Survival Skill Question

[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I'm not at all a GURPS author, but, to my mind, if the familiarity penalty has been replaced by this flat -4, this is to avoid the fact that familiarity penalties are removed after a few hours of practice...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.