Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

So, I think this is obvious, but just to be sure: If you have both Knife skill and Sword skill, and you wanted to use a shortsword, you'd simply use the higher of Knife and Sword, right? (If "yes": Easy enough! Sounds good.)

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

I'm in favor of restricting the players to GURPS Lite and perhaps one specialized skill, advantage, or disadvantage from the rest of the books. This was a lot easier to do in 3d edition, but it works to focus the players on core skills over esoterica.

On the other hand, we would be remiss if we didn't call your attention to this post from Kromm about the minimum skill set needed for an action campaign.

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

Over the weekend, I helped my players draft their new characters. I scheduled a day for character drafting and curating, and the following day for actual campaign play. No one showed up until the day of; needless to say, there wasn't any actual campaign play. Handholding four people that are new to GURPS takes up inordinate amounts of time.

But I digress.

One character is an ATF agent. I gave him Pro: Law Enforcement, but I wasn't able to field questions well regarding its use. I realized that he didn't understand when I looked at his sheet and found he'd dumped his points into the pro skill and failed to purchase any other pertinent skills (Gun, Investigation, Driving, etc).

How do I explain (and understand, I guess), the overlap - where professional skills end and general skills begin? Are there synergy bonuses from your pro skill to skills he might use on the job? Is the pro skill able to replace certain skills entirely by itself (kind of a catch-all), or would that just make it a cheap, versatile (!) skill?

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

The important thing to remember is that Professional Skills cover only the basics of how to do whatever job they cover. Again, Soldier is an example - it covers several skills, but only for tasks that would get a large bonus when you do them with the other skill. So if your ATF agent wants to actually be good at firing their gun in combat, going through paper trails where someone is actually trying to hide something, or driving their car in a chase, they'll have to put points in Guns (Pistol), Administration, or Driving (Automobile) respectively.

It's probably a good idea to let Professional Skill act as a complementary skill to any roll where one of the skills it can stand in for would also work.

If you don't know how complementary skills work, it's pretty simple - to aid another character or yourself, a character proposes a complementary skill, a skill for which success could plausibly aid the main skill. If the GM accepts this, the player rolls the complementary skill (before the main skill is rolled), and if they succeed, they give a +1 bonus to the main skill, or +2 on a critical success. On a failure, however, they impose a -1 penalty, or a -2 on a critical failure.

So, for example, the ATF agent might be trying to get a warrant to search someone's home for weapons. You decide this requires a Law roll. The agent has Law-11, which is a bit low, so they want to help things along by ensuring that all their paperwork is perfectly in order, with all the "i"s dotted and the "t"s crossed, so to speak. This would normally be an Administration roll to complement the main Law roll, but you decide to allow Professional Skill (ATF Agent) to stand in for it, since filling out ATF-related paperwork is definitely within it's wheelhouse.

Generally, a professional skill cannot completely replace other skills, no. As you say, that's the realm of wildcard skills, not something as cheap as a regular average skill. However, the complementary bonuses I mentioned above can come in handy in a lot of circumstances, since Professional Skills do cover a lot of ground, even if it's not very deeply.

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

So, it can work synergistically if you role for it in tandem with the applicable skill - assuming there is overlap. Cool. That helps quite a bit. I'm having loads of other problems with my campaign and my players, but this sorts out at least one small problem I had. Thanks!

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

Yes, and a shortsword wielder who took Knife is worse at parries but faces no penalty for using his sword in the off-hand and gets a default for throwing daggers, while the shortsword wielder with Sword gets better defaults from his main skill to Spear and Hafted, a relative +1 to Parry, and a default for throwing a boomerang.

Re: Tips for avoiding skill bloat; Pro skills
 

To decrease the number of skills on the character sheets, I encourage them to use Wildcard! skills.