Rolling Against Default
A side effect of growing up playing GURPS is that I occasionally think and talk about my everyday life in game terms – especially when I'm talking to other gamers. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the joy and satisfaction that comes from rolling against default.
If you haven't played GURPS, I'm talking about skills. If you haven't put any points into a skill (i.e., are untrained), you roll against that skill's default, typically based on a basic attribute, but sometimes based on another skill. The penalty is smaller the more related the skills are. I've always loved this rule because it's very uncommon for games to mechanically model how knowing how to do something kind of similar is often better than no experience at all.
I love trying new things, especially making new things, and a common refrain for me is "how hard could it possibly be?" before jumping headlong into a project. So here are a few skill defaults I've rolled against in the past week:
- Electronics Repair (Electronics Operation-3): I've been on a nostalgia kick for rhythm gaming (Rock Band, Guitar Hero, etc.) lately, and the secondary market for controllers can get pricey. I bought a nonfunctional guitar controller on the Goodwill auction site in the hopes of repairing it. When I got it, I took it apart and poked around. There was battery corrosion, which I cleaned, and the wire going to the battery housing was in bad shape, so I re-soldered that with a soldering iron my roommate had borrowed from a friend after a "learn to make stained glass" party – incidentally, that party was the first time I'd soldered anything successfully since high school. Et voilà! I now have a working fake guitar!
- Stylist (Wig) (Barber-5): I started (badly) cutting my own hair when I was a teenager (rolling at IQ-5 for the professional skill), but over the intervening years I've put a character point or two into knowing my way around clippers – especially when COVID hit and my friends and family were desperate enough to trust me with their hair. I've got a drag show coming up where I'm doing an act as Frankenstein's Creature (from the excellent recent Del Toro adaptation), so I got my very first lace front wig and spent an evening hacking it into shape with shears. I have no idea how to cut long hair, especially long fake hair, but there's only one way to find out! I'll probably get some more help on it before the show, but it's shaping up nicely.
- Wigs (Sewing-3): The Creature in the Netflix film has a streak of silver in his hair, so I picked up a silver sew-in weave bundle at the beauty store and resolved to figure out how to make that happen. It was fiddly for sure, but surprisingly not too hard to stitch a couple extra short wefts in between the existing rows of hair on the wig! A curved needle helped a lot. Weirdly, it reminded me a little of fixing a couch.
- Singing (HT-5) and Songwriting (IQ-5): I'm not a trained singer. I'm not really a poet or songwriter, either. But I had an idea for a song parody act based on the similarity between a movie monster's face and a music video from 15 years ago, and that demanded that I figure out how to do both of those things really fast . . . we'll see how I do in a of couple weeks!
My favorite thing about tackling a task that I initially have no idea how I'm going to approach is that whenever I look at the final result, I feel a swell of pride (tinged with disbelief) that I actually pulled it off! The more I do that, the more I'm surrounded by physical objects that remind me to try new things just to see what happens.
Also, GURPS GMs, I think access to YouTube should give at least a +2 on any untrained skill roll. Just based on my personal experience fooling around and finding out that yes, I can!