Mmm. Running or playing things like FATE at conventions, I’ve seen a bit too much of people trying to find a solution to the current problem by bending the wording of some trait that happens to be on their character sheet. It’s not helped by designers providing sample characters who, instead of having clear and simple trait descriptors like “Good Swordsman” or “Street Urchin”, insist on giving characters things like “Demon-Possessed and Happy About It” or “Materialistic Social Media Marketer” or “Good in a Tight Corner”.
I thought of this when I once ran across a rather terrible early '50s Batman comic story in which the one-off antagonist, the Pied Piper, had clearly talked the GM into letting him have ten dice in “Pipes!” (and nothing else). So he used pipe bombs and blowpipes, hit Batman with a lead pipe, escaped by running away down sewage pipes, and on and on - I could just hear the player yelling at the GM “It’s a pipe! I roll ten dice!”
Wildcard skills in GURPS seem to be pretty deliberately designed to be this, so there must be people who like it.
I found it very appropriate when all the PCs were Bards and they were getting the Band back together. Obviously, a sick guitar solo can summon demons under the right conditions. Frankly, it would be weird if it couldn’t. And, yes, Bassist! can absolutely be used to perform Grievous Bodily Harm. And if all the band plays together, it definitely works as True Faith with Turning, while they keep playing.
I blame modern corporate culture, trying to persuade you that job X will teach you skills that are genuinely transferable to a wide range of other areas. The fact that management and consultancy are frequently populated by people with a ton of transferable skills and few domain-specific skills means that the people involved in the direction of companies overestimate the usefulness of their skills and underestimate the need for very specific skills.
Agreed entirely with your post. When it’s story specific / fits the genre it can be huge amounts of fun.
In the same way, I’d be happy for the player in the BA Baracus role in an A-Team themed game to take massive liberties with their ‘Mechanic’ skill because … well … that’s exactly what Mr T does throughout the series.
That might have been me.
But in my defence, if the bloody GM gives me a pre-gen with traits like “world-class morris dancer” or “prefers rocks to people”, then I’m desperate to try and figure out how the hell they are USEFUL in the scenario.
To be fair, Wildcard skills come with a list of standard skills which they encompass - sometimes to a nit-picky and boring degree. Their names are usually clear enough that the intent and implications should be obvious.
It comes into taste, I think. My looking through the character sheet for something I can do that might be helpful in this situation can be your pestering the GM to have the best ability work for everything.
The original of the GURPS wildcard skills, I believe, was The Sword! in Swashbucklers, which was basically “anything you can do with a sword can use this skill”. Similarly fluffy, but perhaps easier to envision than “Shooter!”