Book Idea: GURPS Skills

[kmunoz]

I was thinking more of things like GURPS Compendium from 3E, but MA and Powers are close to the same idea.

"a difficult jump (into a pit, for instance)" on p. 352, which doesn't exactly explain to me which jumps are hard enough to merit a penalty or why

There is already a formulation, in Basic, for how to determine difficulty, on pp. 345-346. That's for the GM to decide. I suppose you could draw up lists, but that would be drier than Arrakis and has more in common with Rolemaster than with GURPS, I think.

And that's basically the problem: the extent to which a skill's scope is left to GM interpretation is rather well defined in Basic. The Social Engineering book is great but it's thematically tailored, which makes it valuable. Squishing that together with combat skills (Martial Arts) and then all the rest - i.e., an omnibus - gets you something that isn't thematically tailored and therefore loses most of the value of those other two books. And then what you're left with is... a list. And while I may be very far on the crunchy end of the handwave-to-crunchy scale, even I would find that unappealing and not worth my money. A book like that would be a very hard sell indeed, if even I wouldn't buy it.