[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Otaku

I am not following. Some of it is wording but... maybe get back to using some actual examples?

I'll try, but examples will be implicitly pretending that the gurps skill divisions are reasonable so I'd like people to keep in mind that I'm not actually going to be using them or their defaults for melee weapon skills when making objections.

Originally Posted by Otaku

I originally had a wall of text but the short version is... some of this feels like improper GMing. I know that sounds harsh, but this is not some proclamation from on high: personally I'm a lousy GM (hence why I rarely do it!).

There is no GMing to be improper.

Originally Posted by Otaku

Otherwise... if there is a situation where using a Skill from default should be more challenging than using the Skill having properly trained in it, the GM needs to assign an appropriate penalty to the roll and/or use any of the other approaches already built into the game to help mitigate this situation... but when there are no such extraneous circumstances, don't sweat it.

What am I trying to do here but come up with an appropriate penalty?

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

I think think this is going to come down to who close you think certain skills are to each other.

I have no problem with saying that when it come to closely related skills being an expert in one means it pretty likely you'l be really, really good at another. This is is especially true of the probably overly precise family of melee skills.

As to your general point about it not being about the points, a skill of 24 brought up from base attribute 10 is what 67 for an average skill. A cost that is based on the current assumption of how defaulting works as well. So if you do decide to further penalise defaulting you have just given that person less for their 67 pts. I.e the points cost is already includes the familiarity defaults and isn't just to be an expert in one specific area.

Accordingly if you were to makes defaults worse, I think you need to reduce the number of skills to counter balance that.

Skills are blatantly not utility costed and there isn't any cost difference based on what and at what penalty of defaults a skill gets.

Originally Posted by Varyon

The things that are truly important in combat are universal, as Kromm has noted. I suppose I could see cause for improved defaults at lower levels (something like "If you have at least [8] points invested in combat skills, Easy combat skills default to a minimum of DX, Average to DX-1, Hard to DX-2, and Very Hard to DX-3"), but not for poor defaults at higher levels.

Making the lower level defaults easier while not changing the higher level defaults is also giving "poor" defaults at higher levels.

Originally Posted by Varyon

True masters are typically a once in a generation (if even that often) affair, so having 5 of them running around together strikes me as cinematic. This is probably just a difference in opinion on what constitutes "cinematic," however.

Who said anything about five of them? As I said before you only need one case for it to be problematic.

Originally Posted by Varyon

First off, the master does have a very good reason to engage his foes with his chosen weapon, because having Skill 26 against a Skill 20 foe is far better than having Skill 22 against that same foe.

Not engage with the weapon, engage with his mastery of the weapon. It's trivially obvious that he would use his weapon of choice if he had the ability to.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Secondly, and the reason I don't see a problem with this situation (as well as part of why I had all skills with at least some level of default in my Overhaul), is the case of one Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi was a master swordsman who traveled Japan challenging other masters of combat - and consistently winning. He used everything from swords (two handed, one handed, or even dual wielding) to improvised polearms to a metal fan. If you have PC's with skills comparable to Musashi, the idea that they could pull off feats similar to him hardly strikes me as a flaw in the system.

Musashi is irrelevant until you demonstrate that he only had points in one or a small number of those skills. I am not objecting to people who are experts at multiple weapons.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Another thing to consider - and germane to the topic of Musashi - is that nobody with any high skill (particularly in a combat skill) is likely to have trained in a vacuum. A character with high Broadsword skill has probably spent some time practicing with some two handed swords, with shorter blades, with swinging his own sword by the blade (using Axe/Mace skill to strike with the hilt), and even in fighting unarmed. I don't think it's necessary to actually charge points for such, instead simply relying on defaults to show that, yes, the character has dabbled a bit in other combat skills.

I on the other hand do. Aside from being aesthetically unpleasant for people to be permanently working off of defaults in core competencies it is vital that the trained/not trained distinction be usable for rules purposes and reflect incentivized behaviour.

Originally Posted by Varyon

As noted, some of the defaults there are probably overly generous. Something I didn't mention in that thread was how I envisioned buying up from default - you can buy up a single skill at half price so long as you are within "default range" - so if you had Sword at 20, "default range" for 2H Sword is between 18 (where it's at from defaulting) and 22 (where it becomes the dominant skill, with Sword defaulting from it). How to deal with multiple defaults would probably be a bit hairy (and having not fully worked this out is one of the reason I never got around to posting the defaulting rules in that thread).

As I mentioned before I also intend to do stuff with improving from default. When I'm talking about people putting points into a skill to become trained I am absolutely not talking about needing to put 4 points in the skill. It would require at most 1 point.