Bonuses to skill defaults for reference material

[weevis]

I had a funny real-life situation earlier this year that felt like GURPS. A group of friends and I were in the middle of nowhere and our older diesel engine ran out of fuel. We had extra fuel, but we had to bleed the air out to start it again. We had no Internet access. As any munchkin PC would do, we had brought along a whole bunch of tools and a complete set of reference books about diesel engines. But none of us had ANY experience as a mechanic. Skill-wise we had nada. We knew how to check the oil: that's it.

We tried for hours but in the end we were not able to start it. The issue was the lack of hands-on experience. The manual specific to our engine assumed you were a mechanic so it was very hard for us to understand. The generic books for beginners were comprehensible but did not have diagrams that looked like our specific engine, so they were hard to act on. After a few hours we did find the correct relevant things to do on our specific engine (hooray!)... but we ultimately failed because we didn't push the manual fuel priming pump hard enough. It had to be pushed REALLY hard! Since we had zero practical experience we didn't know how the pump handle should feel. So we had to wait hours for a mechanic.

I was thinking about this lately because what happened to us seems like it is a good fit with the GURPS skill default rules. Good job, GURPS! However, there are other situations where it seems like having specific reference material would work MUCH BETTER than it did for us and I wonder how GMs handle that.

Right now I have a group of city PCs who are ordinary people (GURPS Horror, 125 point characters) going into an remote, cold mountainous setting. I feel like if they brought along just a few books pitched at the right level they would be dramatically better at some aspects of the Survival skill then I was at Mechanic. If they needed to find shelter to prevent exposure and they brought (for example) the US Army Survival Manual and/or the Boy Scout Manual and they had a lighter on them, then they just followed the instructions I think they would be fine for exposure. I passed a wilderness survival course a long time ago and I feel like the shelter part is not that hard. (In contrast, foraging seems hard!) These manuals are expressly written for people who don't have any skill. They are a special kind of reference material pitched exactly at this situation. The military manuals can be very direct: so your plane has crashed and you are suddenly in the middle of nowhere with no equipment. Do this first...

In modern settings my players are increasingly saying things like: I'm going to use my Research skill to find a YouTube video that shows me how to do this. Hmm. I'm pretty sympathetic to this strategy. In my Mechanic scenario above, when I got home and back on the Internet I watched a YouTube video on bleeding diesel engines and I am positive that if we had that video when we were stuck we would have succeeded at bleeding the engine. Watching someone do the specific task on video was very helpful. I do think the world has changed and it is much easier to find reference material that is very specific to the problem you are trying to solve.

As one final example: I teach computer programming (which has no default in GURPS) and I have noticed that students with no prior skill can now exactly follow the directions in a YouTube video. Or they can ask ChatGPT to write them a computer program. Both of these strategies can produce amazing results without skill, and this would not have been possible just a few years ago.

Are there rules covering bonuses for specific reference material? How do you handle reference materials in these sort of situations?

It does feel that the nature of rolls without skill is changing due to contemporary information technology. As the GM I know I can just wing it and select modifier but I wondered if there was something more systematic. The Survival skill takes equipment modifiers (p. B345) and I could consider reference books to be equipment. The way the equipment modifiers box is written it looks like they left out books on purpose, since almost everything except books is mentioned in there.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by weevis

I had a funny real-life situation earlier this year that felt like GURPS. A group of friends and I were in the middle of nowhere and our older diesel engine ran out of fuel. We had extra fuel, but we had to bleed the air out to start it again. We had no Internet access. As any munchkin PC would do, we had brought along a whole bunch of tools and a complete set of reference books about diesel engines. But none of us had ANY experience as a mechanic. Skill-wise we had nada. We knew how to check the oil: that's it.

Canonically, there is Take Extra time. S. John Ross had some GURPS Classic rules for libraries but they may have been taken down when he closed his Blue Room website.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

S. John Ross had some GURPS Classic rules for libraries but they may have been taken down when he closed his Blue Room website.

Thanks so much for this, it is interesting.

• Here are the book rules: https://web.archive.org/web/20160801.../bookrules.htm
• Here are the library rules: https://web.archive.org/web/20160801...s2.htm#Library

I notice these rules would give my "library" a -8 because I only had 6 books about diesel engines with me.

It is fun to read this but I don't think it captures my scenarios or experiences very well. It seems like he is trying to simulate a needle-in-a-haystack search but I am wondering about what happens with extremely specific (or even perfect) reference material chosen in advance or easily found online.

I wonder what his YouTube DIY rules would be? His word count metric is probably not the way to model it.

[ravenfish]

I don't have anything official, but if you're looking for ideas, it might make sense to allow textbooks and manuals to be a source of the skill bonuses from quality equipment on p.345 of Campaigns. (Indeed, a GM looking to add extra complications might rule that unskilled characters might only get such bonuses from good manuals and not from good hardware- in the hands of the uninitiated, top-of-the-line gear is simply something more to puzzle over, but a well-written handbook can be worth its weight in gold, whereas the skilled gain little from a simple walkthrough but can take proper advantage of good tools.)

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

I don't have anything official, but if you're looking for ideas, it might make sense to allow textbooks and manuals to be a source of the skill bonuses from quality equipment on p.345 of Campaigns. (Indeed, a GM looking to add extra complications might rule that unskilled characters might only get such bonuses from good manuals and not from good hardware- in the hands of the uninitiated, top-of-the-line gear is simply something more to puzzle over, but a well-written handbook can be worth its weight in gold, whereas the skilled gain little from a simple walkthrough but can take proper advantage of good tools.)

Yeah, I would say that a typical reference manual can let you operate from default. A well written manual can give someone a better default, probably going with Complementary skill rolls there. So a success by the author grants +1, +2 on a crit success.
And Research can help you find the better manuals or examples over the lower quality or outright trash.
Also give the bonuses from Back to School for things like video if its specific to your task.

[Pursuivant]

Most bonuses from reference materials just offset penalties to skill, however.

The rules for software in GURPS Basic are a good starting point. In some cases, you need reference materials to avoid being penalized (e.g., Law skill for many tasks, unless you're really familiar with case law). In other cases, they offset penalties to perform an obscure task (e.g., a reference library which covers a particular skill, like a cookbook library which gives instructions for cooking weird things like peacocks, turtles or opossums). Rarely, they actually give bonuses to skill, but might just count as better Equipment.

What a reference library does for many tasks is save time. For example, if you're inventing something, access to a patent library will tell you what sort of things have been invented. An academic research library, with access to journals, might tell you what approaches have been tried and didn't work. Functionally, the two might count as Good- or Fine-Quality equipment to make Invention rolls using a particular skill or a bonus for Research as a Complementary Skill

How-to videos effectively give you points for self-study. Assuming the creator's core skill, Teaching skill and PS (Video Production) skills are up to par.