Bang Skills

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by stilleon

How does bang skills balance in y'all's opinion?

In terms of what they give for the points, they need a little extra to balance them against not just standard skills, but also attributes and advantages. I disliking shilling my own stuff, but as others have said, "a little extra" is what GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills provides. Wildcards that encompass many techniques at full skill, waive familiarity and TL effects, bestow plot-changing Wildcard Points, and grant many bonuses for high skill – and that perhaps even get an enhanced critical-success range, and work at a higher level when standing in for less-than-Average, -Hard, or even -Very Hard skills – are very much worth the points. The important thing here is not to replace the complexity of excessively long skill lists with the complexity of excessively numerous optional rules!

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

This can stil be a problem. For example: Gardening! may not look like a good deal compared to Melee! even if does make a character a truly epic gardener.

GURPS Power-Ups 7 helps there, too. It has a lot of rules for easing that problem. In particular, it encourages what it calls "off-label use." For instance, the gardener can use Gardening! with DX to wield any bladed weapon that resembles a gardening implement (axes, knives, sickles, many polearms, etc.), shoot small-caliber rifles (for varmint control), and even use flamethrowers (which are used to clear brush), and with IQ to cook up plant-based poisons or just repurpose insecticides. So Melee! person might be the better fighter (because they get all kinds of combat perks and techniques built in), but Gardening! person could still pull their weight in a fight and be awesome in their niche.

There's also an optional rule (Law of the Instrument, a.k.a. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.") that lets Wildcard Points from any wildcard convert any situation into one where that wildcard applies. That can help a lot. The A Matter of Degree and Not Quite What You Wanted rules also let any wildcard step up in any situation. The recurring theme is that there's a penalty or cost to operate far from home base, but the answer is never a firm "No."

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Going to just bang skills is probably too much of a blunt instrument, because there’ll always be things that a player wants a character to do that can’t really be covered by any bang skill that otherwise fits the character. Your party’s gunslinger may well have Guns!, but the scientist may just want a couple of points in Guns (Pistol) to allow them to be non-useless support when things get shooty. Conversely, Science! is great for a cinematic scientist, but perhaps your hands-on techie just wants to know a little bit of Physics, yet also knowing Biology and Astronomy would be too much.

The above optional rules help with that. Moreover, there's always the GM's prerogative not just to use general wildcards but also to assign personal ones to specific characters, in keeping with their role or occupation. This can be as simple as using a standardized list but letting each player name a small number of "incidental skills" that their version includes . . . or as radical as letting people have wildcards like Joe! and Jane!.

There are also hybrid solutions like having a small list of standard wildcards plus asking everybody to take their personal one (e.g., Jane!) as well, and then invoking suitable GURPS Power-Ups 7 options. For one thing, the personal wildcard will generate Wildcard Points and bonuses applicable to anything that fits the character concept, irrespective of other specifics. For another, there are rules there that let two wildcards work together, which means the personal wildcard could enhance a situation-specific one.

The extreme case is the Ultimate Template Wildcards rule, which replaces specific skills with role-suitable tasks: "When a character is playing their part in the campaign, every skilled activity involves a roll against the most suitable attribute modified by their relative skill level with their template wildcard."

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

Or perhaps, give a large point break for hobby skills. Just make sure that they are just for color, rather than anything truly useful.

There's that. There's letting people include a few hobbies in their version of the wildcard or their personal wildcard, as mentioned above. In between is allowing skills to default to wildcards as in GURPS Power-Ups 7, but declaring that any innocuous hobby or interest always defaults to any wildcard, the logic being that in the course of becoming broadly competent, you of course had downtime in which to pursue personal pastimes.