[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The problems with such thinking as "someone who has Broadsword at 24 and thus a default of Two-Handed Sword of 20 shouldn't be as good as somebody who studied Two-Handed Sword specifically and raised it to 20" are twofold:

1. "Good with swords" is part of what you're paying for when you buy a sword skill. And the first character above did pay more . . . other things being equal, he bought a skill at 24 and defaulted another at 20, while the second character only bought a skill at 20 (and defaults the other way at 16). In GURPS, part of the value of a skill is being good at the skills that default to it. Skills are overpriced – especially when they fall into clusters that cover overlapping tasks and are based on the same attribute. That's why skill-attribute optimization works. Letting people default lots of skills from a single master skill serves to mitigate this flaw (and yes, I admit it's a flaw). On a meta level, it makes more sense to me that a character can have, say, Merchant at some high level in order to get all of Accounting, Administration, Economics, Finance, Market Analysis, and Propaganda for what amounts to 4 points/level than that to forbid this and force someone to spend 28 points/level to raise all seven skills, meaning that all money-oriented PCs will become generalized IQ monsters instead, because IQ costs just 20 points/level and does more stuff.

2. Limiting someone after a certain level is actually the opposite of real life in the specific case of weapon-skill defaults. General wisdom among people who do this stuff is that true mastery of a weapon comes with realizing that the weapon isn't the essence but merely a prop, and that concepts such as controlling distance, maintaining situational awareness, staying mobile, and having good timing are universal. To quote the only fencing master I ever knew, "I could have defeated him as easily with a pot lid as a foil" . . . and when called on it, he did! A good case could be made that any Melee Weapon skill at 25+ gives you all Melee Weapon skills at some level; that is, there's a special uncapped default that works only at really high levels.

Melee weapon skills really need the same treatment that Gun skills got in Alternate GURPS 3.