NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9544595" data-attributes="member: 907">I mostly agree with your criticism of GURPS, but I think there's a point to the bell curve. The idea is that increasing your skill level leads to diminishing returns when it comes to regularly difficult things – going from 12 to 14 is an increase in from about 75% chance to about 90%, but going from 14 to 16 then only builds it up to about 98%, and beyond that it doesn't help at all. But the character with 16 can take a -4 penalty and still have about a 75% chance, while the guy with 14 is now down to 50% and the one with 12 is at 25%. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different matter.There are two issues related to this, though. One is that you get double-whammied on the diminishing returns front. With an average-difficulty skill, 1 point gets you stat-1, 2 points get you stat+0, 4 points gets you stat+1, and every additional 4 points gets you an additional +1. So just as you start getting diminishing returns on each skill level, the costs start going up. That's why the powergamer move in GURPS is to max your DX and IQ and spend as little as possible on skills. If you're spending 100 points on IQ and IQ-based skills, you can either pump IQ to 14 for 80 points and then spend 20 points on getting 20 different Average skills up to 13 for 1 point each, or you can keep IQ at 10 , get 8 skills to 13, and 1 to 11. And given how many frelling skills GURPS has, 20 skills aren't that many.The other issue is that GURPS is very "generous" with penalties to skills, but far less generous with bonuses. Being unfamiliar with the specific equipment you're using is a -2, for example. This can stack for being different in multiple ways – the game specifically calls out someone used to 12.7mm sniper rifles having a -6 when using a 5.56mm assault rifle (-2 each for unfamiliar caliber, unfamiliar action (bolt action vs self-loader), and grip (bipod vs hand-held)).</blockquote>

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