11mm Brass Dice

I got these 11mm tiny brass dice off Amazon, and I am very impressed with them. They are a touch smaller than a standard plastic 12mm die, but are far heavier, though not as heavy as a full 16mm metal die. They still have a good weight, and I would recommend a dice tower or large neoprene pad for rolling them on, but they are great little dice.

The only difference is that they are an oriental layout instead of an occidental layout. With the oriental layout, the two faces are over-under instead of corner-to-corner. The pips are slightly different from the picture, too, slightly larger but uniform in size on all sides. It took me a little while to get used to counting the 2 sides, but once I did, it was a faster read of the dice since the 2 is a very unique face. Studies have shown that they are easier to read quickly since the 2 and 3 sides are very different. In a traditional die, the difference between the three and the two is the placement of a single dot, whereas in oriental dice the pattern is entirely different.

If you think of it as "half of a 4," split right down the middle, it makes more sense.

I use them with one of these mini-dice towers, and they make a satisfying sound and roll very well through them. The one shown is a touch too deep to reach into, and that annoys me with larger hands, but I just use the tower part and the bottom as a backstop about 8 inches away. I have one of those large gaming mousepads on my table surface, so my play area is metal-die safe.

This smaller tower is small enough to travel with, so that is a plus.

Also, using a dice tower is another solo-play tool since it is harder to cheat rolls, tell myself that was a terrible shake of the dice and it wasn't really a roll, and want to reroll the dice. A dice tower roll is fair and final, means a lot more, and makes you put in slightly more effort in rolling, making trying to take back a terrible roll so much more difficult. Yes, I am probably putting micro dings into the wood of the tower, enough to give it character, but not damage it unless I put a hundred million rolls through the thing.

The sound of the roll in the wood is super satisfying, and that aural feedback makes solo play incredibly fun. This is positive feedback, and rolling dice with a tower seems like it is a slight waste of time, but trust me, it is much more fun to roll dice this way and get that ear-pleasing ka-chunk-ka-chunk sound with every roll that is like comfort food for my ears.

I like metal dice since they also have a finality to them. I am far less likely to reroll metal dice than I am plastic ones; I don't know what it is, perhaps the weight and impact of the roll feels greater, and I take it more seriously than a plastic die. If I am rolling a critical miss on 3d6, that feels like a final judgment with metal dice, and I am obliged to not cheat that roll and apply it as it lies. The fact that metal dice also damage surfaces makes me also not want to reroll them, and that special care in rolling them makes me more often play the dice as they lie.

To me, metal dice are the best solo play tools. I will not change a roll when no one else is looking. The roll is final.

So, size, metal, and dice tower aside, what is so cool about these dice? With a small dice tower, these feel like the most random dice I have ever used. I am getting a wide variety of rolls, whereas with some plastic dice I feel are really concentrated around the middle results, the distribution curve feels closer to reality. I am getting a good number of low and high rolls, whereas with some plastic dice I feel they tend to only roll high. I am rolling 17s, 4s, 6s, and 15s regularly, and the distribution of results feels very spread out.

I know most of my rolls are in that middle range due to the bell curve, but with some sets of dice I rarely roll the ending numbers on either side, whereas with these dice I see those results just enough to feel the dice are fair and all numbers are showing up. With some sets of plastic dice, I very rarely see low rolls like 4, 5, or 6. Some plastic dice feel "D&D weighted" for ability score generation, where I am constantly rolling high and wondering why these dice never work well for GURPS, where roll-low is the way we play.

But these dice will regularly roll low or high in equal amounts, and still stick mostly down the middle for the majority of dice rolls. They feel very fair, and with the tower, the rolls feel incredibly fair and random. Larger metal dice are harder to roll since they are inherently more dangerous and weighty, whereas the smaller metal dice feel just right to me. A 16mm solid metal die can ding a book, whereas these feel like they won't do too much damage if they bump into something.

