are you comparing? Skill-ups by CP expenditure only happen on adventures, not with mooks like us.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Two to Eight.
Back in 3e, yes. I was a negative 108 point character, IIRC. I thought about doing it in 4e, but realized it's fairly pointless thing. Most game traits are entirely subjective, and the system isn't really made for in-depth characterization of real persons, but rather for fairly broad characterizations of fictional heroes. It's hard to describe all of ones own interests, habits, handicaps, and peccadilloes with only five quirks, for instance.
How many more points do you suppose your cat is then? :)

At any rate, Kromm has often said stuff that I interpret to mean that you actually do have those skills at default.
Hence Dabbler.

What constitutes well enough. Well enough to compete professionally or at least at the competitive amateur level? Most people don't do that.
And win tournaments? Make money? Hobby (RPGs) is just one skill, though. Do you compete? Putting points into a dozen techniques is a great way to waste points in GURPS.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Okay, I looked forward a page, and no-one seems to have answered this, so I hope I haven't been "ninja'd"...

IIRC, it was originally in Thaumatology or Magical Styles? Learn 8 spells at default +1, or 4 spells at default +2, or 2 spells at default +3 (or any combination). (And to those wondering about the perk: it's limitation is, you can't learn up from these bonuses-to-defaults. Put a full point into one of these spells/skills, and you get default +4, as per normal, but don't get back the fraction of a point that went into the perk...)

It was then generalized to Dabbler, in Power-Ups 2, so it was available for ANY skills.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

A couple of things I am wondering: how extensively do players rely on "buying up from default"? I'd think that quite a lot of skills on character sheets would be that...

And "learning-by-doing," doesn't that require actual effort on the part of the character (and, in statting real-world individuals, people)? I know that my driving isn't improving, for instance, since even though I spend about 6 hours a week driving (which means, being "self-taught," I should be getting a point every 2-3 years), I'm not actually making an effort to get any better. I'm just driving.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Remember that in order to get even a default in a skill, you have to know something about it - so the fact that you know something about a skill doesn't mean you're not using it at default. Even if you've spent time studying the skill, you might not have a full point in it - and at 4e's resolution before Dabbler was introduced, that means no points.

Ditto for techniques. Just because you know how to kick someone, or apply an arm lock, or whatever, doesn't mean that you have extra points in Techniques; most likely it's just part of knowing the underlying skill (which, again, you might not even have a full point in). If you can get to the end of the sentence "I have 12 Techniques" without noticing a problem with the concept of having 12 narrow specializations, you're thinking about it all wrong.

Of course, I say this, and yet I'm an advocate for giving (for instance) moderately experienced drivers a point in Driving vs. those people who assume nearly everyone is operating at default. In any case, you can't assume that you have a point in every skill you know.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Well, to do this at all, you have to have the master skill at a high enough level above its attribute that other skills get a default level equivalent to having put points in them. That's a fairly rare situation, unless you're deliberately exploiting the default system by buying up a master skill really high.

Then, once you get there, it only makes sense to put points in one of the "slave" skills if it would only take an additional point or two to improve that skill by one level, AND if you only intend to buy up a couple of slave skills this way; otherwise it makes more sense to pump points into raising the master skill - same as with buying Techniques.

I feel like the way defaults work needs revision, but I haven't hit on a simple and satisfying replacement mechanic.

Over your lifetime, you'll probably encounter challenging driving circumstances that count as learning - bad weather, sudden blowout on the highway, having to avoid some guy who's driving like a psycho, merging into heavy traffic, and so on - so as the years pass, I would expect your Driving skill to improve somewhat. But yes, most of the time, you're not really learning anything new.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Wizardly Dabbler is introduced in Thaumatology: Magical Styles, which was published after Power Ups 2: Perks. It was a magic-specific variant of Dabbler, rather than the other way around. PU2 is the first mention of the Dabbler perk that I can find.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

There isn't a "learning by doing rule". There's a Learning on the Job rule on p. B293 and it expressly mentions this. "However, since most time on the job is spent doing what you already know, not learning new things,"
It doesn't mean "self-taught". Self-Teaching is for " reading, exercises, practice, etc. without an instructor". It's much closer to Learning on the Job; which means you should be getting 1 point every 2.6 years.

