Price for a Universal Talent?
 

I just spent a little time looking at Talents, Alternate Attributes, and these two posts by Chrisopher Rice (https://www.ravensnpennies.com/boil-...sorcery-spell/) and T-Bone (https://www.gamesdiner.com/2009/10/p...ills-in-gurps/).

Here's the question I'm thinking about: what would be a fair price for a "Universal Talent" that gave +1 to all skill rolls - with no other benefits (i.e. no +1 to all reactions).

Ideas?

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

IQ partitions in Per, 5/level, and Will, 5/level, and IQ!, 10/level.

Dex partitions into Basic Speed, 5/level, and skills, 15/level.

HT is trickier, but part of it counts as FP.

I think I might say 40/level for your universal Talent. Maybe a bit more or less, but that's the right order of magnitude, I think.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

The breakdown Bill espouses more or less works, but your probably looking at something around 15-20/level simply because you're not going to be using multiple skills at once so alternate attributes might come into play. This post might also be useful.

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

If you look at it that way, I might say 20 (for IQ, including Per and Will) +20/5 (for Dexterity) + 10/5 (for Health) = 26, rounded down to 25. I certainly would not let it cost less than IQ; it's more useful than IQ!

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

Yes. *Maybe*. But really it's "IQ without Will or Perception" (10/level) + "DX without Basic Speed (15/level) + "Health without Basic Speed (5/level)+ Will (5/level) + Perception (5/level) or ... 20/level. You need to break it out into all its parts and not just use the base costs because those include benefits other than skill boosts.

The GURPS Basic Set has a grand total of 277 skills. Of those, 146 of them are IQ-based, 93 of the are DX-based, 12 of them are Per-based, 13 of them are HT-based, and 13 of them are Will-based. At some point the latter three are effectively just "add it for 0 points" thanks to diminishing returns.

Then there is the whole thing where attributes control magic, psi, etc. Is that included? If we look at it as a talent it's just 15/level - the highest you can go without bringing in optional skills. So it could cost that.

Thus 15-20 per level.

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

Thanks, y'all, for these responses.

This is persuasive. If you take out Will and HT rolls for resistance, Per rolls to notice things in the absence of any points spent on observational skills, DX rolls to avoid falls and knockdown, etc.... Maybe it should even be 17 or 18/level?

I started thinking about this because I came across an old GURPS homebrew page - can't even remember where, now - that had an "all skills" talent at 15/level, and I thought that was pretty munchkin.... But now I'm not so sure it is.

But if you consider that Chi Talent has an alternate cost of 20/level and that 20/level is also mentioned as "the upper end" in "Smooth Talent Cost," I think that's a good number.

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

I wouldn't let you do claim a discount for most of that, simply because anything you can roll against an attribute for, you can usually also make a case for rolling against a skill, for which you would get to use the bonus. That is if your Acrobatics were higher than your DX, you'd typically roll against Acrobatics for a lot of the things that call for DX rolls, and probably scream if the GM told you, no this roll not to fall down says it's a DX roll and your points in Acrobatics are useless... Most stuff will have at least a potential skill of that sort, if only because somebody, somewhere wanted to buy it up without buying up the attribute, and skills are how you'd model that.

Put me in the 40 points camp. Most of what DX and IQ do for you is increase skills, the little bit that isn't is likely no more important than the few skills based on HT or something weirder.

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

I'm not following the math here. 10+15+5+5+5=20?

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

There are skills based on Will and Perception, and buying down secondary attributes is a generally problematic, so it amounts to "IQ + DX + HT - 0.5 basic speed" or [40].

Re: Price for a Universal Talent?
 

You pay full price for the most expensive and one-fifth price for the others, since you can only use one at a time.