These have larger pips (than what is shown), and they're painted in, too, so they are very readable.

These are my favorite GURPS dice for my Old West campaign. They feel authentic, and while not the classic "cowboy layout" of the occidental dice, the oriental style feels more Hong Kong cinema and action-authentic to me. They look like little side-by-side double-barrel shotgun choke holes, so they have a fun aesthetic to them for this style of cowboy games.

Highly recommended, not too expensive, very satisfying, not too heavy, and the feel of these is very nice. The side-by-side 2 faces are an interesting quirk, but not too hard to get used to. Also, the antique look of brass dice is very authentic for my Wild West game.

GURPS: Zero-Level Funnels

A few games have the concept of "zero-level funnels" in the system, most notably Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. The game has a mode of play where zero-level characters (without a class) are rolled up randomly, and each player gets a few of them to control, such as four, and they get a random profession (farmer, baker, butcher, gong-farmer) that determines their starting "skill" and equipment. A character may get a chicken and a pitchfork as starting gear, while another may get a bag of flour and a rolling pin.

The result is a hilarious "last person standing" style of play where characters are sent into danger and sacrificed to solve the adventure's challenges, traps, hazards, and puzzles. The characters with terrible ability score rolls are typically disposable mooks, while the highly desirable characters are held in reserve in the hopes they survive.

The characters that survive become the choices for player-characters, who are graduated to first level when the campaign begins.

You can do a zero-level funnel in GURPS pretty easily. I would stick to very low-level character point totals, 25 or 75 maximum. If you have GURPS Character Assistant (GCA) from the Warehouse 23 store, create a library with GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Fantasy, and GURPS Magic, and you can apply randomized 75-point templates from GURPS Fantasy as your starting characters. They have archers, bards, knights, holy men, and a good selection of fantasy archetypes.

If you ever get duplicate skills or selections from a randomized template, don't worry about it; just play with what you got. When your zero-level funnel is done, then allow players to "rebuild" the character with a few extra character points (maybe allow a total of 100), and give them a chance to clean up the skill list, add a few they want, and clean things up to make a platable and well-rounded hero. Stick to most of what was there, and you could make tweaks like replacing a few disadvantages that don't make sense and cleaning things up so the character fits how they were played in the funnel, while getting rid of things that make the character unplayable.

If your character survives, this is the part where players can "create a level one character" and make those tweaks. Do not care about balancing points, either; if some come out 60-point, and others 120-point, just roll with it. When it is time to create "level one" character, pick a ceiling above the highest surviving point total, and set the design point limit there. So if you have characters from 80 to 120 points as your "level one pool," then set the ceiling at 150 points, and let them design for that.

My random "spellcaster" ended up with two spells, detect magic and lend energy, along with bad temper, bloodlust, overconfidence, and gluttony. This guy will be a hoot to play as he steals food from the monsters, and if he is ever denied a chance to chow down, flies into a fit of rage and starts trying to kill everyone in the room. I dare say this is a more hilarious character than anything I would get in DCC or Shadowdark, just due to GURPS' excellent disadvantage system creating memorable personalities to throw into the meat grinder.

His spells? Well, he can lend others energy and detect magic, so if he is ever in a funnel with a magic trap, he will be useful. He does not have a direct attack spell, but, hey, it is a funnel; make do. If a referee is feeling generous, throw a spell scroll with an attack spell in the funnel somewhere and allow a CP spend on the spot to buy it.

My barbarian came out pretty useful, an impulsive pirate from an uneducated, mundane background. He can also throw sticks! The radioactive wasteland could be interpreted as a magic-blasted wasteland from some mage war in the long-lost past, but as a mundane background, he doesn't know why the land was blasted raw; it just is what it is. Hey! We are getting worldbuilding happening here, too! I would consider this barbarian a keeper. At only 58 points, I have a lot of room to tweak and build with when he "graduates" to a "level one" hero.

