Maintaining skills with no default

[Crystalline_Entity]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I believe those rules were written before the Dabbler Perk existed. Personally, I'd say degraded skills simply drop by a further -1 until they hit the better of Default and the standard penalty for that difficulty (Att-4 for Easy, -5 for Average, -6 for Hard, and -7 for Very Hard). Note this means that once you learn something that lacks a default, you'll never completely forget how to do it.

I like that idea, that sounds reasonable and fair.

Thank you everyone!

[Emerikol]

I admit I approach the game from a far more gamist viewpoint than I do a realism viewpoint. I want it to feel real enough for a fun suspension of disbelief, cinematic tv shows for example. They give lip service to realism but not really. Almost any subject you know well you will realize these shows are very fakey. Yet for most it's good enough.

So I'm far more concerned with players breaking the GAME by min maxing certain things than I am the lack of realism in not losing skill points with disuse. I mean do you really want your PCs taking their list of skills and telling you they practice them between every adventure. Mark off some time. That is what mine would do.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I believe those rules were written before the Dabbler Perk existed. Personally, I'd say degraded skills simply drop by a further -1 until they hit the better of Default and the standard penalty for that difficulty (Att-4 for Easy, -5 for Average, -6 for Hard, and -7 for Very Hard). Note this means that once you learn something that lacks a default, you'll never completely forget how to do it.

This is basically what I assumed you'd do, but seeing it written out is nice. I bolded the very important part because from what I've seen in real life, you very well can go a decade or more without using a skill and still have parts of it come right back as though you were never gone.

Originally Posted by Varyon

have the character arrange some freaking flowers at some point within six months.

Reminds me of a write up I saw where the character had perk SOP: Uses each skill at least once per month. It was the equivalent to Rules Exemption: Skill Degradation and they didn't realize it until it was pointed out.

I personally don't and never even considered this optional rule. Instead, I just use it as justification for someone taking points out of a skill, especially for Impulse Buys. That one point in Professional: Janitor you have kicking around doing nothing for twenty campaigns? We can easily accept you lost it and picked up something else or got lucky.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

This is basically what I assumed you'd do, but seeing it written out is nice. I bolded the very important part because from what I've seen in real life, you very well can go a decade or more without using a skill and still have parts of it come right back as though you were never gone.

As a corollary to this, for GM's who enjoy complexity, it should probably be easier to regain lost skill levels than it was to gain them in the first place. I'd be inclined to apply a x4 multiplier to any points invested, or time spent learning, until the character is back up to wherever he/she left off. Someone who used to have Bow at DX+2 [8] but has had it degrade all the way down to its default of DX-5 [0] is going to pick it back up faster than someone who has never used a bow before.

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I personally don't and never even considered this optional rule. Instead, I just use it as justification for someone taking points out of a skill, especially for Impulse Buys. That one point in Professional: Janitor you have kicking around doing nothing for twenty campaigns? We can easily accept you lost it and picked up something else or got lucky.

Yeah, this feels like a better way to handle it. Personally, I think of the six-month degradation as being largely an afterthought of the rule - the real meat-and-potatoes part of it is the daily degradation of extreme skill levels, which can (potentially) be used to keep skill levels from getting too high (or at least stop one character from having a lot of skills at high level, as there are only so many hours in the day to practice). Simply exercising the GM's right to say "No" is often a better solution, of course.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Varyon

As a corollary to this, for GM's who enjoy complexity, it should probably be easier to regain lost skill levels than it was to gain them in the first place. I'd be inclined to apply a x4 multiplier to any points invested, or time spent learning, until the character is back up to wherever he/she left off. Someone who used to have Bow at DX+2 [8] but has had it degrade all the way down to its default of DX-5 [0] is going to pick it back up faster than someone who has never used a bow before.

My simple rule is that if you don't get points back for losing it, you don't have to spend points to get it back. If someone loses an arm, they can (if possible) just go to the high tech doctor or healing wizard and get it back, but the person who has One Arm can't without buying off the disad. Someone who forgot a skill can pick it back up with a little bit of training. For an exact mechanic, I'd probably have it be a handful of hours per point with a max of a month of 'hobby' hours to get it back, or have it retrain as though you were gaining a familiarity (which I can't remember the rules for).

