Both Traveller and Star Frontiers have this problem. This one came up in my GURPS Star Frontiers campaign, derailing my game. Here is your typical starting SF character's skills:
- Beam Weapons 1
- Technician 1
Usually, you pick a combat skill plus your specialty- a medic, technician, computer, robotics, or whatever. In Traveller, you get similar skills, but the skill list is more extensive, so you typically start with 4-10 skills in various areas. Still, the levels and specialization focus areas are similar to Star Frontiers. Traveller's skill list was better, by far, but SF was designed for a younger audience. SF did more with the skills, offering actions in each skill that you could attempt at various percentages.
However, trying to convert SF to GURPS poses a problem. I had characters I wanted to recreate, and my first attempts are rebuilding them were these "good at everything generalists," which frankly had no focus and sucked. If you are designing a generalist in GURPS, stop and rethink your design. You won't be happy with it.
The character I was trying to rebuild was a technician, pilot, and beam weapons "action hero" type guy.
He ended up a sci-fi, do-it-all generalist with a two-page skill list, and I was not happy with him. In Traveller, your character can die in character generation; in GURPS, your character can "die" in character generation, too; you can blow it and have the character come out terrible. It is like cooking dinner, failing terribly, tossing it all, and ordering takeout.
You can get through GURPS character creation and have a mess of a character that can't be played. That is a terrible feeling. Sometimes, I would rather play a 50-point know-nothing scrub and earn my character points to learn what comes at me. GURPS takes time to learn. But what takes even more time is re-learning how to roleplay.
You enter the world of GURPS, and your world expands exponentially. Things you would "brush off" in a throw-away rules-light game suddenly become matters of life and death. You can't get the cargo-bay ramp closed. Who cares?
The door will tear off when the ship tries to get enough speed to accelerate into orbit.
All that atmospheric pressure blowing in the ship will cause the lower deck to explode from within.
And the ship will fall back to the ground, tearing itself apart as it loses structural integrity.
In a rules-light game, whatever, the hard technician skill roll, fix it, take a 20, and get flying. Some games don't handle the above situation; like in a Star Wars-type reality, you can fly around with a door open forever since the rules and the genre don't care.
But in hard sci-fi? Close that ramp, or it will be game over.
And if no characters can perform a hard hydraulics skill roll? You are stuck. Or try something else, like shutting the ramp and welding it shut. You lose the ramp, but it is better than losing the ship. All mechanic skills default at a -4 skill level, so a 16- turns into a 12-, and modifiers further lower that.
Does someone on your crew know hydraulic repair?
Not a problem.
That one small situation that would have been a throwaway moment in a rules-light game becomes a critical area of knowledge your character can pick up and become good at. This "world expansion" happened to Traveller players who picked up GURPS Traveller, and all of a sudden, the universe felt incredibly large, and everything felt "real" all of a sudden - like putting on a VR headset and being teleported into the world.
I get it. Rules light players are sitting there, groaning and wondering why "elevator repair" is such a big deal. It is a big deal to a GURPS character, especially a technician dealing with blast doors, hydraulic lifts, ramps, starfighter storage systems, docking clamps, massive cargo lifts, landing-bay doors, and deck-sized lift systems.
You look at Star Wars; every shot inside the Death Star has hydraulic systems in the frame.
Rules light players laugh, but we know this skill is worth its weight in gold. Combine this with knowledge of security systems, computer hacking, and electronics, and my character is now "the door guy."
I can't do that in Traveller or Star Frontiers. The former is more straightforward to accomplish this, but not to the detail and level of GURPS.
Which returns to my character design. Maybe I never knew him to the level of understanding who he really was. The generalist character in GURPS sucks. That character doesn't need anyone else, and they will never be great at a few things.
Even if you design NPCs using GURPS Ultra Lite to help the PC in a few areas, that is preferable to being a generalist. Doing this speeds up play, and since the Ultra Lite rules are legal at my table, it allows me to mock up "party members" and crewmates for PCs quickly and play with one fully designed character and a team of UL NPCs as the ship's crew.
Heck, most aliens and monsters will be UL NPCs, too. If an alien has a power, such as a mind control power, make it a simple N-skill roll and get playing. Throw some ! bang skills in as well, as needed, for NPCs. There is no need to break out the powers book for this. UL handles 99% of NPCs.
However, simple skill systems and rules-light games sell themselves as "easy," but I rarely find them to be worth much. 5E's skill system is like this, too. It does not work well for me, and I can't customize it and buy into areas I want to specialize in after character creation. What's worse, with a simple skill system, I never get to know the character and the world's interactivity is reflected in the game's skill system.
Simple skill system? A simple, less interactive, flat, and unengaging world.
The deeper and more in-depth the skill system, the better the world becomes. One-to-one skills reflect immersion in the world. The better the skill system, the better the world. This is where rules-light falls down hard. The worlds are flat and uninteresting, meant to pretend you can interact with them with a skill system so simple it barely tells you anything.
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