This archer does not even have a ranged weapon skill. Since he has overconfidence, maybe he lied and thought he could make it as an archer without knowing how to fire a bow, and just got by winging it, and is now stuck in a terrible situation. He has leadership, too, so maybe he figured out he could get an officer's role without doing too much archery. Even a "junk" character like this can become a memorable and hilarious personality with a little imagination.

The lying archer seemed like a randomized, mistake, garbage character, but now I imagine him with a compulsive lying disadvantage and never buying him archery, yet carrying around that bow and pretending to know what he is doing. He has a smallsword, so have him fight that way if needed, and he can pump that skill up to be a highly effective close-in fighter who is still useful to the party. Buy bluff and intimidate skills and let him use the bow to threaten others and get his way, if push comes to shove. He never knows how to shoot the thing, but he uses it as a tool to get things done.

This is GURPS. You can get away with this here, and the design system supports it. The tactic of bluffing with a bow you don't know how to use is supported in the rules, and you can pump these skills and abilities up to a high level and support them with force-multiplying advantages.

You can't do this in D&D 5.5E, DCC, or Shadowdark.

My randomized "mistake" characters are coming out better than my boring optimized designs.

GURPS is hands-down cool.

We don't have great random starting equipment tables in GURPS, so borrow one from another game. You don't want to be buying and equipping four randomized characters, so either do a cold start, such as all the characters being stuck in a cell without gear and organizing an escape from the goblin fortress, or some other cold start where the characters wander into trouble and must find, steal, or figure out gear. As an option, give everyone their highest-trained weapon as a starting item. You can also create your own tables.

Once you can get beyond character generation and use the randomized template characters, you get over a huge hurdle to running a funnel. From there, it is just printing the characters out, handing them to players, and letting them use their imaginations.

And with these types of quirky, randomized, sometimes hilariously limited characters, your funnel experience could be better than it is in games that directly support the funnel-style adventure. Letting players figure out randomized disadvantages and skill lists, and come up with stories? This is insanely fun! Running the angry glutton mage or the lying archer through a funnel is going to be a fun game to play and outshine experiences in other games.

And you can do zero-level funnels better in GURPS.

GURPS Is the Best Low Fantasy Game

While I love Rolemaster, Runequest, Hackmaster, and a few of these other "real fantasy" games, GURPS has killed the entire genre for me. The low fantasy versions of 5E, the Conan game, any of the new "dark and gritty" low magic versions of OSR games, and low-magic variants of D&D? Yeah, those are all gone too.

GURPS killed the genre for me.

GURPS does it all better.

While these books are excellent sources of inspiration, GURPS will always be the system played at my table for them. it works the same way every time, is easy to pick up and run, and has the best combat system - and it works without combat even better than most "combat only" games.

Even a game like Shadowdark, brilliant in its own right, pales in comparison to GURPS. What thief character do I want to play? Shadowdark's d4 hit die, backstabbing, and advantage on a few skill check areas, or my fully realized GURPS thief character?

It is no comparison. My GURPS thief wins every time. This is a character who has much deeper development, a greater sense of who they are in the rules, and a more configurable and customizable skill set than a simple 3d6-down-the-line OSR thief. My GURPS thief also beats my 5E rogue by a mile, since my GURPS thief actually feels like a thief and not an MMO DPS class.

My GURPS thief feels like a real person, someone with a backstory with supporting rules to back that up, and will engage me on a deeper level than any OSR or 5E game. In a solo game, my thief wins by a huge margin, even over games designed to have solo modes of play, like Dragonbane.

When my thief navigates through a world, that character in GURPS will have a much more engaging and deeper experience than my OSR or 5E thief. The "GURPS effect" of feeling like a VR headset was put on you will hit immediately, and I will feel immersed in the world, with everything around me suddenly vividly real, mattering, and my every action has consequences - good, indifferent, or bad.

