Survival Skill Question

[Sin'Aria]

Why the change from familiarity [3e] to "per planet" specializations [4e]?*

This makes trying to run universes like Stargate, Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Traveller with a minimum of house rules a PITA.

Am I going to majorly break anything by changing the required specialization to "by planet type" and then instituting familiarity penalties for new planets?

*I only noticed this when working up a Traveller Imperial Scout character earlier today. :p

[Prince Charon]

Not sure of anything you'd break by going for 'by planet type', and GURPS is nice about allowing (or even encouraging) rules adjustments for different settings. that rules adjustment makes a lot of sense for Stargate and Star Trek in particular, since they have all these ancient races moving life-forms from one planet to another, and otherwise terraforming them.

Not sure what the official response will be, but I doubt they'll strongly object.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Not sure of anything you'd break by going for 'by planet type', and GURPS is nice about allowing (or even encouraging) rules adjustments for different settings.

I fully do agree. Yes GURPS is highly adaptable.

Since wildcard skills like Sword!, Gun! or Science! (See Basic Set, Characters, page 175) are possible for some settings, Survival! sounds to be a good option for game worlds like Star Trek or Stargate... Especially Stargate, where humans go on other planets exactly as if it was Earth, with not the least illness or even language problem!

And if you don't like wildcard skills, you can just decide that such planets are so close from Earth than they are exactly like Earth (and completely drop differences between planets for survival purpose). After all, SG1 team rarely meets strange fauna or flora.

[GodBeastX]

Naturalist is per planet.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Sin'Aria

Why the change from familiarity [3e] to "per planet" specializations [4e]?*

Each planet survival skill defaults to another planet survival skill of the same type -4.

That penalty makes sense. Someone with Survival (Desert, Earth)-14 will have to roll against 10 to survive on Arakis (Dune). The vast desert of Arakis is quite different from our Sahara, where there are no shai-huluds (giant sand worms) for instance. So, surviving in such a world when you only know earth desert is logically something hard, which corresponds to a -4 penalty.

I'm not at all a GURPS author, but, to my mind, if the familiarity penalty has been replaced by this flat -4, this is to avoid the fact that familiarity penalties are removed after a few hours of practice... A few hours of practice are not sufficient for a human from earth to know how to survive on Arakis at full skill.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Gollum

I'm not at all a GURPS author, but, to my mind, if the familiarity penalty has been replaced by this flat -4, this is to avoid the fact that familiarity penalties are removed after a few hours of practice... A few hours of practice are not sufficient for a human from earth to know how to survive on Arakis at full skill.

Other options for intermediate cases:

* Call every world a technique defaulting at skill -4 and give everybody one at full skill for free,

* Allow buying off the -4 with a skill adaptation perk per planet

* Allow buying off the default penalties for *all* skills specialized by planet with a Planet Familiarity perk in the same way Cultural Familiarity does for social skills. I might well pick this one for a Space Opera setting.

The main advantage of any of these is they impose an actual cost and generate something that is written on your character sheet, avoiding debates about what familiarities you already have.

[ericthered]

Survival has a number of different uses:

This is the ability to “live off the land,” find safe food and water, avoid hazards, build shelter, etc.

This skill also gives an “eye for country.”

Finally, you can use this skill to trap wild animals.

in other words, survival allows:

• finding safe food and water
• avoiding hazards
• building shelter
• finding terrain features
• trapping wild animals

It should be recognized that a blanket -4 to survival on realistically alien worlds is fine. Settings that fit this mold include Avatar (with the giant blue people) and the Old man's war universe. These worlds have completely alien flora, fauna, and weather. Yes, you can apply knowledge you have learned, but thats not enough. You don't know what the dangers of the area are. You don't know which plants are edible, which animals go for what, what the good building materials are, what to bait your traps with, or even what the local weather patterns are.

If any of these assumptions break down (flora, fauna, weather) then the -4 isn't appropriate. In star gate, its cannon that a lot of the plants and animals are the same from world to world. A lot of worlds don't build up alien planets as completely seperate ecosystems. And in some cases, this is justified --- if civilization has been mucking around, introducing invasive species across the galaxy, its quite possible that you do find the same old species from world to world, though some nasty surprises will stick around each world.

I'd honestly make up defaults for different activities on each planet. Finding safe food is likely to be pretty high up there, while weather hazards or finding same water is likely to be lower, unless the GM makes a point of alien weather patterns. And the level of default they'll be facing is one of the first things I'd tell any survival oriented character when they set foot on a planet: "The jungle is dense, but many of the plants are familiar, and the nearby ocean will regulate the temperature well." or "The Jungle is quite alien: you don't recognize the plants, and for all you know, some are carnivorous. Even the terrain of this world is uncertain. You will want to be careful in the wilderness"

[Varyon]

I'll second Eric's comments. The -4 is probably realistic. In many settings - Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, etc - planets are perhaps unrealistically similar, so a lesser penalty is appropriate.

The way I'd do it, I'd probably use the Required Specializations in high-realism settings (which I probably wouldn't run, because I'd be unable to give alternate planets justice when building them), but treat different planets as Familiarities (albeit with probably more than 8 hours necessary to get rid of the penalty). I'd still require Specialization by planet type, of course, but if you need to fall back on raw Survival on anything but a Garden planet, you're probably doomed anyway.

[GodBeastX]

Probably unrealistically? :) The chances two planets followed same evolution are probably astronomical if they produced life at all.

I think -4 is generous between planets, unless you are following that logic that planets have similar features to be classified easily.

[Kromm]

The issue seems to be with cinematic/space-operatic settings, not with the rules as written. Allowing any default at all between the specialties for different worlds is probably generous. The situation was changed between editions because some fairly informed playtesters – including a couple of space scientists – asked for the change. They wanted specialties with no default, so the rules are already "soft realism" at best.

In low-realism campaigns inspired by the likes of Star Trek ("Oh, look, more carbon-based humanoids with languages similar to ours, living on an Earth-like world!"), it would be an excellent campaign assumption to reduce worlds to mere familiarities. It would result in a better campaign. And no, the GURPS Police won't hunt you down for doing that! ;)