Professional skill seem cheap

[Donny Brook]

GURPS (4e) Seals in Vietnam has some templates that might be useful for your needs.

[Not]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Although in the right sort of game, combining ridiculously high Soldier skill with Book-Learned Wisdom (Limited: US Army Field Manuals) could be entertaining.

A character from Catch-22 or MASH.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Why do you want to?

The standard approach in GURPS is to treat a "profession" as a template. And a template routinely includes at least a couple of primary skills (things the practitioner needs to be quite good at), several secondary skills (things that require basic professional competence), and some background skills (things some who pursues that profession would be exposed to, learned at a basic level). That defines, not a single uniform level of competence, but a range of different competences that define the "profession" in some detail. It seems that you dislike that approach, but I'm not sure why.

They may have seen something like "Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) — 12" in one of the Classic books (Zombietown U.S.A. for this example).

The 4e Basic Set says "Anyone connected with law enforcement and criminal investigations: beat cops, corporate security, government agents, forensics specialists, coroners, etc. Typical skills are Criminology, Forensics, Intelligence Analysis, and Law"

So in the conversion of the character I replaced "Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) — 12" with:
*Criminology (A) (IQ-1) — 12 [1]
*Forensics (H) (IQ-1) — 12 [2]
*Intelligence Analysis (H) (IQ-1) — 12 [2]
*Law (Local) (H) (IQ-1) — 12 [2]

About 2 years ago we had the Explain to me about Professional Skills and the issue of where the boundary of a general skill and an adventuring skill is came up there.

Pulling out GURPS WWII and looking at the templates Soldier on its own is not going to cut it. The character will need other skills.

I see it as a great opportunity to flesh out the character. What type of soldier are/were they? Rifleman, Marine, CO, Recon Trooper, or something else?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by maximara

They may have seen something like "Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) — 12" in one of the Classic books (Zombietown U.S.A. for this example).

That and Profesional skil Firefighting are in Mysteries a 4th edition supplement.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Steev

My general principle in games is to have character generation take no more than a few minutes and involve as little stress as possible for the player.

So I would, in this military style game, like the players to essentially pick a soldier, a specialty and a couple of customisations and be ready to play.

Hence my desire to employ templates etc.

Am I unusually in wanting this? If character generation takes ages and involves a lot of my time I essentially cannot kill PCs off in the game as everything would grind to a halt as I helped them generate a new character.

Do others not find this? Bear in mine my group do not know the gurps system so I would need to help them.

You might take a look at Action 4: Specialists. It has a number of 25 point lenses covering basic infantry as well as various military specialties. So for a 150 point campaign:

100 point base for Attributes, Advantages and incidental skills.

One 25 point lens covering military training everyone has.

One 25 point lens covering a specialty - paramedic, helicopter pilot, sharpshooter etc.

Delvers to Grow has interesting ideas but is for TL 3 fantasy and would take some effort to convert the concepts. One concept to simplify character creation would be the idea of -25 point modules of Disadvantages with a theme, so a character might take Mercenary with a Checkered Past, each including -25 in Disadvantages.

Wild cards are another way to keep things simple but you'd need to work out a few distinctive ones for a military campaign. The Power Ups: Wildcard Skill supplement might be useful if you want to go that route. For TL 8 Wildcard skills, you might also look at the "Pointless Monster Hunting" article in Pyramid 3/83. Different genre but some appropriate modern skills.

Hope some of this is useful.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Refplace

That and Profesional skil Firefighting are in Mysteries a 4th edition supplement.

But Mysteries expressly states "The skill should be used in situations that are obviously part of a police officer’s job that are not covered by other more specialized skills like Criminology, Interrogation, and so on."

Certainly the Sheriff of Zombietown U.S.A. would have those skills rather than just "Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) — 12". In fact, in Mysteries Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) "requires specialization by department or agency."

Professional Skill has its uses it just it is so vague that there are times it comes of as a doorman's wild card. At least it isn't nonsensical like Expert skill is.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Steev

My games are high role play and low number crunch. I ran The Armitage Files over lock down, once a week for over a year. There were 2 character deaths (one guy took a shotgun blast in the chest and one girl was shot with a pistol and bled out on the way to hospital) the entire time but the players all knew the threat level of the game and played cautiously as they could die and be replaced at any time.

Two character deaths in fifty sessions is pretty low as far as mortality goes, and if that's your preference, then I'm not seeing why you feel taking time over character generation is an issue. In a much higher mortality rate campaign, sure, so stipulated, but this is a feature, not a bug.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by maximara

Certainly the Sheriff of Zombietown U.S.A. would have those skills rather than just "Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) — 12". In fact, in Mysteries Professional Skill (Law Enforcement) "requires specialization by department or agency."

Well:
1) Wildcards didn't exist in a similar form back in 1988
2) She's an NPC; "does cop things" at 12 is reasonable shorthand
3) Even according to the plot she's not all that great a figuring out the crime; sign of a crime she arrests the usual suspect and the PCs have to talk their way out of a crime on at least one occasion. I think the inability to actually solve complex crimes fits a small-town cop reasonably well, where the job is more settling disputes (i.e. Diplomacy) and putting people in the drunk tank (i.e. PS Law Enforcement)

[Steev]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Two character deaths in fifty sessions is pretty low as far as mortality goes, and if that's your preference, then I'm not seeing why you feel taking time over character generation is an issue. In a much higher mortality rate campaign, sure, so stipulated, but this is a feature, not a bug.

Because I want players to know that the characters can die and be replaced relatively easily. If they know it will take an hour or so out of the game for both me and them they know that killing their characters causes a major hassle. The two characters that died in that game were back playing with new, interesting characters within a few minutes without disrupting the game.

I also like to keep the same system for all the game’s I play so I might want to run another game soon with a Hugh threat rate where which might have a higher mortality rate.

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by Infornific

You might take a look at Action 4: Specialists. It has a number of 25 point lenses covering basic infantry as well as various military specialties. So for a 150 point campaign:

100 point base for Attributes, Advantages and incidental skills.

One 25 point lens covering military training everyone has.

One 25 point lens covering a specialty - paramedic, helicopter pilot, sharpshooter etc.

If your doing a modern day military campaign, this is what I'd use.
Also, it's flexible enough to cover just about any time period.
Though, for fantasy or TL3 & lower DF oriented books will do better.