Sure, my 5E rogue gets "cool powers" - but, so what? Those are only good for combat, and they don't help me tell a story. Most of them are promises I will never play long enough to enjoy, having but never really needing. Or the fact that I only get combat powers means the game forces me down a "choice path" of violence first, thinking later.

GURPS? I can run a campaign out to 500+ points of character abilities and not get into one fight. Combat isn't the focus of this game; perhaps it is stealth and social intrigue in a Venice merchant house? Maybe my character has competent fencing skills and some excellent training, but solves most of his problems through intimidation and Machiavellian scheming.

"He's pulled his sword a dozen times, but never used it."

That is a great GURPS character.

Why all these "roleplaying-focused" streaming shows aren't using GURPS is beyond me. GURPS curb-stomps D&D 5E in terms of roleplaying support and actual in-the-book rules that support character backgrounds. It is not a guess, player choice, or sitting there and making it all up - all the character options for flaws and advantages are in the book, rules written, and ready to be used.

And for realistic, gritty combat? GURPS has dials that turn that up to 11, or down to 1. It beats many of these other "real fantasy" games without even breaking a sweat. You have as many or as few "realism rules" as you want here.

And GURPS is far, far easier than many of these games to create characters for and run.

Skills & Wits

One of the trends in post-2000s gaming is the expectation that everyone will be given special powers. Our games became less about "skills and wits" and more about "powers and progression." Granted, there were always superhero games before the year 2000, but with D&D 3.0, game design became more about power trees and progression paths, often mimicking ARPGs like Diablo in pen-and-paper form.

You see this sort of design culminating in D&D 5.5E, where every class feels like a video game series of unlocks and granted powers, where player skill (and the character's skills) matter less, and it is all about what power I can get next, and where I am going on this class tree.

I am speaking broadly, as if D&D 5E is 90% of the market, and games like it tend to follow the leader, and you will see class designs with special powers granted at each level. This "prebuilt powers on a class list" design is incredibly common in gaming today.

Also, skills have been relegated to a secondary role, often "solving a toggle problem." Passive perception covers, "Do I see something?" A referee calling for an active skill roll, like History, is just presenting a pass-fail problem with very little player input or interest. After a while, it doesn't matter what the skill is or what the roll covers; it is just a binary test in the adventure: you get to read something, or you do not. You can move somewhere, or you can't. You take damage, or you don't.

If you can see a 5E adventure as a decision tree, this is the structure. Skill rolls just force you down decision tree paths. And I get this feeling that in 5E, the primary way you solve a problem is with a power, rather than creativity and skill use.

GURPS hits differently for me. Skills feel more open and more like player tools than pachinko machine pegs. For most things, you don't have the skill. You may know someone who does, though. Many D&D adventures are designed around skills. Since they are so limited, there will be a number of skill encounters that act as toggles or filters, making the roll go this way, fail it, and go that way.

In GURPS and many older games, you don't really have adventures designed so tightly around skills. Skills are there as player tools that could open new paths, but they primarily exist to give players the tools and options to create new narrative paths. Skills feel optional and more player-initiated than adventure-required.

Powers are another thing. Powers force the player to read the character sheet each turn and choose a path for that turn of combat. Choice paralysis also defines modern gaming. You will have high-level D&D games in which players forget their characters have powers they could use.

D&D 5E says to me, "Powers solve problems, not plans."

GURPS was designed in the pre-modern era, and you can even see this design philosophy reflected in other games, such as Palladium and Basic Roleplaying. Characters in these games are more about character skills and player choices, and powers are an extra, special bonus.

If you wanted special powers, you turned to games like Champions or ... GURPS. GURPS sort of stands in both worlds, with a power design and a full-featured system for superpowers. D&D never had the focus on special powers it does today, merging with video games and with powers taking over the mental decision tree for a player when their turn comes around. GURPS, by default, can ignore the power-design system and still run like an old-school "stats and skills" game.

