Bonuses to skill defaults for reference material

weevis · 11-21-2023, 11:11 AM

I had a funny real-life situation earlier this year that felt like GURPS. A group of friends and I were in the middle of nowhere and our older diesel engine ran out of fuel. We had extra fuel, but we had to bleed the air out to start it again. We had no Internet access. As any munchkin PC would do, we had brought along a whole bunch of tools and a complete set of reference books about diesel engines. But none of us had ANY experience as a mechanic. Skill-wise we had nada. We knew how to check the oil: that's it.

We tried for hours but in the end we were not able to start it. The issue was the lack of hands-on experience. The manual specific to our engine assumed you were a mechanic so it was very hard for us to understand. The generic books for beginners were comprehensible but did not have diagrams that looked like our specific engine, so they were hard to act on. After a few hours we did find the correct relevant things to do on our specific engine (hooray!)... but we ultimately failed because we didn't push the manual fuel priming pump hard enough. It had to be pushed REALLY hard! Since we had zero practical experience we didn't know how the pump handle should feel. So we had to wait hours for a mechanic.

I was thinking about this lately because what happened to us seems like it is a good fit with the GURPS skill default rules. Good job, GURPS! However, there are other situations where it seems like having specific reference material would work MUCH BETTER than it did for us and I wonder how GMs handle that.

Right now I have a group of city PCs who are ordinary people (GURPS Horror, 125 point characters) going into an remote, cold mountainous setting. I feel like if they brought along just a few books pitched at the right level they would be dramatically better at some aspects of the Survival skill then I was at Mechanic. If they needed to find shelter to prevent exposure and they brought (for example) the US Army Survival Manual and/or the Boy Scout Manual and they had a lighter on them, then they just followed the instructions I think they would be fine for exposure. I passed a wilderness survival course a long time ago and I feel like the shelter part is not that hard. (In contrast, foraging seems hard!) These manuals are expressly written for people who don't have any skill. They are a special kind of reference material pitched exactly at this situation. The military manuals can be very direct: so your plane has crashed and you are suddenly in the middle of nowhere with no equipment. Do this first...

In modern settings my players are increasingly saying things like: I'm going to use my Research skill to find a YouTube video that shows me how to do this. Hmm. I'm pretty sympathetic to this strategy. In my Mechanic scenario above, when I got home and back on the Internet I watched a YouTube video on bleeding diesel engines and I am positive that if we had that video when we were stuck we would have succeeded at bleeding the engine. Watching someone do the specific task on video was very helpful. I do think the world has changed and it is much easier to find reference material that is very specific to the problem you are trying to solve.

As one final example: I teach computer programming (which has no default in GURPS) and I have noticed that students with no prior skill can now exactly follow the directions in a YouTube video. Or they can ask ChatGPT to write them a computer program. Both of these strategies can produce amazing results without skill, and this would not have been possible just a few years ago.

Are there rules covering bonuses for specific reference material? How do you handle reference materials in these sort of situations?

It does feel that the nature of rolls without skill is changing due to contemporary information technology. As the GM I know I can just wing it and select modifier but I wondered if there was something more systematic. The Survival skill takes equipment modifiers (p. B345) and I could consider reference books to be equipment. The way the equipment modifiers box is written it looks like they left out books on purpose, since almost everything except books is mentioned in there.

11-21-2023, 11:11 AM	#1
weevis Join Date: Jul 2015 Location: 3.165, -3.048, -0.0818	Bonuses to skill defaults for reference material I had a funny real-life situation earlier this year that felt like GURPS. A group of friends and I were in the middle of nowhere and our older diesel engine ran out of fuel. We had extra fuel, but we had to bleed the air out to start it again. We had no Internet access. As any munchkin PC would do, we had brought along a whole bunch of tools and a complete set of reference books about diesel engines. But none of us had ANY experience as a mechanic. Skill-wise we had nada. We knew how to check the oil: that's it. We tried for hours but in the end we were not able to start it. The issue was the lack of hands-on experience. The manual specific to our engine assumed you were a mechanic so it was very hard for us to understand. The generic books for beginners were comprehensible but did not have diagrams that looked like our specific engine, so they were hard to act on. After a few hours we did find the correct relevant things to do on our specific engine (hooray!)... but we ultimately failed because we didn't push the manual fuel priming pump hard enough. It had to be pushed REALLY hard! Since we had zero practical experience we didn't know how the pump handle should feel. So we had to wait hours for a mechanic. I was thinking about this lately because what happened to us seems like it is a good fit with the GURPS skill default rules. Good job, GURPS! However, there are other situations where it seems like having specific reference material would work MUCH BETTER than it did for us and I wonder how GMs handle that. Right now I have a group of city PCs who are ordinary people (GURPS Horror, 125 point characters) going into an remote, cold mountainous setting. I feel like if they brought along just a few books pitched at the right level they would be dramatically better at some aspects of the Survival skill then I was at Mechanic. If they needed to find shelter to prevent exposure and they brought (for example) the US Army Survival Manual and/or the Boy Scout Manual and they had a lighter on them, then they just followed the instructions I think they would be fine for exposure. I passed a wilderness survival course a long time ago and I feel like the shelter part is not that hard. (In contrast, foraging seems hard!) These manuals are expressly written for people who don't have any skill. They are a special kind of reference material pitched exactly at this situation. The military manuals can be very direct: so your plane has crashed and you are suddenly in the middle of nowhere with no equipment. Do this first... In modern settings my players are increasingly saying things like: I'm going to use my Research skill to find a YouTube video that shows me how to do this. Hmm. I'm pretty sympathetic to this strategy. In my Mechanic scenario above, when I got home and back on the Internet I watched a YouTube video on bleeding diesel engines and I am positive that if we had that video when we were stuck we would have succeeded at bleeding the engine. Watching someone do the specific task on video was very helpful. I do think the world has changed and it is much easier to find reference material that is very specific to the problem you are trying to solve. As one final example: I teach computer programming (which has no default in GURPS) and I have noticed that students with no prior skill can now exactly follow the directions in a YouTube video. Or they can ask ChatGPT to write them a computer program. Both of these strategies can produce amazing results without skill, and this would not have been possible just a few years ago. Are there rules covering bonuses for specific reference material? How do you handle reference materials in these sort of situations? It does feel that the nature of rolls without skill is changing due to contemporary information technology. As the GM I know I can just wing it and select modifier but I wondered if there was something more systematic. The Survival skill takes equipment modifiers (p. B345) and I could consider reference books to be equipment. The way the equipment modifiers box is written it looks like they left out books on purpose, since almost everything except books is mentioned in there.