Player Paranoia and Character Surprise: How to GM

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

I've done this. It creates obvious breakpoints, which is bad. But it also means that defaulting from a very high Stat becomes much more sensible.

The way I did this was that the first point gets you from DEFAULT to DEFAULT+4, and then increases from there.

Default: 0pts
Default+4: 1pt
Default+5: 2pts
Default+6: 4pts
Default+7: 8pts

For average skills at IQ/DX of 10, this has zero impact. For low IQ/DX, the points in skills have even more impact than ususal. For high IQ/DX, it's lower.

Frex: At IQ8, 8pts in an average skill by RAW gets you Skill-10. Using STAT/2, you get Skill-11. For IQ18, RAW gets you Skill-20. STAT/2 default is 9, 8pts gets you Skill-17.

I'm 99,9% sure I've suggested this simple fix before: Round up for E and H skills and down for A and VH skills.

Or if for whatever reasons the other way works better, round down for E and H skills, and up for A and VH skills.

[Harbinjer]

Originally Posted by Kromm

In GURPS, I hint that certain skills are necessary....

Perhaps it should be more than a hint.

Kromm's list is so useful, that it (or something like it) should probably be in the Characters book.
Perhaps we could see it expanded upon to fill out a short PDF available on Warehouse 23. I'm picturing something between the GURPS Skill Categories and a character template.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Harbinjer

Perhaps it should be more than a hint.

Kromm's list is so useful, that it (or something like it) should probably be in the Characters book.
Perhaps we could see it expanded upon to fill out a short PDF available on Warehouse 23. I'm picturing something between the GURPS Skill Categories and a character template.

Yeah! We could put it with a bunch of other advice and call it How to Be a GURPS GM! (Pp. 21-22, by the way.)

Seriously, people seem to assume this is a book only for beginners, or some weird third-party thing like GURPS For Dummies. t really isn't. There's a lot of good stuff in there.