[kirbwarrior]

Skills are (basically) 4pts per level, and with Average skills that translates exactly to +1/lvl
Talents as of PU3 can be Skills per level in cost
DX and IQ are 20pts per level each
DX! + IQ + HT! comes out to (15+20+2) 37pts per level
I added Omnitalent for 40pts per level to cover all skills based on the above, and x10 cost for "all in the group" seems pretty common in GURPS
It is cheaper to buy up DX than it is to buy up 6 DX skills and significantly cheaper to buy up the relevant Talent

There's definitely some oddities in all that. I was thinking that if one skill is 4pts per level, and all skills is 40pts per level, then maybe skills might make more sense to treat like AAs and have some sort of staggered cost. There are plenty of complicated ways to do it, but likely the simplest is just making every skill after the first cost 1/lvl, paying 4pts for the highest.

There are definitely complications; Difficulty modifies where Attribute+0 is, buying up from default becomes even worse of a plan, and techniques are already this cheap.
For difficulty, just treat it like AAs again and care about total point cost, not relative modifier. 32pts in a skill means any skill with less base value is 1/4 price.
Buying up from defaults was already a trap. I already use a house rule that doing this uses the costs from Techniques, and leaving it here would work easily enough.
Techniques in that house rule become a flat 1pt (similar to but not the same as a perk). Seems about fine for this.

I don't know if this is perfect. But after seeing how often players would rather buy up attributes before even considering having six high skills (skill 14+), I was thinking about expanding Talents into the place of skills. It's absolutely breaking the regular concept of Talents (one major rule being it can't be 'skills I want') but from a mechanical perspective it seems sound.

This is all just theoretical, and I think would absolutely change how skills are even looked at. On the flipside, it does make having staggered amounts of skills without requiring attributes being at nonconceptual levels. And since Power talents can already use regular talents, converting multiple skills into the talent-like pricing means that having powers use skills can let them stagger some, too.

What does the hivemind think? Would this unbalance anything? Would it substantially change how to look at character creation? Would starting point totals be different to make up for it? Is there already a thread about this that escaped me in my search? Have you done anything like this?

To bring it back from mechanical to flavor, I like the idea of asking players to give an explanation to their new 'talents' if they come up, having fun explaining why they bought this specific group of 11 skills to +7.