[VIVIT]

Originally Posted by kdtipa

Hmm... it might be workable, but the amount of thought I'm having to put into considering is is high. And my reflex for simplicity is fighting back. A change that big affects how a lot of the book is written and makes it so you have to keep a lot in mind. I don't think it's fundamentally flawed as an idea, but it sounds like a fair amount of work, and I'm not sure I see a benefit that's enough to pay for that work.

It is a big change, but it's mostly a presentational change rather than a mechanical one. Beyond making a new character sheet, it would hardly be that much effort to implement this as a house rule. It's not like we would have to search-and-replace through the book and slightly edit the description of every Will-based skill, although I could accomplish much of that with a single regular expression: s/Will\/(Easy|Average|(V. )?Hard)/IQ+Will\1/g).

You'll also have to consider attribute pricing to keep balance. If there are Will rolls that can be based on HT instead of Intelligence, HT become more useful, and IN loses some of its importance. It's not a big change, but it is something to consider.

The costs can stay as they are. DX and IQ are the power stats of GURPS. Every attribute is important (I really like this about GURPS: there are no dump stats!) There's a reason why 4e makes them cost twice as much as the other two, and many people consider them to be undercosted even now. A compromise (which, incidentally, is also possible even if we keep Will as an attribute rather than turn it into a modifier) would be to make (yet another) secondary characteristic out of (Will+HT)/2 and roll against that for extra effort. Credit to Mao on the GURPS Discord for this idea.

Originally Posted by Celti

. . . reaction rolls become a standard success roll against Charisma, using the Expanded Influence Rolls table on p. 31 of Social Engineering.

The tradeoff here is that this means that raising IQ improves reaction rolls. I'm fine with influence rolls benefitting from IQ, since they're based on learned skills, but influence rolls? Not only does that not make sense -- reaction rolls are for first impressions, and it's usually pretty tough to make a powerful first impression on someone using brainpower alone -- but it's also a buff that IQ definitely doesn't need.

That said, I really, really like the idea of writing reaction rolls out of the game entirely.