Skill: Games (Gurps)

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by ULFGARD

You learned the first lesson: the best way not to get your @55 kicked in a street fight is NOT to be the baddest fighter, but to be able to avoid the fight in the first place.

QFT - Sometimes Diplomacy is the baddest fight skill of all.

Even if a fight happens and you win, injuries suck.

[Engurrand]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

QFT - Sometimes Diplomacy is the baddest fight skill of all.

Even if a fight happens and you win, injuries suck.

Injuries suck so much.
I thought about titling this thread: "Everything I need to know about adventuring I learned from playing GURPS." How much injuries suck in the absence of healing magic, however, is not something I had to learn from GURPS.

Edit: and I also haven't learned everything I need to about adventuring. I don't think anybody can.

[PK]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Writing (and maybe Contacts) has kept you employed for 17 years; Hobby (GURPS) is just a prerequisite. ;]

No, it'd be fair to say that the job of GURPS Line Editor has prerequisites of both Games (GURPS) and Writing, and that the monthly job roll is made against the lower of these two prerequisites. So both are important. (Contacts, not so much -- I wouldn't say that anyone at SJ Games counted as a Contact at the point in my life where I was offered this job.)

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by aesir23

I was helping my girlfriend study for the GRE the other day, quizzing her on vocabulary words.

A few of the Kaplan flash cards were familiar to me only because of my RPG experience:

The two I can recall off the top of my head are "Augury" because of GURPS and "Abjure" because of AD&D. I think that I knew "Alacrity" because of an RPG too, but I can't remember which one.

(As you can see, she's still working through the A's, there are probably a great deal more.)

Alacrity, from the 2nd Ed MET rules for Vampire: The Masquerade?

Most of my vocab comes from role-playing games, and GURPS spring-boarded my love of the Sengoku period. (Yes, GURPS Japan was my first book.) I convinced my dad that they were HISTORY books.

[PhoenixPaw]

GURPS 3rd Edition Basic Set (fourth printing) is one of the main reasons my command of this (to me) foreign language is at the native level.

When I started fourth grade at the age of 10 I started learning English in school, but it was slow going. When I got hold of my first GURPS book (the basic set book) and I had a desire to improve my English.

As things stand today, I sometimes switch to speaking English to Swedish friends due to the fact that I find English a more comfortable language to express some ideas in compared to my (real) native tongue.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

Alacrity, from the 2nd Ed MET rules for Vampire: The Masquerade?

I think I only had the 1st ed VtM. That is where I learned "celerity", however.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Engurrand

The GCA program default when you add the "Games" skill to a character is the specialty "GURPS." Chuckle-worthy? Yes.

Just as an aside, I really like it when people find these little easter eggs - especially since I don't drop in too many of them.

Originally Posted by Engurrand

But it also got me thinking. At least a few people on this forum have this skill, so, besides playing GURPS, how do you use it?

I obviously us it in combination with Computer Programming in writing data files for GCA. This doesn't make me any real money, but does get me some swag (it's difficult to work on these things if you don't have the books, so I get them complimentary). In fact the first programming "language" I probably learned was GCA data file spec, and wrote quite a few files over the years before 4th Edition came out and GCA became the official character creation program.

Outside of gaming, I've used many interesting facts I've gleaned from GURPS books - I won a picture of Walter Koenig at a 'con (which he later signed) because I knew how many Light Years were in a Parsec, thank you GURPS Space (my first GURPS supplement, a book I still love). In helping my brother set up a fish tank I was able to quickly rattle off how heavy the full tank would be thanks to GURPS Vehicles. On a math quiz I couldn't remember how many feet were in a mile, but I remembered how many yards were thanks to GURPS (and multiplying by 3 gave me the feet).

[Hugin]

RPGs in general improved my vocabulary and math skills as a child. I was the only person in my freshman science class that new what a Pathogen was due to Shadowrun's Shadowtech book.

[Dragondog]

When a friend told me that her boyfriend was a SERE instructor, I knew what SERE was because of GURPS.

And as I recall, the first time I saw the word Internet was in GURPS Cyberpunk. Not that it meant anything to me at the time.