Some stupid questions about skills and stuff

[kdarc]

I have a few (relatively newb-ish) questions about skills and learning them. I was looking at the section on character improvement and got a few questions.

For a character to gain another level in a skill (etc. Climbing from DX to DX+1), must all points be spend at once? Can a character have invest, say 15 points in an Average skill, bringing it to Attribute+3 and use a point gained after a session to raise it to 16, thereby bringing his skill level to Att+4? Also, just for clarification, on p.292 of the BS, it states it takes 200 hours to gain one point in a skill. Does this mean a point as in a character point, or in actual skill level?

[Maz]

You do not have to spend all poitns at once. But since you do not gain any benefit from having 15 pts in a skill, people tend to either spend all at once, or save them.

The "200 hours" is per point, but it has nothing to do with spending points to raise your skill. The 200 hours is for increasing skill through training.


GURPS essentially have two ways for a PC to increase skill. Training or spending CP.
So if the GM give you 5 CP, you can freely spend them (unless you use some houserule that limits it).
Or your character can use an amount of ingame time training his skill, allowing him to increase a skill without spending CP. In effect, the character is gaining CP for free by spending time on it ingame instead of say, slay orcs or earn money.


Many GM's only use one of the options.

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It sounds to me that what you initially thought is that if you want to spend 1 CP i na skill, you also have to spend 200 ingame hours. This is not so by the rules, but could be an optional houserule if you want to.

[kdarc]

Thanks for the clarification! It seems I didn't express my question that good, however.

I was aware of the difference between spending character points on skills and training them. My confusion was on whether 200 hours of training meant for instance raising the number of points spend in a skill by one, or whether it raising the actual skill level by one level.

Sorry the badly-formulated question - my fault.

[Ts_]

Originally Posted by kdarc

My confusion was on whether 200 hours of training meant for instance raising the number of points spend in a skill by one, or whether it raising the actual skill level by one level.

What Rogue said, which might be worth repeating: 200 hrs per 1 character point worth of skill, not per +1 to skill level.

[kdarc]

Great, thanks for the clarification!

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Maz

GURPS essentially have two ways for a PC to increase skill. Training or spending CP.
So if the GM give you 5 CP, you can freely spend them (unless you use some houserule that limits it).
Or your character can use an amount of ingame time training his skill, allowing him to increase a skill without spending CP. In effect, the character is gaining CP for free by spending time on it ingame instead of say, slay orcs or earn money.

However if the skill has no default (Mostly Spells, a few Cinematic skills and a handfull other Very Hard skills)

Then the first point in these skills (assuming this is after character creation) must normally come from training not spending CP, though you can spend CP at the same time to further increase it. and don't forget Talents modify that 200 hours 8)

As for your rephrase, that 200 hours is for 1 CP in the skill and must go into the skill you trained ever if it not enough to give you a level 8)