Then again, I started with GURPS 1.0, so special powers were always something found "in other books" rather than something in the core rules. GURPS 4 changes all that and is an excellent all-in-one game. And in GURPS, you design whatever power you want, whenever you want, and work with the referee to get or have it. If you have the free character points, you can play.

Still, for me, GURPS feels like a "skills & wits" game.

GURPS: Twilight: 2000

This would be a tough conversion.

Twilight: 2000 is famous for being a nearly complete catalog of military hardware. You have all sorts of ammunition, guns, tanks, APCs, guns, suppport weapons, and military gear, all laid out for you with complete game stats for everything. By version 2.2, all the kinks were worked out, and this is close to being a modern version of Squad Leader, but on a man-to-man scale and in a what-if World War III.

I could see a GURPS conversion working if you used GURPS for the characters, and Twilight: 2000 for vehicle combat rules, with a skill conversion matrix, sort of like how my Car Wars Classic conversion works. Still, Twilight: 2000 has a lot more going on, in that it is a complete package game. One book and done. Toys to play with for everything. Character creation that takes you through a survivor's life. And then you are on your own.

Twilight: 2000 is the D&D of World War III.

And there are no drones to speak of.

Yes, there is a new version out from Free League, but this is the OG game, down to the millimeter details of the ammunition your AFV fires and the make and model number of the salvaged RPG stored in the back. You are playing escape and evasion with enemy forces, dealing with the next village scared out of their wits at you, and random marauder attacks everywhere as civilization breaks down.

Like any good post-apoc game, trust is the currency you can bank on. Rescue a village's kidnapped people, and you are heroes for a while, with a safe place to stay, your vehicles safe places to park, and your stuff is (mostly) free from being stolen.

Tomorrow is another day, at least until the marauders start dropping mortar rounds in town as revenge, and you are hustling to go find them to finish the rest of the decrepit band off with maximum prejudice. The Navy SEAL and German hostage rescue specialist in your unit will have a ball picking off the mortar team with sniper rifles as your M113 with the 50-cal turns their vehicles into Swiss cheese, and the rest of your team goes in close.

Then, you begin to become a local legend.

Watch out how famous you become, you are bound to attract attention. A detachment of the Soviets may come up to town, saying they mean no harm and are looking for medical supplies for an outbreak of influenza. Do you trust them? Do you make a deal? Do you shoot them, fearing they are infected, too? Every choice has consequences here.

Maybe you will regret opening fire when you should have sent a few and your doctor to meet with their commander to broker a deal. Your team has a chance of getting sick, but delivering what you can spare will foster a more positive disposition between the sides and an agreement to share resources, as long as both sides respect boundaries. Maybe helping them lets peace have a chance for a little while.

Or they could hold your team and the doctor, and you need to go in, rescue them, and realize they can never be trusted. What both sides do matters. The trust you give may be honored, or spit in your face.

GURPS could do this type of game; it would be gritty, hardcore, and real. It has most of the weapons and tech, up to a point, where the pedantic detail of TW2K starts to outpace what GURPS has stats for. There is enough post-apoc info in GURPS to hold its own against TW2K on the rules side.

On the gear side, GURPS tends to be very broadly based and covers a lot. You can get detailed stats on a few of the vehicles and weapons TW2K has, but not really all of them. The best way to do this is to convert TW2K vehicles into GURPS and best-imate the stats. TW2K tends to have more of a "playing with a big box of broken toys" feel, while GURPS is more up close and personal.

My feeling is that with GURPS, much more will be broken down and lost to the ravages of time and war, and it feels like a better game, with a focus less on the gear-head stuff and more on characters. Where TW2K does the 2000 game better, GURPS will do the 2020-and-beyond game, where the world is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages II, much better.

Given enough time, the world will start to develop feudal trappings again. The borders and nationalities will disappear, and the focus of organized civilization will become farming and storing enough food (on radiation-free land) to let a large population survive the longer winters caused by the debris still in the atmosphere after nuclear war. In 20 years, the winters will be like the Ice Age, and any large population will find it rough going just to sustain more than a few thousand in one small area.

