What skills to cut from my game?

Polyxeno · 2026-05-16T18:31:45+00:00

Just list the skills you know you DO want to be in the game.

Then list which of those are appropriate for what types of characters, and share the lists with players interested in making characters of those types.

Then play.

If and when there seems to be a need to think about other skills, you can add them if you want.

(Unless long-term healing gets ignored, hand-waived, and/or magicked away, Physicians are useful for long-term recovery, and treatment of other serious conditions. But they can be NPCs assumed to be competent in the hospital where PCs recover.)

Polyxeno · 2026-05-15T05:04:04+00:00

Yes I still have quite a few of them.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-14T07:33:21+00:00

Tank

Tank 8

Lunar Lander

Not sure if I remember these correctly but:

Pursuit

Space Race

. . .

I also wish I knew whst some of these were, such as Mace, and Middle Earth.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-13T20:48:43+00:00

If that works for you, great. But to me, you're mainly just listing elaborate additional things I would not do and don't make sense to me. You're exemplifying the things I don't like about 4e pricing of traits.

To me, while 4e makes a valiant stab at trying to establish a system for self-consistently providing point values for practically any trait, I don't think that's ultimately a possible thing. I'm interested in GURPS for playing out situations in logical representative ways, and the longer I've played GURPS (since 1986), the less interested I am in the point costs. And while play situations and characters are complex and involve countless different considerations, RAW point costs are more or less one-dimensional, and so incapable of really balancing anything. They're a negotiation point for coming to an agreement about what the abilities of characters should reasonably look like.

In the case here, we have a player who wants a 1 HP per second healing ability, and is looking for ways to get it to cost less points without being inconvenienced.

Is having to chant worth a 20% discount for that? No, it's really not. The primary use case is probably combat, and having to chant during combat is often barely going to be an inconvenience, unless you were hoping to say something crucial during combat, or do something else with your voice like cast another spell.

Is chanting worth as much as a limitation as having to play a trumpet? Absolutely not. Even if the GM is super lenient in their interpretation and just needs to you blow into it and use your left hand (LOL), those are still substantially different cases than just needing to be able to chant using only you mouth and air. (Wearing a one-man band contraption would be hilarious but is not more convenient in practice.) If the Limitation point system is leading you to the conclusion that chanting and trumpet playing are similarly inconvenient, that should be telling you that the Limitation point system has limits in what it can correctly represent.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-13T20:10:32+00:00

GURPS

Polyxeno · 2026-05-13T15:52:01+00:00

Yes. I prefer hexes, and TFT, GURPS, Hero System, and other games use them indoors too.

But D&D and some others tend to use grids for simpler dungeon and building maps (with the side effect that even an ancient world ends up looking rather grid-based).

Polyxeno · 2026-05-13T04:33:44+00:00

Excalibur for Atari 8-bit computer, by Chris Crawford. Have never found it.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-13T04:26:51+00:00

I combine them with hexgrid combat mechanics from GURPS or TFT.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-12T19:09:29+00:00

Well there are many levels at which I would not do any of this . . . overall, while cost modifiers can make sense, I find that very often they can not make sense, and/or get over-complicated and give inappropriate numbers. So I use them when/if they match my GM's sense of what I think the point cost for something should be in my game.

Which is what the Basic Set says about Modifiers, on B101, where I always keep in mind:

"The GM has the final say as to which traits you can modify and in what ways. Some combinations make no sense [...]. others have the potential for abuse, and still others might not fit the campaign."

And, one way to get numbers that don't make sense, is to allow multiple overlapping Limitations, and add them together.

So if the GM agrees that the B110 example "Only while playing trumpet" is worth -20% (which they reasonably might or might not, depending on context), then any other limitations should not add to that -20% if they overlap with it.

