GURPS Power-Ups 10: Skill Trees

Basic Training While the GURPS skill system works, it isn't everybody's cup of tea. The most common complaint is that there are too many skills! For other gamers, the headaches are in details such as prerequisites, skill difficulties, the "jumpy" cost progression, webs of defaults, grouped skills and specialties that do similar things in different ways, and specialties and techniques that also overlap just enough to be confusing. All this stuff clutters character sheets and gamers' minds. While GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills offers one solution, wildcard skills are cinematic and sacrifice distinctions that matter in realistic games. GURPS Power-Ups 10: Skill Trees aims for the middle ground: almost as simple as wildcards, almost as realistic as the standard skill system. Skill Trees proposes a telescoping "skill tree" system that lets you record only what matters. It offers easy-to-remember pricing and moves fiddly skill-related details from character creation – where they vex players, especially new ones – to pre-game or in-play decisions by the GM, who can ignore them in the name of speed. Being "GURPS Power-Ups 9: Alternate Attributes, but for skills," this is an advanced tool . . . but once the rules hacking is done, skills will serve you, not vice versa.