Increasing Skill Levels From default

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Terwin

Remember: when you rearrange a skill default tree, no skill can ever go down. So if you change the tree such that a skill would have a lower value that it did previously, you *MUST* spend points to bring it back up to it's prior level.

As such I suspect that you cannot do your trick of rearranging the default tree to maximize each skill in turn, as you would then need to buy up any non-maximized skill back to its maximized value.

Ah dang, looking at it closer again, it appears to me you are right.

As an aside, even though it isn't RAW, I feel like it would be a good simulation of the realistic idea of certain skills giving each other a certain synergy. EG, in the real world, If someone were an expert level in all of Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, Bio-Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Bio-Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electro-Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Engineering, I think that each skill would have at the least a teeny synergistic effect with the others, some a little less than others. But for example, just because someone uses their insights from Electrical Engineering to be better at Computer Engineering, doesn't mean they can't use their insights from computer engineering to simultaneously be better at electrical engineering.

BUT, that all being said! It's not how GURPS works RAW.