Quote from: JimBobOzGood, because you'd earlier said that 12 was too low for even a junior.

When a GURPS player thinks that, not only does it mean they'll give themselves skill 18 in their own profession, it also means they'll give themselves skill 12 in something they did once one weekend. "Oh yeah in the Boy Scouts we shot a handgun once, I hit the target, looking up range penalties and stuff, I must have skill 13, awesome."

I've seen this many times with people developing skill sets for professions. We get for example someone saying, "what's a registered nurse got?" and someone says, "well, Lifting skill, because they lift patients" - no. It doesn't take a skill roll for two or three people to lift another person of normal weight off a bed and onto another bed.

The brings up the actual problem with GURPS, which is that the profusion of skills is an open invitation to actually buy up all those skills, when in fact the default level with task modifiers (taking time, no pressure) would do for most of the things the PC is likely to actually want to do.

Speaking more generally, that's a problem for any game system where if you don't have the skill, it's almost impossible to carry out even a simple task. When you're making fantasy or space characters people don't care too much. But when you make modern day characters, people more easily relate the character to their own experience, and start saying, "what do you mean he drowns in five foot of water?! How hard can it be to dog-paddle across six feet of still pool?" So when you've a system with stingy or no defaults, people start taking a little bit of a gazillion skills, and you end up with the big long character sheet Balbinus was complaining about earlier.

So if you want a modern day character with a broad range of skills, then you need either a way long skill list, or a system and GM which give generous default abilities.

Emphasis mine.

Looking at what I bolded JimBob, I think that you hit pretty much on the crux of the situtation.  If you have a good system and (probably more importantly) a good GM, then you can do without a large list of skills for characters.  Of course a good GM can pull it off even if the system doesn't allow for it since they will give that load of defaults anyway.  Well put.

Now, just to satisify my curiosity, I am wondering how people handle the driveing skills that are present in so many different systems for Modern characters?  Doses a hig skill level mean that you are an extremely good driver, or does it mean that you know how to drive many different types of vehicles, or perhaps many different types of vehicles very well?  Manual transmission or automatic?  Towing a trailer or not?

For me, those questions about type are answered through in game chatter. Characters all have their own style of driving and my players will happily supply their own modifiers on the spot. Hard core bikers are all too happy to take a negitive modifier for driving a minivan. City slickers take a bonus for avoiding traffic but a penalty to avoiding wildlife and so on.

The skill represents their average driving ability in all conditions. So any realy big benifits have to be ballanced by big penalties.