Quote:
Originally Posted by Emerikol
I think you give some good advice here. The main use of a high weapon skill would of course be those things you mention. The difference would be enemies who might have similarly high attack / defense skills which would be very possible if you are running a high fantasy game. The question you have to answer is what is the difference between the skill of a beginning character with the job of fighting and an end game character with the same role. If monsters never get above 16 attack skill that would influence greatly how far you'd push your weapon skill.
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Concur. The levels of the foes will indeed have an impact.
In a "realistic" game I ran where I recommended against high skills, a player insisted on doing so anyway, despite my advice. After trying to get him to change it, instead of making a hard ruling against it, I let him, and he ended up with Broadsword somewhere in the mid 30s. However, in that campaign, almost all of the opponents they fought only had combat skills in the 10-12 range, with a number of rare exceptions that you could count on your fingers.
That player soon realized that he was no more "effective" in combat than the other player who had a Broadsword skill of about 18ish. Both defeated their opponents with ease. So he had therefore spent a good 60 to 80 more points in Broadsword than the other player and wasn't any more "useful." It's not that he wasn't a well-rounded character - he had plenty of other useful skills. It's just that he could have used those 60 to 80 points on something else that would have been more useful
in that campaign. He later acknowledged the warnings were right there in the campaign description and in my advice, and paid more attention the next time.
(On the other hand, in those rare exceptions with high skilled opponents - which I made really high because of that character - he really had the opportunity to shine compared to the other players and really enjoyed those moments.)
In one of my current campaigns, my PC warriors are all mid- to upper-twenties in the combat skills, and they're having a tough time. But that's an epic fantasy game, and we designed it that way. They started around skill 18ish, and worked their way up. And they did so roughly together, because they knew with me as the GM their foes would evolve to match the PC capabilities, so they didn't want any one PC warrior too far ahead of the others. And they wanted to ensure the non-warriors also had something to balance out as well (such as better magical defenses). I actually enjoy that as it's my players who set the power level by their collective decisions on how to improve their characters, and as their GM I just go with it. And they took that approach all on their own.
The thing with
GURPS is that you need to tweak it to meet your needs. I talk "skill caps" which works for me as I don't have to worry about impacts of changing the character point costs on other things, but it's definitely not the only option. And even with skill caps you can have flexibility. You can have a skill cap of say 15 (or attribute +5, or whatever) for starting characters, raise it to 20 at mid campaign, and then raise it again to 25 near the end. Pick and choose the levels that work for you. That flexible approach lets PC get better for the end bosses without achieving an unbalance at the beginning against the weaker foes. Viewed from the lense I gave in setting campaign parameters in another post in this thread, instead of saying your campaign is realistic or heroic or cinematic, it's "we will start out realistic, and gradually improve to heroic then cinematic at a controlled rate." Just make sure you let your players know you will be doing this so that they can plan for it.