Chart of time for skills?

[briansommers]

Is there any chart/table that would show time for different skills?

I’m having a hard time wording what I’m wanting to ask.

The more difficult the skill is and the higher the points you get in that skill should effect the characters age. Are there rules in place that do this or some sort of guideline.

It would be nice to know how many skills and what level you could get say with a 4 yrs of college. I’m looking for a bit of a lifepath…

Say the character is 17 or 18 yrs old and for every 4 hrs of school they get x amount of skills and or y amount of points in that skill but the character ages by 4 years every degree if you will.

Bachelors, Masters, Doctors, etc….

[sir_pudding]

Social Engineering:Back to School has rules for education.

[ehrbar]

Originally Posted by briansommers

Is there any chart/table that would show time for different skills?

I’m having a hard time wording what I’m wanting to ask.

The more difficult the skill is and the higher the points you get in that skill should effect the characters age. Are there rules in place that do this or some sort of guideline.

It would be nice to know how many skills and what level you could get say with a 4 yrs of college. I’m looking for a bit of a lifepath…

Say the character is 17 or 18 yrs old and for every 4 hrs of school they get x amount of skills and or y amount of points in that skill but the character ages by 4 years every degree if you will.

Bachelors, Masters, Doctors, etc….

So, does pointing out the Improvement By Study rules, Basic Set pages 292-293, answer your question?

[mlangsdorf]

Skill points can reflect learning, but also natural talent. So it's not really accurate to say "my character has 8 CP in Engineering, that means he spent 4 years at school." There's also the question of diligence and training/education time - two people can go to the same college, but one might take only 4 courses a semester and the other takes 7. And two different people may have education on a different schedule - one of them goes to college for 4 years straight, while the other has to work every other semester to pay for it, so both end up with the same(ish) education, but the first graduates a 22 and the second at 26.

Normally, a modern 4 year college is sufficient to get a single Mental/Hard skill up to 12 or 13, plus any prerequisites or minors and a smattering of other skills. But you could easily have a talented, diligent prodigy who ends up with Computer Programming-13, Engineering (Electrical)-13, Mathematics-12, Physics-11, Writing-11, Philosophy (Western)-11, Smallsword (Sport)-13, and Sport (Tennis)-13 with a double degree of BS in EE and CS graduating at the same time as an aimless slacker with Literature-12, Writing-11, and Hobby (Drinking Games)-14 graduating with a BA in English Literature.

So no, there's no real guidelines.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by briansommers

Say the character is 17 or 18 yrs old and for every 4 hrs of school they get x amount of skills and or y amount of points in that skill but the character ages by 4 years every degree if you will.

OK, if I recall, Basic Set mentions:
-> There's a figure of 200 hours to 1 character point (this is often flawed, but let's roll with that).
-> There are different levels of which hours are accumulated (i.e. Intense training is twice as effective, learning on the job is quarter effective and self-teaching is half as effective.)
-> One college credit is about 200 hours (that seems a little high to me, but then again all my courses were listed at half credit...)

So working from these:
In a university that does five courses a semester (of which there are three a year, but most students do only two of them), a four year degree would net a character 40 points. Graduate degrees are more complicated (as students spend the majority of their time writing a thesis, at least for the research based degree), but assuming a similar rate of study, that puts a Master's degree at 20 points and a Doctoral degree at 60 points.

But let's step back from lazy maths for a moment. The actual value of a degree will vary based on:
-> What courses the character takes (i.e. Easy courses vs. Hard Courses, diverse courses vs. narrowly specialized courses)
-> How much effort the character expends (i.e. the character gets a bare pass vs. does well, the character tries to absorb the material vs. crams for the exams and promptly forgets it, the character is a genius and extremely challenging courses are laughably easy)
-> The actual game play value of the skills taught (i.e. Nobody comes out of medical school with 40 points in medical skills, a newly minted PhD doesn't have 60 points in Physics, a semester of CS doesn't justify five points in Computer Programming)

Also consider that just dumping the points in skills is likely to be not so accurate when determining what the character actually possesses. A Liberal Arts degree could be modelled by smatterings of points in tons of knowledge skills, or you could model it with a +1 or 2 to IQ and a few points in courses they really liked.

[whswhs]

Note that GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School has a procedure for tracking a character's learning in college, month by month, using a die roll against Will, with modifiers. This will give you some number of hours of learning for each month of enrollment.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by TGLS

-> One college credit is about 200 hours (that seems a little high to me, but then again all my courses were listed at half credit...)

That does seem insanely high.

My 3 credit courses were around 3 hours of class instruction a week, plus 6-9 hours of homework problems, class readings, and other self-study, for the roughly 13 weeks in a semester. That would work out to about 60 hours of education or about 20 hours per credit. A degree was nominally 120 credit hours, or 2400 hours of education for 12 CP, which seems more sensible. That would work out to 8 CP in a M/H major course of study, 2 CP in a M/H minor, and 2 CP spent on two other skills (or two Dabbler perks, possibly). An IQ 11 incoming student would graduate with skill 12 in their major, skill 10 in their minor, and skill 9 in two other subjects. Plus whatever else the student learned in the 70+ hours/week that they weren't involved in formal college classwork and during school breaks.

But even that outline is deceptive, because in the student has a talent instead of raw IQ, they'll learn faster. Or the student could bounce between majors. Or all the other things I covered in my previous response.

[briansommers]

Very helpful.
I’m leaning towards back to school is what I want.

[Varyon]

As others have noted, there's nothing really set in stone, although stuff like the Improvement By Study rules, and I would assume the content of Back to School (a supplement I lack), do have some general guidelines. You can go off of those to get some basic ideas, but realistically sometimes you can just learn a certain skill* pretty quickly, at least up to a certain point, and sometimes you'll have a skill that you just... can't wrap your head around (or otherwise lack the ability for - artistry and craftworks are largely beyond me, for example).

*There's also the fact that some GURPS skills are fairly broad, like Biology, while others are ultra-narrow, like Melee Weapon (which has to be specialized per weapon type, with things like Shortsword, Broadsword, Jitte/Sai, Tonfa, Smallsword, Rapier, and Saber all being distinct skills from each other).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

*There's also the fact that some GURPS skills are fairly broad, like Biology, while others are ultra-narrow, like Melee Weapon (which has to be specialized per weapon type, with things like Shortsword, Broadsword, Jitte/Sai, Tonfa, Smallsword, Rapier, and Saber all being distinct skills from each other).

At out TL Biology is so broad that it's IQ/VH. Optional Specialization (reducing things to only Hard)is said to be much more common.

As for your others, Tonfa covers tonfas and sometimes fictional equivalents like the sharp ones in the first Hellboy movie. Jitte/Sai covers mostly just two weapons and the fencing weapons skills are only a little broader.

Broadsword and Shortsword though are only narrow compared to Sword!. We'd be here a _long_ time if I started typing out lists of distinct historical weapons covered by one or the other of them.