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Old 11-21-2021, 02:50 PM   #1
Steev
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Default Professional skill seem cheap

I generally use the PC’s career to baseline a lot of their skills eg a soldier would have skills in all things soldiery.

Looking at he skill professional skill and soldier they seem awfully cheap. At IQ 10 I can build a skill 18 soldier for 32pts which seems insanely cheap.

Is there some way that individual soldier (in this example) skills are graduated so they are not all 18?
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Old 11-21-2021, 02:54 PM   #2
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

32 points in a skill is a LOT.
Most soldiers would have 1 or 2 points in those and more in Guns, Hiking, and other skills. Breadth soaks up a lot of points.
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Old 11-21-2021, 03:04 PM   #3
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Note that Soldier explicitly does not substitute for combat skills, so, while the character described is quite impressive at entrenching and maintaining his gear, he probably ought to spend at least a few points on Rifle. While he's at it, he should probably drop a few points on Hiking, and a number of other skills where a soldier often wouldn't be rolling at +4 for routine use and therefore can't use the Soldier skill as a substitute.
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Old 11-21-2021, 03:50 PM   #4
Steev
 
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Ah, right. So is there a default setup in gurps which would allow me to stat a professional skill which includes all of the sub skills or would I need to hand make a template for players to use?
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Old 11-21-2021, 03:52 PM   #5
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steev View Post
So is there a default setup in gurps which would allow me to stat a professional skill which includes all of the sub skills...?
Bang!/Wildcard skills.
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Old 11-21-2021, 03:55 PM   #6
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

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Originally Posted by Steev View Post
Ah, right. So is there a default setup in gurps which would allow me to stat a professional skill which includes all of the sub skills or would I need to hand make a template for players to use?
Sounds like you want wildcard skills (p. B175). Professional skills are cheap placeholders for "skills some character might have for a job but won't be useful in adventures." Wildcard skills are more like lots of skills for adventuring use, bundled into a single (exceptionally expensive) skill for convenience.
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Old 11-21-2021, 04:06 PM   #7
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Quote:
Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company View Post
Sounds like you want wildcard skills (p. B175). Professional skills are cheap placeholders for "skills some character might have for a job but won't be useful in adventures." Wildcard skills are more like lots of skills for adventuring use, bundled into a single (exceptionally expensive) skill for convenience.
I guess he could also either use or create a talent to save points, some of the talents are really useful for certain jobs and character concepts, AND save a lot of points.
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Old 11-21-2021, 06:01 PM   #8
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Join Date: Jun 2005
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

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Originally Posted by Steev View Post
Ah, right. So is there a default setup in gurps which would allow me to stat a professional skill which includes all of the sub skills or would I need to hand make a template for players to use?
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.
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Old 11-21-2021, 06:25 PM   #9
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Quote:
Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company View Post
Professional skills are cheap placeholders for "skills some character might have for a job but won't be useful in adventures."
And probably not the only skill a typical professional would have, at that.

GURPS has a very fine-grained skill system. Few professions, including the adventuring ones, would just have a single skill, jacked as high as possible to reflect expertise. They'll have a number of other related skills and supporting skills.

As others have mentioned, the Wildcard skill optional rule (sometimes called "bang skills" on the forums) are meant to help in games that don't want that kind of detail in the skill list. Such games might prefer skills named after roles, like Detective! or Soldier! (not to be confused with the normal Soldier skill). They're expensive -- triple cost, so as much as 24 points per level -- but they cover a wide variety of tasks, anything their role would be expected to do. See the box on B175. They're particularly good for games where the table likes everything to keep moving, roll and shout!, and don't worry about the details.

The chief drawback of Wildcard skills is that omnicompetence, an inability to reflect being good at some things but not others. Science! turns the character into The Professor from Gilligan's Island, or Spock from Star Trek. It's hard for that one skill to represent being good at all the hard sciences but none of the soft, for instance. It becomes hard to tell two similar characters apart, or reflect individual areas of expertise and varying ability within those sets of professional skills. You can always split the wildcards into, say, Hard Science! and Soft Science! if you want -- but that's headed to finer granularity and even higher cost. It takes fiddling to get the list exactly where you want it, and that division probably won't be the same from genre to genre or game to game. (Just another example of the "GURPS is a toolkit" idea.)
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Old 11-21-2021, 08:27 PM   #10
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Default Re: Professional skill seem cheap

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steev View Post
I generally use the PC’s career to baseline a lot of their skills eg a soldier would have skills in all things soldiery.

Looking at he skill professional skill and soldier they seem awfully cheap. At IQ 10 I can build a skill 18 soldier for 32pts which seems insanely cheap.

Is there some way that individual soldier (in this example) skills are graduated so they are not all 18?
You can very plausibly decree that a character with that skill level in soldier must spend 30 points on some combination of rank and reputation to go with it.

More seriously, I would have a conversation with the player about his goals for the character. It's likely this build would not be what he was hoping for. He would be a hopeless shot without the rifle skill, for example, and couldn't drive a tank without driving (tracked).
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