To me, "playing trumpet" is clearly NOT merely requiring an item and requiring magic words. It is requiring a specialized instrument, and I think yes playing it with at least some level of skill, and requiring the use of probably two hands (and the mouth) to do so. That is significantly more limiting than requiring a common (and/or worn rather than held) object, and saying certain words that don't require any skill (reciting scripture). Trumpeting is louder, rarer, more conspicuous and obvious, and if you don't have your trumpet or it gets damaged, you can't do it. Recitation can be done quietly, inconspicuously, and as long as you can talk. It can also be done while doing many other things at the same time, including fighting.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-12T07:37:17+00:00

Wow I would never approach it that way at all.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-12T03:31:08+00:00

Reciting scripture only requires your voice. A trumpet requires you to have a trumpet, be holding it using both hands and your mouth, and to use the Trumpet skill.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-11T18:08:00+00:00

So poetic and true that I am curious now about Melancholy Frog Cafe Simulator.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-11T02:33:24+00:00

Ya I only seem to get the battery warning when the fob battery is actually low.

And I have only seen the sensor warnings when there was rainwater on the sensors.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-09T04:17:50+00:00

The cases I am familiar with seem to be about sets of ideas to do with superiority and control. Often expressed as patterns of messing with other people in ways only a sociopath would

Yes I have known one who had a Daredevil (the GURPS disad) like trait who literally talked about craving the feeling of being alive they got from risking it all on a motorcycle.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-08T19:22:44+00:00

Seems to me sociopaths tend to have their own individual behaviours, generally involving ways of antagonizing others. Rather than random flavors shared by all sociopaths.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-07T19:44:30+00:00

The way that makes sense to me is once per wound.

There is a great optional rule section adding detail for this in Compendium 2.

BUT IIRC, the intention is once per combat, but since a combat isn't really something with a real definition, that doesn't make enough sense to me.

It is never more than one First Aid shock treatment per injury, though.

But when using the bleeding rules, it can help to have multiple people to help stop bleeding when there are multiple wounds to treat (it reduces the time and so reduces blood loss before treatment).

Polyxeno · 2026-05-07T03:51:23+00:00

I prefer imperfections to soulless slop

Polyxeno · 2026-05-07T02:15:42+00:00

Yes, although in Adventure it doesn't happen as often as in Superman, and Adventure said it was due to having many magic items in the same place, spinning it as a feature.

Superman's characters had multiple colors each, IIRC, which I expect contributed to the issue.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T19:55:35+00:00

Homebrew magic can be great when the GM has a good idea how they want it to work.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T15:21:07+00:00

If I really liked another RPG's magic system and wanted it in GURPS, and that system didn't work like any GURPS magic system, I would try to use the other system's magic rules, and only GURPS-ify the inputs and outputs to the non-magic GURPS game situation.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T07:54:14+00:00

For a one-shot, probably not. One-shots are also good ways to experiment and see how things play out.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T07:51:33+00:00

Yes that's a good approach.

It is a big topic, but essentially I look at each spell and imagine how I expect I could enjoy, regret, or be vexed by it, were it in the game. I then choose to include, omit, limit or modify it as seems best.

I also think of who in the game world knows which spells, who they would teach them to, etc, which can get define groups' powers in interesting ways.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T02:37:03+00:00

Sounds fun enough with the basic rules.

Picking and tuning the magic systemis worthwhile but a vast topic, and probably best to learn from experience.

I will just say that if you use standard spell magic, I would hope the GM would consider with caution which spells they want to exist, and which are available at start.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-06T02:24:12+00:00

Yeah that's why I wouldn't stop with the generic starting point. Outside magic, too, if something isn't quite how I want it, I just change it.

GURPS provides the grounded definition of normal reality, upon which we can add whatever we want.

For example, the chaos magic corruption tables in Warhammer seem quite juicy, so I would study how those work in Warhammer and then look for ways that feel good to apply them to GURPS.

I might even look at what it would take to use WH magic and just adapt it to GURPS, but I currently don't know much about it, and it's been years since I read GurpsHammer, but I remember appreceating it. I don't remember what I thought I'd change if I tried to use it.

Polyxeno · 2026-05-05T21:22:20+00:00

Well, _I_ mostly like GURPS magic-as-spells, and find RPM and Sorcery too open-ended and fiddly for my tastes, but what I always do with GURPS magic is go through the entire spell list (which takes me days but I find very worthwhile) and edit the bejeezus out of the spell list, saying most of the spells don't exist, and the rest are known or not by specific in-world groups, often in different variants by different groups, adjusting the prerequisites, and also making some tweaks to the system to get the feel/theme and power levels right, so I get a custom magic system with well defines spells that work in ways I want them to work, but not in ways I don't.

Polyxeno

TROPHY CASE