Originally Posted by Varyon

Yeah, this feels like a better way to handle it. Personally, I think of the six-month degradation as being largely an afterthought of the rule - the real meat-and-potatoes part of it is the daily degradation of extreme skill levels, which can (potentially) be used to keep skill levels from getting too high (or at least stop one character from having a lot of skills at high level, as there are only so many hours in the day to practice). Simply exercising the GM's right to say "No" is often a better solution, of course.

I absolutely echo the No. In fact, I'd far rather a GM tell me "no" than to punish me for something they didn't want me to take. I've actually seen a lighter version of this rule used once; It has no effect on regular skill levels. For high (I think it's +10?) skills, you get a flat -2 if you didn't maintain it today, and -1 if you did a small amount (like five minutes or two uses, whichever is better). You don't lose the skill, you just lose the edge temporarily.

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Personally, I think of the six-month degradation as being largely an afterthought of the rule - the real meat-and-potatoes part of it is the daily degradation of extreme skill levels, which can (potentially) be used to keep skill levels from getting too high (or at least stop one character from having a lot of skills at high level, as there are only so many hours in the day to practice). Simply exercising the GM's right to say "No" is often a better solution, of course.

My feeling about it is that the rules on skill degradation exist for special situations and to encourage story hooks. If a character is a concert pianist and they get in a shipwreck, they have to either take special care and risks to get the piano off of the ship and onto the atoll or else they're just going to have to take the skill loss for not being able to practice it for however long it takes to get rescued. Or a character in a Turkish prison might have to find a way to surreptitiously practice their martial arts or else incur the wrath of the guards. Or a character in hiding in the Dharavi slums while their partner recovers from serious injuries might have to be careful about practicing their parkour skills (Jumping, Climbing, Acrobatics, whatever) or the rumors of their unusual activities might spread to where their enemies might hear and track them down.

Most of the time, though, characters just naturally practice their skills. And of course the GM can use that as a pretext for the neighbors witnessing their unusual activities related to that. And someone sneaking off into the woods every night is unusual and arouses curiosity, too. Practicing Hypnotism in a medieval setting might get the character accused of witchcraft!

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by lugaid

My feeling about it is that the rules on skill degradation exist for special situations and to encourage story hooks. If

The common "special situation" is a time skip of a century or so in the life of immortal characters.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I believe those rules were written before the Dabbler Perk existed.

Personally, I'd say degraded skills simply drop by a further -1 until they hit the better of Default and the standard penalty for that difficulty (Att-4 for Easy, -5 for Average, -6 for Hard, and -7 for Very Hard).

Note this means that once you learn something that lacks a default, you'll never completely forget how to do it.

If we give everything defaults (just ridiculously low for the inconceivable) we have that anyway.

Maybe things could drop below default into "incompetence" tier?

We could just assume that the lack of incompetence that comes by default character design assumes that someone has some sub-dabbler practice in it ?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

We could just assume that the lack of incompetence that comes by default character design assumes that someone has some sub-dabbler practice in it ?

GURPS actually does assume some experience with skills that have defaults in many - perhaps most - cases. For example, Area Knowledge can only make sense if the character had some sort of exposure to information about a given area - a successful roll can allow you to know where a local park is, for example, which makes no sense if you have absolutely zero exposure to the area (the default could represent having been there in the past, having read about it in brochures/on the internet, or similar). Indeed, this is the case for most IQ-based skills, and probably the case for many DX- and HT-based ones, at least when talking about skills that have a default.

[Plane]

An "incompetent in everything" kind of baseline definitely makes sense only for defaults...

B164's "all guns" makes me think that if you took Incompetent for Hobby Skill (B200 .. it does have a default) that you would have to be incompetent in ALL hobby skill defaults and just generally be bad at all these random little DX/IQ tasks.

This kind of thing probably would make sense for wild animals to have. Even moreso than a human with No Fine Manipulators (your brain is still wired to be able to do things like juggling/kite flying/needlepoint/origami even if your hands are cut off!)

I wouldn't for example expect an ape (despite their fine manipulators and high DX... B456 gives chimps/gorillas DX12 for example) to be as competent in learning needlepoint sewing as a human. If we don't give gorillas "Incompetent: Hobby Skills" then maybe IQ should factor into these DX skills somehow too? This would at least reflect how humans could outperform them.

