Re: Skills as perks
 

I'm using a much shorter skill list than the norm (~30 is less than the 100+ in DF, much less the several hundred in the Basic Set).

Long-distance hiking is a function of HT-based Explorer, HT-based Athletics, or a default of HT-4. Simply hiking at full HT without the other things those skills grant would be a Perk.

Swimming is a function of HT-based Athletics for staying afloat, breath-holding, or endurance swimming. DX-based Athletics for the skill cap of fighting in the water. A Perk of swimming as if the skill was known at Attribute+0 is a Perk.

Knowing the market value of a saleable item is a roll against Merchant or Craftsmanship(assuming an appropriate familiarity of that skill). A Perk would allow this against base IQ instead, but would be of no help for haggling or Savior-Faire in the Merchant's Guild.

All weapons can be Fast-Drawn at skill-4. A Perk specialized per skill raises this to full skill.

Rather than having separate sword and knife fencing skills, I have a perk called Weapon Finesse specialized by skill; it adds the option of the F parry in exchange for facing encumbrance penalties for all one-handed thrusting weapons under the skill.

First Aid is a function of IQ-based Medicine, Poisons/Diagnosis of Per-based Medicine. A separate Perk would be available for IQ- or Per-based competence at administering first aid, of identifying poisons, or of diagnosing diseases.

The list goes on.

I don't think I'm even going to require rolls for Gesture or Knot-Tying, if they even come up.

Re: Skills as perks
 

I don't know; I have never been part of a military unit or large vehicle crew. But I try not to assume that if I am ignorant about something, it must be trivial and boring.

Re: Skills as perks
 

But you can look about it from a gaming perspective. Will there ever be a situation in a game where the difference between a sailor-11 and sailor-18 matters?

Actually, I think there is, if a ship is in a storm. Still, I think it is a nice rule of thumb to decide between skill and perk. It might be setting/game dependent.

Re: Skills as perks
 

He can do his work in half the time (-5 to skill) and still be better at it.

Re: Skills as perks
 

That is a bad habit that one should avoid, certainly. But then, I posed this as a question. I know that there are some people with maritime experience here; maybe they can answer it.

From what I've heard chatting to such people in the past, though, yes, maritime crew operations are a respectably skilled job. However, a lot of it involves keeping mechanical systems running - and that's Mechanic.

And yes, the other issue is how often any of this will come up in a game.

Re: Skills as perks
 

But that then raises the question of whether that's actually realistic. Crewman on a four-master presumably includes knowing how to help raise the sails right; Crewman on an airship might involve (I guess, from a position of extreme ignorance) walking round the gasbags once a day checking for leaks. Those kinds of routine-but-necessary activities really are quite hard to do in double time.

Re: Skills as perks
 

I'll defer to an actual seaman if one pops up. Until then, seamanship and sailors' skills seem like the quintessential example of a crewman skill where experience makes a vast difference. Contrast the ordinary seaman with the salty old chief petty officer, who knows his knots, the weather and wind, how to belay gear properly. I suppose all of this is covered by other skills, and I agree that skill overlap is a problem, but given that it's a thing in GURPS seamanship is a big deal.

Certainly in the fiction seamanship skills matter.

Re: Skills as perks
 

But once you've allowed for the stuff that's covered by other skills (Carpentry, Knot-Tying, Meteorology...), you're mostly left with "knowing where stuff goes and keeping things tidy". Which sounds to me more like a Familiarity than a skill in itself. It's knowing how and where to apply those other skills, really.

Don't get me wrong, I have no great hate for Crewman. But if one wants to prune back on the GURPS skills list, eliminating overlaps seems like a good place to start - and Crewman and Soldier are prime, blatant overlap bait.

Re: Skills as perks
 

The alternative (assuming fractional points stay dead) starts looking a lot like Dabbler, which is perhaps unfortunately-named but seems ideal for this purpose.

Re: Skills as perks
 

I like this concept. There are skills which I think are really groundwork for other skills, and they can safely be reduced to Perks.

Knot-Tying, for example. Yes, specialists like sailors know a lot of knots. But specialised knotwork is covered by their professional skills – like Crewman (Sailor). The perk gives knowledge of enough knots, bends, and hitches to handle any situation where something needs to be tied up – probably not much more than about a dozen of them. Sailors and climbers should definitely have it. Obsessive knot-fans can take it as a Hobby Skill, but remember that a point covers 200 hours of learning. You can learn enough knots in that amount of time for all your Crewman needs.

Panhandling is a sub-set or adaptation of Streetwise. The perk gives you the knowledge of the best kinds of places to beg, the approaches that suit your particular appearance, etc. When you actually beg, your roll will be against Streetwise, Performance, etc.

Parachuting. Most of the time this is ‘how to pack a parachute’ and ‘how not to break a leg on landing’, for which you only need a 1-point perk, 200 hours of training. On the rare occasions when you are using a steerable parachute to get to a particular landing-point, it will take fairly hard IQ rolls to judge the factors involved (wind speed & direction, rate of descent). If you do that regularly (e.g. Special Forces training) take a Parachuting speciality of the Piloting skill – it’s basically a non-rigid glider.

Some will depend on the genre. Fast-Draw might be worth using as a skill in a Wild West game where gunfights actually happen. But every other campaign I've ever run or played in, Fast-Draw hasn't been a contest to see who shoots first in a face-off, but just to see whether the characters can shoot in the first round. So turning it into a perk makes sense: anyone who spends 200 hours learning to fast-draw can probably be assumed to continue practicing their fast-draw as they keep using (i.e. improving) their skill with that weapon.

As for Gesture: the point Varyon made about some Gestures can get up to Fluent (i.e. military sign language) misses the point about the skills: military sign language is a Sign Language, and the people being signalled to have trained so they know the signals used. Gesture is to communicate to people who don't share your particular knowledge set. A high Gesture skill would make people good at Charades, but I think few people would work to get better at it. Pricing it as a perk would make sense - you are just someone who has the kind of imagination that lets you get over your message through mime.