To which I thought, the ability to recognize and distinguish colors and being able to match or complement colors. At my company, there is a shortage of the particular color of paint used on our products. The color is dictated by marketing, so we’ve had to reach out to them for an alternative color that we could substitute so that there is no disruption in manufacturing.
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In GURPS, I would say that if you don’t have a specific Forced Entry skill, you roll DX to hit the door at an angle that can be effective; ignore defense, as the door can’t dodge, parry, or block; and then roll damage for a kick or a body slam and see if that’s enough to force the door open. The rules don’t explicit say that you can sub DX for Forced Entry, but the analogy to Brawling seems obvious. And pretty much everyone has DX.
Oh, and for Throwing specifically, you roll vs. DX-3 default to hit a precise target, but against DX to lob something into a general area. I think the latter covers what you’re talking about.
Incidentally, I want to say that Drive Heavy Equipment is to Forced Entry as Gunner is to Guns or Crossbow.
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In HERO System games the advice is for the GM to let the player take that skill for no cost, assuming it is unlikely to be a real benefit in play.
Happily I do still have that very magazine, but at least in the case of Fantasy Gamer and Space Gamer you can buy legal PDFs. Pity it’s not the case for many others.
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I’ve worked this out in GURPS, but it’s too long to post here – on the blog shortly.
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I eagerly await the new supplement, GURPS Martial Arts: Billanben
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This made me think.
When in this position I think I have set free skills as related to “are X” rather than “do Y”.
“Do Y” seems to be the area where differentiation leads to spotlight sharing.
Like if “PCs are the crew of a spaceship who pull heists” then when only one PC has a particular spaceship crew skill then the heist angle stalls out. Like it matters more that there is a charm face and an intimidate face for the heist than that there is a zero-g structural engineer vs an electrical engineer.
Something like the wharticulture discussion of Dr Who may be what I’m stumbling into. Like is the spaceship a part of the heists or just how they get to the heists? Level of setting engagement may be at issue also. Like being a knight mattering for social issues in the village but not mattering when swinging a sword in a dungeon.
A fireman, or possibly a search and rescue worker. And in GURPS Underground Adventures I specified Forced Entry as the skill usable by miners to break up rock with a pick or penetrate it with a drill at higher speeds. So sappers might have it. Not a large class, but not impossible to find as PCs. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man had a high Forced Entry skill, and so did Hugo Danner, in the feat that got him arrested . . .
This whole thread reminds me why I don’t play GURPS any more. If character creation takes as long as the last two GURPS games I played in (we spend a whole session on character creation, refining our concepts. The following week we spend a couple of hours more refining things. One character still isn’t ready the week after that for the conspiracy game, and they spent all week emailing the GM about things), then it’s a bit too frustrating. There is a range of levels of detail and choice when it comes to character creation, and there’s a balance most gaming groups have to find. I find really open systems can lead to “Choice paralysis” where you can’t decide which way to express your concept in game terms.
This reminds of an ancient article in White Dwarf entitled The Origin of the PCs - I’m not sure I agreed with its conclusions but I enjoyed the pun.
I routinely spend that kind of time on character creation with my players, regardless of system.
If players come in with a specific character concept and then try to fit it into the game system (any system), it can be difficult to correctly express the concept in game terms. The vast, vast majority of game systems are not “open” and players must compromise on their concept to get them to fit. Games like GURPS give them illusion of openness. If a GM pitches the system as, “you can make any character you want,” they are setting up their players for disappointment.
If you envision what a character looks like and then try to find a picture that matches, it can be nigh impossible to find the right match. You can avoid this by finding a picture you like based on some general traits you want (skin color, hair style) and then describing the character to match the picture. I think this approach should also be applied to game systems. Come in with a loose concept. It becomes solidified once you build it with the game system.
Sorry not making myself clear. I shouldn’t have made the X who do Y a new paragraph.
I’m bitching that there are systems which do not take this into account:
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There are Every PC Kind of Needs This skills, which are common to a whole slew of RPGs regardless of system and setting. Because they are “doing the plot” skills. Those are things like sneak, punching people and spot hidden. For instance, unless you are playing Completely Honest & Open Fluffy Bunnies RPG, at some point one or more PCs will be sneaking about. Which, in games where there aren’t enough points/skill slots/steps on the skill pyramid, degenerates into a shambles, because a couple of people couldn’t afford Sneak.
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There are Normal People in the Setting Should Have This skills. You shouldn’t have to waste your points/slots/steps to have these skills. Like getting from A to B by riding/driving/flying a form of transport which normal people use in their everyday lives. Modern day it is driving a family car to the shops. In the Wild West it is driving a buggy or riding a horse to the general store. If you want to deviate from the ‘norm’ and be a non-driver, or be a rodeo rider, then that’s the point you should start to spend your points/slots/steps, and differentiate your character.
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Finally there is the Too Fekking Granular thing. (Which to be fair, in some systems is more a case of Uneven Granularity or even a case of Too Fekking Expensive). So if one player utilises 1 of their 5 skill slots and picks Science, which gives them detailed knowledge of everything from oceanography to nuclear physics, but another has to use 4 of their 5 skill slots to be a semi-competent car mechanic, then the car mechanic is not going to be having much fun on the sneaking and punching and persuading bits of the game.
Which leads me to… probabilities! Chaining several skills together and insisting a successful dice roll on all of them is the only way to achieve the objective, only proves to me that the GM - or game designer - either (A) doesn’t understand probabilities or (B) wants you to fail.
