What if all skills were average difficulty?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Dingle

I'm planning to run a cinematic game (Stargate SG-1), and one of the house rules I plan to use is to reduce skill-to-skill default penalties. I find that characters in that setting who are experts in one area seem to be experts in adjacent areas. I think GURPS Action hints at this when it suggests that GMs may ignore skill specialties and skill defaults.

I'm currently statting the PCs, and keeping track of the skill difficulty levels (Easy/Average/Hard/Very Hard) feels like a lot of work.
What problems could I run into if I made every skill an Average skill? (1 point gives attribute -1)
Would these problems be more or less significant if the penalties for defaulting skills are also reduced? (e.g. Attribute -4 or Skill -2/-1)

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

There's a handful of skills (I'm pretty sure exactly five) that are specifically built around how difficulty works, but if you stumble across them you can fix them directly. Even Kromm has commented about removing skill difficulty and making it all average just for the sake of an easy price (each +1 above attribute is 4pts).

Setting them all as average will only matter in a few situations, mostly situations where a more expensive skill is strictly better than a cheaper one (except for price). The examples I can think of are:

• First aid and physician. Physician gives you first aid with a default of -0
• Brawling, Boxing, Karate. Karate is strictly better than brawling, and mostly better than boxing, but is hard rather than easy or average
• Wrestling vs Judo. Judo is strictly better than wrestling, but is hard rather than average.

Other than that, it really doesn't matter than much.