Working guns and vehicles will be the tools of "knights" and the elite. They will be taken care of, maintained like family heirlooms, and passed down to the next generation. Owning a working pickup truck with gas will be like owning a fully barded warhorse, with a team of squires and mechanics who work for the family in its garage-like stables. Gas will be made in small batches and power the few remaining vehicles of the knights and royalty.

This is the game in which GURPS will shine and outdo TW2K.

Part of why TW2K works is that it is still close enough to the war that all this stuff still works. There is still gas. There is still ammo lying around. The limited industry still works because there are people around to run the broken factories. The game has lots of bang-bang left around to play with, like some last gasp of an action movie. Pretty soon, the notion of NATO versus the Soviet Union will be forgotten. It will just be the living and the dead, with the latter side winning the battle.

The entire setting is sliding into another mass die-off of the Earth's population once they figure out that "it really wasn't worth it."

It still isn't.

HAPPY 40th GURPS!

I went back and checked a few sources, and to the best of my knowledge, this is GURPS' 40th anniversary. This is backed up by SJG, with Origins 1986, July 3-6, being the first release of GURPS:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/2026-07-03

40 years of great gaming, and only 4 editions, with the 4th lasting more than half of that time?

GURPS is more than just a legendary game; it is an icon and milestone in gaming. They rolled a crit when they developed GURPS.

40 years of amazing gaming, and here is to many, many, many more!

Happy GURPS Day to you!

Skill Confusion

There is a conversation happening over in the 5E and Critical Role communities about, "When you should roll a skill roll?" A Critical Role GM said a bit of roleplaying was so good, he said, "No skill roll needed!" Some OSR types got angry. How could he "not roll?" That is an OSR rule, not 5E!

I sit over here in GURPS-land and wonder, "Really?"

How is this hard?

What are they even talking about?

I will shorten all of this and point out the obvious: anger engagement is engagement, and this is probably something about nothing. People are riding coattails again and finding silly things to be angry about. Also, mind you, if any of them played a true skill-based system, which some of us have been doing since 1980, they would have figured this out decades ago.

GURPS has had this figured out for the last 40 years.

This all stems from the bad habit of 5E players, and the game encourages it with passive skills: when characters enter a room, every player says, "I roll perception!" Instead of convincing an NPC through roleplaying, the player shouts, "I roll persuasion!" 

We have it nice and clear. From GURPS, Campaigns, B343, the first page of that book:

To avoid bogging down the game in endless die rolls, the GM should only require a success roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success.

It is simple. From the D&D 5.1 SRD, page 77:

The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.

Oh, that is simple too. So, if I search the statue and tell the referee I am pressing the third button on the statue's jacket, just like the clue we found earlier said to open the secret passage, no roll is required?

Yes, if you hit a bullseye with your roleplaying, searching, interaction with the environment, or the referee says "don't roll" because "the outcome is certain," you do not need to roll. Both D&D 5E and GURPS are crystal-clear on this.

In fact, if, in GURPS, a player says their character "searches the room" but doesn't say any of the W's (who, what, where, when, why, and how) - or gives me any clue where they are looking or what they are looking for is probably staring at a -4 to -8 modifier in GURPS as my ruling. I'd say "looking for anything" in that large an area is a very hard skill roll.

Yes, searching a large area is more difficult than searching a small area, especially when time is a factor. But, again, only roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success. You may just say they find it after an hour of searching, mark a torch off, roll for some wandering monsters, and move on. On the flip side, searching a very small area will be easier. GURPS covers this with the universal difficulty modifiers. The referee makes the call.

Tell me, are you searching the desk or the bookshelf? For that, I may give you a 0 to -2 modifier, depending on how well it is hidden. Well, you are searching for the key that was taped under the top desk drawer? No roll needed. Bingo. You hit the jackpot.