B15 only forbids tech skills and languages, and Hobby Skills isn't listed as a TL skill...

B138's "Hidebound" would probably interfere here (both Domestic Animal and Wild Animal have this) but that's only a -2 penalty. Is -2 really the only difference?

This would mean the average chimp/gorilla with IQ6/DX12 would have the same default in DX-based Hobby Skills as a human with IQ10/DX10 ...

Am I missing something? The only way I can see it working is requiring BOTH an IQ-based and DX-based success roll to do a lot of this stuff.

Sewing is more than just "my hands can operate a needle for fine tasks" (ie a gorilla could use a needle to fish ants out of a decaying tree to eat) but also "I understand what sewing is"

If we don't factor in IQ then Incompetent: Hobby Skills would probably cover that gap (any human with it is as bad as a gorilla/chimp of equiv DX when trying to do needlepoint! at default)

Incompetent would probably also cover the gap for a lot of skills we might not have thought about them having DX in... like what about weapons?

Gorillas/Chimps might well have the DX to become amazing fighters, and their hands are up to the task... but wouldn't they just tend to have "incompetent: weapons" because they just don't understand how weapons work?

Being below IQ 6 prevents using TL weapon skills like guns, but there's non-TL weapon skills like...

spear/sword (do chimps/gorillas even understand how cutting/impaling weapons work, or do they just only thing of weapons in terms of being branches/crushing?) and especially Force Sword (they don't feel heavy so they wouldn't seem like they could hurt someone... and you might actually be frightened of it ... can you imagine a chimp wielding a flaming torch without pyrophobia?)

Then there's ranged DX-based weapon skills like Blowpipe/Bola/Bow/Crossbow and also other tool use like Bicycling which one might imagine a DX 12 gorilla/chimp performs less well at compared to humans.

They might be able to figure out a Cloak/Net but that type of thing probably is less instinctive than using a Shield... maybe low-tech weapon skills should be given a TL as well?

You almost need an "incompetence suite" to get realistic low-performance use to apply to subhuman animals.

B27 defines TL 0 (ie caveman/gorilla/chimp tier) as being "stone age". I would assume that at that level "everything is a club" and you should have to actually buy up TL to use tools for anything other than thrust-crush/swing-crush/armed-grapple/parry/block (ie can't understand how riding a bike works, or how needleploint works)

Or if this is allowed without buying up TL then maybe the negative TL (as compared to when something was invented) could at least be a penalty to the skill.

Needlepoint for example dates back to ancient egyptians, but that's still at least Bronze Age (TL1) not Stone Age (TL0) and maybe even Iron Age (TL2) because I'm pretty sure Egyptians worked with iron in some ways. So at TL0 you should maybe have a -2 penalty for doing a TL2 level skill like needlepoint.

Bicycles were invented in 1817 (TL5 industrial revolution) so we could maybe give a -5 penalty for a TL0 character attempting it.

That said: it takes IQ to invent/design a bicycle but not necessarily USE it (ie you don't need to understand how guns work to point and shoot them... you can learn to use higher TL weapons if someone teaches you) so rather than a DX penalty maybe it should more be something like to buy off Incompetent you make an IQ-TLdiff roll?

The assumption could be that wild animals who don't understand bikes/sewing are all Incompetent, but that the average human is not incompetent in things which are commonplace in his TL.

A caveman should definitely be incompetent in Bicycle/Needlepoint (they aren't invented, they are alien) but since his IQ is higher than the 6 of gorilla/chimps (let's say at least 7) he has a slightly higher chance of buying off his Incompetence and being able to use the skill at default like a modern human.

As to when to make these IQ rolls, I think something along the lines of "learning is a job" (social engineering) where instead of "put in the hours, get the character points" you actually make success rolls after putting in the hours to see how many "hours out" resulted from the "hours in".

This makes higher-IQ characters faster learners because they do better in those checks. So it would allow the IQ8 caveman to get the required 200 hours to buy off his Incompetence quirk faster than the IQ 6 gorilla/chimp.

This also synergizes well with "teaching is a job" because you not only have accelerated learning with someone teaching you, but if they're also doing success rolls then higher-IQ teachers (or with more points in the teaching skill as needed) could get better "hours out" from "hours in" ratios.