Tactics Skill: any utility at all?

[BraselC5048]

Really, what good is tactics skill anyway? I've been playing a space military campaign for a while now (a naval campaign set in a highly altered Traveller universe, with all the non-starship rules from stock GURPS - I don't even own GURPS Traveller), [Note to mods: this not a traveller post, it's a GURPS post] and I've never come across a situation where I’ve had to use it.

For example, GURPS WWII give the example of ‘using tactics skill to determine the best way to approach the house.’ Do you roll, and then the GM tells you the best way if you passed? At least in my experience, what happens is the GM draws up a quick sketch map, and gives a description, and then the player decides what course of action to take. For example, “we’ll head along the creek until we get a close a we can, then we rush them, hopefully taking them by surprise, since there’s only two windows on that side of the house.”

And for one example from my campaign, my character was arriving to help a group of marines pinned down in a warehouse. A quick sketch map, and the enemy is firing down from a sort of balcony/open hallway along the front of a loft with offices in it. I decided essentially instantly that there were likely stairs up to the loft around the back of the building, and I still don’t know why I thought that. But my character went round the side of the building, and sure enough, there were stairs there.

As for tactics(starship), it’s even more useless. Essentially, the player has to have tactics skill, because ‘here’s the grid map, you are here, there’s the enemy, their course and speed is this, now what direction do you send your ship, captain?’ The player has all the information the character would have, and the player has to make a decision based on it, and all the skill in the world your character has won’t help you if you ‘fail the rolls,’ so to speak.

I figure I have maybe skill 12 in starship tactics, but then again, I’ve never obviously done something that would be a failed roll, either.


On a side note, operations skill works much the same way, and since success at operations gives you a major advantage when it comes to tactics, it helps my GM is working from default.