Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
[...] but if you want to keep your game functioning in a sensible way you generally have to hard-cap skill.
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Pretty much the official answer, by the way.
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GURPS is a toolkit. To get the look and feel you want – in terms of genre, realism level, and power level – you
must turn the dials to suitable settings.
Skill levels don't have a hard cap because unlike, say, self-control rolls or rolls for Patron, skill rolls have no hard floor on penalties . . . a skill roll at -10 or even -30 is perfectly possible under the rules. Which said, p. B172 is fairly clear on pointing out that skill 20+ is masterful, and suggests a cap of 20-25. There's also ample advice there and on pp. B447-448 that "normal" people have skill 12-14, whatever the rules allow in theory.
So . . . the observed behavior in the example isn't surprising. The example depicts a moderately realistic professional warrior vs. a cinematic peasant-hero type.
Power level might be comparable, but
realism level sure isn't!
I see those 58-point heroes and raise with
this. That's an example where both realism level
and genre are out of whack. You can get similar results by creating a 0-point person with enough disads to afford the Wealth to own a nuke, then setting it off remotely.
The point being that the original example, while less extreme than mine, isn't comparing like with like at all.