Skill Advancement

[Gnome]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

All right, I'm out of this thread. Trying to talk about GURPS is very frustrating when every conversation is about how GURPS is broken.

That's funny. At no point did I say or imply that GURPS is broken. I love GURPS. I have played thousands of hours of GURPS. The root of this discussion was my proposal to bring part of a GURPS 3e rule into GURPS 4e--hardly a "GURPS is broken" position, considering that everyone I know who plays GURPS uses house rules of one kind or another.

I'm not just theorycrafting or spitballing here. My opinions are based on experience in actual play, and all I'm saying is that some primary skills (mostly talking about melee weapon skills here) are underpriced at high levels, as compared with other ways of making your character better at combat, like buying ST, DX, etc., and as compared with the way other characters advance relative to typical published threats in their chosen area of expertise.

Originally Posted by JulianLW

The problem with that Broadsword-40 character is that he probably isn't going to go first in any melee, if he has a 10 DX and 10 HT. And the first character to shoot a bow at him or throw a knife at him probably causes a stun, because he can't parry a missile weapon. The first character to grapple him puts him down. Can he parry a slam? A shield rush? And he's probably not fast enough to chase you down if you want to run away.

That's the real problem with a PC who's sunk most of his points into Broadsword-40. Build this character and put him in an actual fight with a real opponent and see what happens when you have only the one skill to rely on.

Obviously a 120-pt character shouldn't spend all 120 pts on one skill. My experience is more like this:

We start a DF campaign, and everyone picks a template. No problem so far. We favor fast advancement, so pretty soon everyone has 40 pts to spend. The swashbuckler spends all 40 on weapon skill. Everyone else spends on various things: higher attributes, more spells and powers, a diversity of skills, etc. The other characters get a bit better at doing whatever it is they do, or they branch out a bit. The Swashbuckler gets way better at fighting, so now the point of every combat is basically "stay alive until the Swashbuckler takes care of it," the Swashbuckler can easily parry attacks that seriously threaten anyone else (or spends one point on Sacrificial Parry to parry for the whole party if they are smart enough to stay close), the Swashbuckler can easily eye-stab any enemy within reach, can take out hordes of fodder with Rapid Strikes, etc., etc.

Of course there are a diversity of threats in such campaigns. The party still needs a Scout with Danger Sense to avoid getting ambushed, a Bard for social encounters, a Cleric for exorcisms, a Wizard to solve magical mysteries, etc. The Swashbuckler wasn't going to compete in those domains anyway. But his advancement path is so cheap, that it takes very little advancement for him to grow way beyond the typical threats that would still be interesting to everyone else. A Cleric with 40 extra points is still well within the level that plays well against the published adventures and monsters with basically no tweaks or maybe a few extra enemies here and there, while a Swashbuckler with 40 extra points has basically graduated from published DF threats and needs the GM to create new ones, which will become totally obsolete again when he gets his next 40 points. And as I mentioned earlier, some spells become outclassed at this level as well, as do some special abilities.

In campaigns without templates, we ironically run into sort of the opposite problem, which is that non-specialists can match specialists by focusing on one weapon skill. I'm thinking of a campaign we played a number of years back in which one character was your typical high DX fighter (sort of similar to a DF Swashbuckler), while another was more of a Bard type (focused on social skills and some limited magic). The fighter had DX 16, the Bard had DX 10, and they had the same primary weapon skill, which meant that the fighter was only slightly superior to the Bard in combat, while the Bard had a whole slew of other abilities.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly made that fighter want to invest every earned point into weapon skill so that he could shine in his one area.

To those who mentioned dropping your sword: carry a backup weapon. If you lose that or get it confiscated by the druidic authorities or something, pick up a stick (light club) to use with the same skill. If the GM is dead set on nullifying your one trick, of course he can do that, just as he can put the Wizard in a no-mana zone or the Scout in a windstorm or the Martial Artist in an ambush where he doesn't have his high Per buddies with him. But these are problems that the DF Swashbuckler (and every other specialist) already had. You aren't making those problems worse by spending more points on weapon skill, even if you had to, say, lower DX by 1 or 2 to do so, or not buy as much ST.