However, it's also not clear exactly what counts as "practice" for Maintaining Skills (unfortunately). I've been thinking that it might mean that if you don't get at least 200 hours of learning in six months you'd have to roll. So for your driving, you'd be rolling to maintain it twice a year and only getting at most 1 of those levels back (if your Driving drops back to default) every 2.6 years.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

Speak for yourself. I'm a PC.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

I almost agree with you here. But just almost.

Yes, GURPS is mainly designed to create fictional heroes. Which is emphasized by the fact that the basic unit of the game is named an "adventure".

Having said that, it is perfectly possible to create an ordinary character with GURPS 4 (ordinary people suddenly thrown in extraordinary events is very common in a lot of genres, including the most famous ones, and even the precise story from which the very first role palying came: The Lord of the Rings).

And creating a detailed character is possible with a lot of depth. Especially with the fourth edition. There are a lot of little realistic advantages and disadvantages and each of them can even be customized with Enhancements and Limitations...

Dabbler was just what was missing to me to make things even more precise. Thanks to this thread, I now got it. Many thanks to all of you!

Not a lot... But certainly not just 0. She is MY cat. So she is extraordinary! ;-)


Yes and I do agree with him for most situations... But there is still a difference between someone who has his driving license since yesterday and someone who drive for more than 25 years, like I do. Likewise, there is a difference between someone who just learned chess rules and someone who plays for many years, even if I do not take part in any official tournaments and content myself to play with friends...

Defaults level don't do any difference between those characters. Thanks to the Dabbler perk, I can now do it without having to put a full point in the skill!

Well enough to defeat very easily someone who just begin. Well enough to teach the game to someone who don't know it at all. Well enough to teach mathematics, grammar, history, geography, biology, physics, etc., to children and to be paid for that... Which most people don't do either.

So I'm certainly not a professional in all these skills, and I may not even be a skilled amateur. But I'm still much better than most people, which means that I do not only have the same default level as anybody. I didn't learn all these skills just by watching the TV!

There are two ways to create a character: optimization or realistic detail. In reality, we learn a lot of little things that would not at all be useful in an adventure and that will be a pure waste of points, indeed. Nobody would take more than a couple of leisure activity when creating a warrior or a wizard, for instance. But most of us still have a lot of different leisure activities.

Furthermore most of our skills would be totally useless in a dangerous adventure. It would also be a pure waste of points in a role playing game... But most of us still have these ordinary skills rather than Lockpicking, Stealth and Pickpocket, which would nevertheless be much more useful.

Re: Skills, skills everywhere
 

As the rules perfectly explain it, I know the Scuba skill by default. From watching the TV (and also speaking with friends who have the skill)... But I have certainly not the same default level with driving. I drive for more than 25 years, for true, which makes a huge, huge difference between my Scuba skill level and my Driving skill level.

And as I wrote it above, I fully do agree for most of the little skills I have... But not for Driving, for instance.

No, that's not wrong, even if it may appear.

As I explained it in my post just above, there are two ways to create a character: optimization and realistic detail.

If you think in optimization mode, of course, taking more than a couple of technique is a waste of points. It's a much better idea to improve the skill and to choose the couple of techniques for which your character is supposed to be very good...

But, in reality, we all have more than a couple of favorite techniques, and more than a couple of techniques for which we are not as good... Fine-tuning a character to that point is possible! GURPS is amazing here. But it supposes to take a lot of techniques.

Of course. I never assumed that I had a full point in all skill I know. I know a lot just by default and have no problem with that. But I also know a lot more than just by default. My job (teaching all subjects to children) implies that. And my personal way of life (learning all what I can) also do it.

I don't consider myself as an exception. We all have a lot of skills in which we are better than Mr Everybody. This is especially obvious in this forum. Even if some are better than others in some subjects (and much better than I am), we all discuss about a lot of different things like science, history, combat, politics, computers, etc., with a lot of precision and detail... GURPS may be a game that requires to be cultivated.

GURPS player or GM: competent character, 50 to 75 character points. Hint: extensively use the Dabbler perk.