What am I making anyone roll for that?

Even in GURPS, that is silly.

Same thing with roleplaying. "I roll intimidation" is going to get you a pretty hefty negative modifier since you aren't telling me anything. What, are you leering at them? Come up with a great one-liner? Make my day, +4, easy task. Or maybe even automatic success. Give me something specific to work with here, and I will take that into consideration.

This is GURPS; there are ways to make a skill check easier by narrowing your focus and telling the referee exactly what you are attempting. The risk is that if you focus on the desk, and the passage is behind the bookshelf across the room, no roll is going to help you find it. Maybe someone "searches the room in general" while a few of you each take an area of the room?

Then again, give me a reason to roll. You come up with a search plan like that, and I may rule after 5 minutes of looking; the person searching the bookshelf finds the passage. Mark off some time and move on. Why are we rolling?

Also, whether a player has a skill or not may be a factor in GURPS, "if you roll," and "can you even attempt this?" If a character is a pilot, they will generally know the procedures for landing a plane and how to talk to the tower. No roll needed. What? You are going to fail the roll, and the tower says, "No, you can't land here, land somewhere else, jerk!" Characters without the skill won't know, and they will need help from someone with the skill (likely the person in the tower) to know what to do next.

There are a few factors playing into the confusion. One, BX and these old-school D&D-style systems never had skill systems to roll against, hence the rise of skill-based systems to give players games with task resolution based on skill use. There was a lot of houseruling in those days, too, where you could say "rolling under and ability score" was the "default skill check system of BX." I had BX groups in the 1980s who rolled under ability scores for everything as much as some 5E players do today.

This is not a new "problem" if it is even a problem. Nor is it new.

In old-school games, it is a problem. The rules are not all that consistent across the games, and almost every group had a different way of handling the exact same thing. Houseruling was so common that two groups could handle things in completely different ways.

In the modern OSR, things tend to be clearer with suggested ways of handling "skill and ability checks."

There is another source of confusion for 5E players: those who play D&D video games expect the skill roll to pop the magic d20 up on the screen, animate it, make a Price Is Right-style sound, and give them a pass-or-fail result. Real pen-and-paper games don't work that way, and there was always the role of the referee in deciding if a skill check is needed, or if one can even be attempted.

There was no "I persuade the king to make me king" with a skill roll back in the day; you were laughed out of the castle. That sort of silliness doesn't even work in GURPS either, not without mind control, and even then, everyone else is going to look at you like you just mind-controlled the king's mind.

Video games do not have a referee. All those skill rolls need to be scripted and pre-created. Live games at the table are not like that. Too many D&D players are trained to shout out a skill name when they are presented with anything by the GM, reducing it to this type of interaction:

1. The referee reads a long paragraph of description.
2. The players look at their character sheets.
3. Everyone picks a skill and says, "I roll this skill!"
4. Ugh.

This was made worse by many live-play shows, where the players shortcutted a lot of that back-and-forth for a quick, deterministic, pass-or-fail skill roll. Live play shows did a lot of damage to how D&D 5E is played, due to shortcutting the non-combat parts for time and speed of play. Those of us who rarely watch live-play shows have no clue why this is a problem.

You get this feedback loop where those who expect 5E to be a tabletop videogame will expect pass-fail "shout the skill" rolls, and those who watch live play want to shortcut interaction for time. 5E combats are long enough, where are we mucking around searching a room by describing where we look? This is 30 minutes off the 3 hours we'll need for the boss fight! I can't stay here late!

Sometimes, shortcutting those skill interactions in 5E is justified. This has nothing to do with game choice, new versus OSR, or any other pretend argument. It has everything to do with game design.

Combats in 5E run long.

Groups speed up the skill checks and roleplaying to save time.

In GURPS, combats are often quick and deadly.

We have more time to spend interacting and roleplaying with the environment.

And our skill system gives us near-infinite ways to interact with it.

If we need to roll.