Player: I want to sneak the ship though the asteroid field.
GM: Okay, make a navigation roll, then a piloting roll, then a sneak roll.
Player does three rolls: I fail.
GM: Wow! I never expected that. Very unlucky.
Player: Nope. I have 80% in pilot, 75% in navigation and 70% in sneak. 0.8 x 0.75 x 0.7 = 42% chance or making all three rolls.
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I would like to sneak the horse and buggy to through the asteroid field to the shops.
In general I agree with the above. I think skill granularity is a problem I’ve known for a long time without being able to necessarily put my finger on it. And, I think, it’s why I learned to enjoy lite RPG systems. I’d rather have: “In my youth, I helped my uncle at his stage theatre company” as a skill than a constellation of skills like “Disguise”, “Knot Tying”, “Handyperson”. And, when it comes time to apply “I helped my uncle at his stage theatre company” in an in-game situation, the explanation for how that “skill” applies will more often than not inform the game as to how I’m going to tie the knot or reinforce a door, not just that I’m capable of doing it.
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Is one of the problems skill bloat? As various official and non official classes enter a game does the problem become increasingly prevalent?
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How I tend to answer these questions in GURPS:
- Every PC needs this: Templates. (I don’t write as many templates as I should.) Also there’s a note on “every PC should have this”/“every party should have at least one person with this” skills, somewhere on the SJGames forums but also in How to Be a GURPS GM – arguably this should have been in the Basic Set (I’d argue it), but at least it’s out there.
- Normal people have this: Templates again. And/or enough of a point budget that everyone can have the standard adventury stuff plus the standard normal people stuff before they start putting on the nifty stuff that is their PC’s special trick.
GURPS Action 4 has a system whereby everyone gets a basic template to give them the core action-hero competences, and they add on small packages of specialist things. Definitely going to use that next time I run an action-focused GURPS game.
- gets trickier. On the one hand one says “ooh, it would be nice to learn knot-tying or kicking down doors as an isolated skill”. On the other one says “look, I was a sailor, how much of being a sailor does Sailor skill not cover”. A standard designer bias is that things they know less about get less detail. I don’t mind a very granular system as long as it’s all granular…
As for probabilities, I have been saying for some time that no game should be published until a statistician has looked over it. (I’m available.) But also I think it’s worth looking at what a skill failure actually means: if a failure can’t produce something interesting (“they spotted you and now they’re on alert, but you got a look at their response and Tactics Person thinks they can see a pattern to it”), I just don’t ask for a roll.
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This gets into my volleyball analogy. What level of granularity is appropriate for the campaign? Skills are fractal, in a way. You can always go deeper. The trick is to find where to stop. (IIRC, BTRC tackled this head-on with CORPS and its telescoping skill specialties.)
Science is a good example. As you go back in time, science was much broader and scientists much more generalized. As we learned more, scientists became more specialized. In the 18th century, “Science” is fine as its own skill that doesn’t need to be more granular. in the 19th century, you might have just Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. In the 21st century, chemistry alone splits into organic, physical, nuclear, industrial, … I remember being miffed at GURPS 3rd because it had skills for Physics and Nuclear Physics. Why the split? Why not split off the other branches of physics?
One of the things that made Savage Worlds “click” with me were its rules for shooting from horseback. You use the lower of your Riding and Shooting skills. This was clean, easy to remember and to extrapolate to other situations, and it didn’t run into the problem of having multiple skill rolls.
GMs also mess this up when it comes to party stealth or perception checks. Asking everyone to roll will all but guarantee that someone will fail and someone will succeed.
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Yes, and if you’re playing in 1585 the skill is “Natural Philosophy” – which in terms of what you can do with it should probably be a lot cheaper than Physics, unless it’s a setting in which that really does describe the universe…
(On the other hand I have a couple of times put Explosives (Nuclear Ordnance Disposal) on a character sheet for a pre-gen scenario, in part because I enjoy seeing the look on the player’s face when they realise what that means. And yes, there is a chance for them to use it.)
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If we’re talking pre-generated characters for a one-shot convention game and such, then the GM can make the skills as granular (and amusing) as they need for that scenario.
When players make their own characters, handing them the rulebook(s) and giving them free reign is a rookie GM mistake, especially for a system like GURPS. The GM has to layout the skills and templates (among other things) that the players should build their characters around.
As I recall, Sean Punch’s explanation for why Knot-Tying appeared in 4e was that he kept getting questions about which skill you rolled in a contest against Escape when A had tied B up and B sought to get free.
I agree that it should have more and generous defaults, but I think that the point would be, not that other characters can’t tie knots, but that they can’t tie very good knots. Only roll when the quality of the knot matters. If no one takes Knot-Tying, don’t complain when all your prisoners keep getting away.
4e made a fair stab at reducing the skill bloat that had afflicted 3e, though it missed some tricks. For those with gratuitous systems expertise, Techniques (basically sub-skills, in others games’ terms) can be useful; probably, Knot-Tying should be a Technique based on multiple other skills.
The idea that “My character has levels… umm experience in such-and-such a character class… umm profession, therefore I should know a bunch of minor things associated with that cl… profession” is not a bad one (“I’m a ______, of course I can…”, as Unknown Armies puts it), but can lead a game down the path to the class-and-level model, which some of us try to avoid, and can also raise the question of how many classes some people would demand to have accessed. (I always assumed that the guy I know who was a photographic technician/motorcycle instructor/gamer/policeman was trying to minimax himself.) GURPS should probably make more use of Professional skills and even Wildcards to resolve these issues.
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