GURPSよろず

　The decision to use ―― or not use! ―― wildcard skills is the GM’s, to be made at the start of the campaign. Though What to Include (pp. 6-10) appears earlier in this work to help explain wildcards, its lessons are best applied after contemplating the following points.

　Wildcard skills can be fun, but before using them, it’s important to know when not to use them. Sweeping skill diversity, though complex, is sometimes appropriate!
　For one thing, having many individual skills is realistic.
Think of the countless jobs and hobbies out there, and the myriad lessons and experiences these entail. While it’s unquestionably simpler to stuff all human endeavor into a few pigeonholes, the results will feel unrealistic. In a campaign about believable people in plausible situations, bite the bullet and use standard skills ―― wildcards are a bad fit to high-realism gaming.

　Wildcards don’t always suit larger-than-life games, either.
Cinematic campaigns often involve teams of PCs (if only ragtag ones!), with each player’s fun rooted in “spotlight moments” where only his character’s abilities will do. When wildcards can cover sharply distinct areas of knowledge, one per character, they enhance this experience ―― but that relies on the heroes being very different. Many stories are about parties of adventurers in the same line of work: buddy cops, three Musketeers, thieves from the same guild, and so on.
For these, fine skill distinctions are key characterization elements, and wildcards may be too clumsy a tool for the job.

　Finally, even if realism isn’t an issue and the heroes differ so much that each can have his own wildcard, it’s important to make the players happy. Reducing the size of the skill list is a godsend when it speeds character creation for gamers who are new to the system or strapped for time. But if the group consists mainly of GURPS veterans who prefer to tweak, wildcards actually add complexity. The players will seek different skill levels in various key areas, and end up using rules like Improving Standard Skills From Wildcards (pp. 5-6) to concoct character sheets more complicated than ones that feature only standard skills . . . so why not use standard skills in the first place?

　The GM who feels that the campaign’s realism level ―― and players ―― would support a “hand-waving” treatment of skills and tasks has several important follow-up decisions to make.

　Highly variable! If templates define the campaign’s major roles, each might feature a wildcard, while taking the “building blocks” approach results in roughly twice as many skills; see Template Wildcards (pp. 17-19).
If the players are designing characters freeform to fit dramatic niches, the GM might work with them to develop one wildcard per PC ―― and interesting categories of NPCs could likewise get one apiece.
Interesting Cases (pp. 15-20) leads to a wildcard for each fighting style, Imbuement Skill, magical college, psi power, weapon, etc., and these may well coexist with wildcards for niches or templates.
What’s imperative is to avoid overlap between wildcards likely to be bought together, and to ensure that especially broad wildcards have prerequisites: Imbue, Magery, Trained by a Master, Unusual Background, etc.

　Restrictions on wildcards per PC aren’t essential, and some categories (e.g., College! skills, p. 16) are meant to allow several at once. Still, it’s wise to set limits on wildcards associated with roles or templates, so that each hero has a clear niche.
The expense of wildcards tends to drive players away from long lists, but why risk it?

　Unless the GM rules otherwise, all that’s needed to buy wildcards is an appropriate background story.
However, if they’re special abilities in a campaign with “haves” and “have-nots” ―― whether by virtue of being wildcards at all (see Special Ability, p. 7) or because they’re truly superhuman in the sense of Supernatural Wildcards (pp. 16-17) ―― there may be a prerequisite Unusual Background, conceivably one restricted to PCs and high-profile NPCs.
The GM sets its point cost, which should be modest unless wildcards offer potent Additional Benefits (pp. 10- 15) or remarkable powers.
Something between a perk per wildcard and a flat 5 points feels right.

　This supplement is chock-full of optional rules.
The GM must decide which ones are in effect. In particular, review Conditional-to-General Defaults (p. 6); everything under Additional Benefits (pp. 10-15); the special options in Interesting Cases (pp. 15-20), like higher technique levels for style wildcards, and whether wizards use Magic! or College! skills; Ultimate Template Wildcards (p. 18); Wildcard Techniques (p. 20); Yet More Optional Rules! (pp. 25-26); and Wild Criticals (p. 26).

　If wildcards are cinematic abilities for heroes ―― that is, the PCs ―― the answer is “no.” However, the GM is welcome to put arch-villains, important NPC allies, etc. on an equal footing.
Some categories of wildcards might be reserved for NPCs; see Ultimate NPC Wildcards (p. 18).
And usually, wildcards that are special abilities comparable to spells and powers are available to whoever who can afford them and any prerequisites.

　Wildcards don’t have to work the same way for PCs and NPCs, though.
Those that exist only to simplify stats by reducing entire skill lists to, say, Tiger! or Orc! might offer fewer benefits than ones that represent special abilities or cinematic competence.
This most often takes the form of less-generous optional rules.
For NPCs built on points, a double-standard that makes wildcards less potent should reduce or erase any Unusual Background for such skills.

　The most radical option is to declare that only wildcard skills exist ―― that no PC can buy standard skills or improve them from defaults to wildcards. This simplifies character creation immensely. Just as important, it eliminates the competition between standard and wildcard skills. Applying Additional Benefits (pp. 10-15) aggressively enough might even wipe out the rivalry between attributes and wildcards; indeed, if most of those options are “switched on,” gauging how wildcards compare to other traits grows so subjective that dumping standard skills is worth considering for that reason alone.
　Doing this will affect many of the GM’s answers to the questions in Deciding How Wildcards Work (pp. 21-22):

　How many wildcards in the campaign and per character?
Making wildcards the only skills lets the GM set an important campaign-wide limit on character complexity. “One per template” or “one per niche” is unlikely to be satisfactory; that gives disappointingly one-dimensional characters. But it would be reasonable to group 200+ individual skills into, say, 15 to 20 completely independent wildcards that cover the major tasks important to the genre and setting, and then to expect or even require each PC to pick four or five of these. If combat is to be a major theme, weapon wildcards can raise the number of wildcards and player choices . . . or the GM might ordain that each hero has to select a different martial-arts style and buy its style wildcard, over and above everything else. If wildcards correspond to magical colleges, those would likewise constitute an extra list, not part of the basic one.

　Is an Unusual Background required?
Probably not, if everybody has to use wildcards ―― the extra trait is just a nuisance when the PCs are all on an equal footing. However, if some wildcards are more capable than others, the option to select them can fairly depend on suitable Unusual Backgrounds.

　Which optional rules?
This becomes crucial, as now the rules controlling wildcards supplant large swaths of standard GURPS. For instance, if Wildcard Familiarity (p. 11) applies at all times, many fussy modifiers disappear, greatly simplifying game play. If the campaign will be “all wildcards, all the time,” intricate options for wildcards become more attractive, because they replace skill complexity rather than compound it.
If nothing else, the GM might want to use Hyper-Competency (pp. 12-13), Compensating for Difficulty (p. 25), and Using Wildcards Together (pp. 25-26) to offset the higher failure rate that accompanies somewhat lower overall skill levels.

　Can NPCs have wildcards?
　If wildcards are truly the only skills, this is a given. But in cinematic campaigns that pit shining heroes against faceless hordes, it’s more fitting to declare that NPCs are still stuck with standard skills. If so, it’s important to keep their skill levels modest, and there are but two sorts of NPCs: worthies who boast wildcards at levels at or near the heroes’, and supporting cast with standard skills at the same relative skill levels or below. For instance, if the typical PC has DX 14 and combat-related wildcards at attribute+2, for skill 16, then NPCs should have at most 16 in their standard combat skills; the GM should avoid “logic” that has NPCs spending the same 48 points on combat skills so that even DX 10 cannon fodder are running around with skill 22!