Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

Can always use duct-tape as improvised equipment.
goes well with
Always carries duct-tape

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

Kick Me in the Jimmy! Although a humanoid male, a groin hit is treated as a torso hit for effects.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

That may depend where in the world you are.

Once upon a time, SJGames required that contracts be notarised, so I had to go see a local notary whenever I got a new GURPS project. One of them told me that becoming a notary in the UK required a certain fairly stringent set of qualifications and proven competences - it may even have included knowledge of foreign languages, or that may just have been a practical necessity for a notary in port, I forget - and the status lasted indefinitely, whereas American notaries more or less just bought their certificates, which had a fixed time limit. (There may have been a bit of cross-cultural snobbery in there, of course.) The notaries I dealt with were also working solicitors, and I got the impression that the notary thing was a modestly profitable sideline for them - a bit of a hassle to acquire, but a source of extra income thereafter. I doubt that their Law skills were especially higher than those of other solicitors, but the notary thing had required some effort to acquire. A perk might well be appropriate.

Then SJGames noticed what all these UK notaries kept telling me - that them notarising those contracts wouldn't make a blind bit of difference in a US court - and I stopped having to deal with notaries.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

Absolute Direction (Requires Signal).

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

That seems like more of a reason for no-one to buy it, rather than for the GM to hand it out for free.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

I actually prefer the reverse - perks are an excellent way to model minor little abilities that aren't *quite* part of the main skill, or skills which aren't important enough (or hard enough) to justify much study. Most of the official Perks so far are more like skills than magical abilities, and I'd hate to see it tip the other way.

Indeed mysterious unlearnable abilities tend to be unusable outside their home setting, so they don't make terrific examples. And really it doesn't matter how trivial they are, if you let the PCs have an ability that normal mortals absolutely cannot develop, there is definitely a risk they will squeeze more than a point's worth of value out of it. Trust me if you let them pull clean clothes from the air when theirs are dirty, they'll hire a mud thrower, buy a laundry, and start a production line.

I've also noticed an unfortunate tendency to expand the effects of supernatural Perks way beyond the PC who actually takes them. This is particularly common with proposals to convert movie tropes into Perks. A learnable skill like Perk rather naturally limits its effects to the PC, but "I can hear the soundtrack" magically causes *everything in the universe* to have a leitmotif.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

Sounds like a good rule of thumb. If a proposed Perk really can't be explained other than supernaturally, I suppose it might be a tip that it should be designed as a power.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

I see four sorts of perks, really:

1. Cool aesthetic features for customizing PCs, a bit like quirks in reverse. With apologies to malloyd, I thoroughly disagree that perpetually clean clothing is in any way a problem ability.
2. Five-point advantages with -80% limitations, more efficiently written as perks.
3. Skill-enhancers, like most of those in Martial Arts.
4. Trivial abilities for those with powers or other superhuman attunements; e.g., the ability to operate as a flashlight if you have light powers.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

1. Depends on how you phrase it. Structured as "Clothing you are wearing cannot become dirty unless you want it to, or the dirt comes in with enough force to count as an attack" it's fine. Go with "Dirt automatically vanishes from your clothes", and the players start looking for a way to make things they need to get rid of meet the definition of dirt. I rather think the key to minimizing problems is to word Perks as having an effect on the PC, not his clothing and certainly not the dirt.
   
   
   Quote:

   Five-point advantages with -80% limitations, more efficiently written as perks. Skill-enhancers, like most of those in Martial Arts.

   I think I'd call that two kinds: bonus in special conditions/to cancel penalties isn't quite the same as lets you do something that isn't normally part of the skill at all (Skill Adaption and the like)
   
   
   Quote:

   Trivial abilities for those with powers or other superhuman attunements; e.g., the ability to operate as a flashlight if you have light powers.

I do think the category of learned things too trivial to rate treatment as full scale skills, or which are a tiny subset of such a skill which you do not want the rest of, is as important as those. If for whatever reason you want to be able to blow smoke rings, or sex chickens, or make cherries jubilee (only), its a Perk. I've thought about redefined a couple existing trivial skills as Perks too - Speed Reading being the most obvious.

Re: List Of your favorite Custom Perks
 

I think the sound track would not be a perk per se. That might be describable as Hard of Hearing or Phantom Voices if the music impeded the character. I could also see a soundtrack power granting abilities like Danger sense or Empathy with a -20% auditory limitation.