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Originally Posted by Kromm
You can see things that way, but I don't. Few tasks truly don't allow retries that waste only time.
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Failed surgeries lead to significant complications (including malpractice lawsuits). Failed civil-engineering rolls lead to building collapses. But that isn't really the issue I was raising.
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Even "high-risk" ones are like that . . . the risk develops if nobody retries, not the instant someone fails at all. I'd use accumulated odds of success for this. At skill 12, say, two tries are like 14, three are like 16. I'd only go with those as baselines for tasks at which failure is tantamount to critical failure, which is a rare set of tasks indeed. I really don't buy into the belief that we have so much intellectual and professional capital that we're expecting holes in one from just about everybody. That doesn't match reality as I've experienced it anywhere I've lived.
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The issue is that you have to
define holes-in-one. There is no reason to say "expecting to succeed at a TDM=0 task is a hole-in-one". If it is a hole-in-one for one cohort, it isn't a hole-in-one for a different cohort. A run-of-the-mill surgeon may be expected to face many "tricky but routine (top end what he should face rather than kicking upstairs)" surgeries a year. Neither he, nor his hospital, can afford him failing on 15s.
Does this mean both high skills and low TDMs for modern medical care? Yes. But that doesn't pose any problems in GURPS. In fact, it removes problems: as a "universal" game, you want to be able to distinguish between societies where 10 years of aggregate medical training is standard from societies where 4 years of aggregate medical training is standard.