Skill Advancement

[Gnome]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

It obviously depend on each GM, but for me Gurps is not a game where a player can come and sit at a table with a character he made on his own.
Creating a character, and upgrading it, is a collaborative task between the player and the GM, balancing the player wishes and the setting constraint.

So, for me, most of the woes reported in this thread cannot happen, because a character cannot have broadsword-40, unless I as GM said I was ok with it, in which case I better be ready to balance the game around it.

If I feel that in a certain game a character shouldn't have more than DX-14 and broadsword-18, that will be the limit in that game.
And maybe in another game I will allow Broadsword-30 and DX-20.
And in either case, I would allow going slightly over the max, with a suitable UB, but not much, and not for cheap.

Likewise, coming from the other side, each characters in a high-point game are expected to be able to handle a minimum level of opposition on their own.

I totally agree with all of this. I like point costs, because rather than a simple yes/no, they give a numerical value to how hard it should be to get that ridiculously high skill. It's easy to say no or to place a skill cap, and I've done so in games a few times. But I find it's more fun if rather than saying no to something, you make it cost enough that the player really has to think about whether they want to make sacrifices to raise that skill (your suggestion of a UB for breaking the cap is a good one, and it's the solution I've used in my longest-running campaign ever). In my experience, 4/level is simply not enough of a sacrifice in a primary skill, especially at higher levels.

For those arguing that raising skill costs cause problems elsewhere, I haven't seen such problems. DX costs 20/level, which is a big sacrifice for raising that skill by one level, which means the player has to save up a lot of points, not buy other potentially powerful abilities, etc. It will take a lot longer to outclass the world's threats at 20/level than 4/level, and a lot longer to outpace other party members whose niche is less fully covered by a single skill.

For those arguing that Sword Guy isn't a viable build, you're just not playing games where such a niche exists, which is totally fine. It exists in DF, and if you read the published adventures, a Sword Guy is an extremely effective character type to handle the kinds of threats in those adventures. If you build a 250 character using the Swashbuckler template, everything works out fine. Once you add another 40 or so points, that's when things get out of hand and that character potentially becomes ludicrously effective (unless you adopt one of various house rules like the ones suggested in this thread, many of which strike me as excellent ideas).