Is there any equivalent to Expert for applied skills?
A. Well, GURPS is an adventure game, and being an adventure game, its skill list is heavily, overwhelmingly, hopelessly biased toward application skills already. It’s rare for a PC to need the kind of skill you’re talking about, because there’s usually some obscure application skill for such situations already. Whereas GURPS has a very short list of theory skills, by comparison. Expert Skill covers a pure-theory deficit that isn’t matched by a pure-application deficit on the other end of the spectrum. That said, GMs who wish to can read Professional Skills in that way (for instance, the Soldier skill in Third Edition’s WWII.
A. Well, GURPS is an adventure game, and being an adventure game, its skill list is heavily, overwhelmingly, hopelessly biased toward application skills already. It’s rare for a PC to need the kind of skill you’re talking about, because there’s usually some obscure application skill for such situations already. Whereas GURPS has a very short list of theory skills, by comparison. Expert Skill covers a pure-theory deficit that isn’t matched by a pure-application deficit on the other end of the spectrum.
