[Basic] Skill of the week: Lifting

[johndallman]

Lifting is the HT/Average skill of lifting heavy things. You can lift as per B353 without rolling and without skill, but a success on Lifting increases your Basic Lift by 5% per point of success. This doesn't affect how much you can carry, and hence doesn't affect encumbrance. Lifting has no default, and no skills default to it. Lifting appeared in GURPS 3e Compendium I, where you could add 10% of Lifting skill to ST to calculate lifts, but that was for the old ST system.

The rules are silent on just what the inability to apply Lifting to carrying means. I suspect that you can take a step or two while using Lifting, as otherwise its usefulness would be very limited, but no more. I also reckon you should be able to roll against the better of Lifting and HT to avoid injury or accident when lifting, in the same way as for Hiking, Running, etc).

Lifting shows up on templates as a secondary or background skill for athletes, martial artists, peasant heroes and barbarians. Bio-Tech covers the use of steroids when training in athletic skills. Supers has material on lifting and throwing very heavy weights under superheroic conventions. Underground Adventures points out the importance of Lifting in low-tech mining, and Zombies makes it a primary skill option for Creepy Assistants.

It seems odd to me that some basic training in Lifting makes the maximum you can lift more variable. Buying Lifting ST is point-efficient, as compared to RAW Lifting and adds to carrying, pushing and pulling, but it's an Exotic advantage. It isn't very Exotic: it can be allowed with a Special Exercises perk, and a single level makes sense as part of buying a point of ST in instalments, but it seems worthwhile trying to get Lifting to make more sense.

Focusing on the sport of weightlifting ignores the practical side of the ability, and adventurers are likely to need that as well as bending bars and lifting gates. So let's think about "ordinary" lifters: labourers, nurses moving patients, people like that. They usually have HT10 and at most [2] in the skill, for Lifting-10, at HT, but the training is nonetheless quite useful to them. Taking extra time is common, but they often don't have much in the way of equipment (hospital lifting gear is a TL8 innovation, and lots of industrial loads are more conveniently man-handled than fork-lifted).

The "Trained ST" concept from Technical Grappling seems like a potential solution, with Lifting adding to ST at the Fast progression. That's already in Technical Grappling for picking up your opponents; if you can do that, you can presumably use it for lifting things that aren't fighting back. But you need HT+1 in Lifting, costing [4], which seems like demanding too much training to get any benefit.

One way to fix that seems to be to explicitly allow taking Extra Time to increase effective Lifting skill for Trained ST purposes. Then people with no Lifting just lift at their basic ST, those with [1] in Lifting can lift at ST+1 if they take 4x time, those with [2] can lift at ST+1 if they take 2x time, and those with [4] can lift at ST+1 in the basic time, or ST+2 in 2x time.

How does that work for weightlifting records? Well, competitive weightlifting seems like Extra Effort. That's Will (or Will-based Lifting, if better), rolling at -1 per extra 5% BL, and a cost of 1FP for the attempt, as well as the 1FP/sec for lifting very heavy things. If you make that by five, getting to 10xBL, that puts real-world weightlifting records around the ST16-18 range, for the total of ST, Lifting ST, Arm ST (for some kinds of lifts) and bonuses from Lifting. This is within a stone's throw of reality, and makes some basic Lifting training useful for normal people.

Does that idea seem valid?

[RogerBW]

This has never appeared on a character in my games.

After all, we do have Lifting Strength, which in typical PC strength ranges gives you 5-10% extra BL per 3 points you spend on it, no roll needed, and does count against your Encumbrance. I am certainly inclined to allow reasonable levels of Lifting or Striking ST to any character, just as I let characters buy their Will and Perception up and down, for a bit more fine detail than the raw stat allows. My inclination, admittedly not tested against reality or play, would be to drop this skill, encourage Lifting or Striking ST to represent a balance of fast against slow strength, and use willpower-based Extra Effort for feats of strength.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The rules are silent on just what the inability to apply Lifting to carrying means. I suspect that you can take a step or two while using Lifting, as otherwise its usefulness would be very limited, but no more.

This is actually debatable. Its original intent appears to be entirely to model weight-lifters, who mostly can't take a step or two while lifting their maximum weight. With quad ST and Extra Effort it's actually much less necessary in 4e in the first place

And yeah, like Hiking and Running it's a skill that exists primarily because the 3e rules discouraged or disallowed up attributes or buying advantages in play. With the admission advantages can be learnable and stuff cost the same in play as at character creation, they really should have been replaced with stuff like Lifting ST, Fit, Extra Move and the like. I suspect the reason Lifting ST is Exotic in the first place is a concession to the same thinking that made advantages not learnable in play in 3e.

[Refplace]

I like your Trained ST and Exrtra Time adding to the effective skill for it idea.
For weight lifters extra time and extra effort is standard IMHO for contests or otherwise poushing yourself.
I would go one further and add the Trained ST to a HT roll as well.

[dripton]

I never see Lifting skill in play either. Which is fine -- unless you're running a game based around weightlifting, just lifting based on your ST is fine.

Lifting ST is really common, though -- anyone who habitually wears heavy armor and is near an encumbrance breakpoint benefits from it, and it's cheaper than a level of Move. I typically allow Lifting ST to vary from base ST by up to 20% before treating it as exotic. Seems reasonable to me that someone who carries a heavy load often can get better at it, without necessarily getting super-strong overall.

[ericthered]

Oh yeah, That is a skill. Never used it. I've seen lifting ST all the time though.

[Bruno]

Doug is on a one man campaign to eliminate ST and HT based skills. I think he was the one who suggested making lifting Will based and just using that in the Extra Effort calculation.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Doug is on a one man campaign to eliminate ST and HT based skills. I think he was the one who suggested making lifting Will based and just using that in the Extra Effort calculation.

I'm not in favor of losing the HT-based skills. There are some things that just make more sense there.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Doug is on a one man campaign to eliminate ST and HT based skills. I think he was the one who suggested making lifting Will based and just using that in the Extra Effort calculation.

Only ST-based. I think HT-based skills are just fine. A better way to phrase this is "eliminate ST-based skills and mostly replace them with HT-based skills!"

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I like your Trained ST and Exrtra Time adding to the effective skill for it idea.
For weight lifters extra time and extra effort is standard IMHO for contests or otherwise poushing yourself.
I would go one further and add the Trained ST to a HT roll as well.

I think Lifting, Running, Climbing, etc are good candidates for Techniques, actually. Perhaps even like Arm Lock, where they default to a basic Stat (Running and Lifting are better for this than Climbing, which has a better blend of varied skills and tricks that make it closer to a real skill) and then points make you just be higher.

But paying (say) 14 or 15 points to go from HT-4 to HT+10 in Running or Lifting and basing your effective HT or DX or die roll using the Trained ST Fast progression shouldn't break anything.