GURPS/Fate Core Skill List

Happy GURPSDay, gamer folks! Enjoy the mountain of RPG goodness out there today!

I’ve already ruminated before on Fate Points in GURPS and Fate Aspects as GURPS Advantages; today’s offering is a breakdown of all the GURPS skills and which Fate Core skills they correspond to, which you can download/view here:

GURPS/Fate Skill List | Downloads: 805 | Size: 103.8 KB

This is meant to be helpful in converting characters from one system to the other, but there are a few things to note:

  • Not all Fate skills from the default list are represented. Specifically, there are no Contacts or Resources skills (since GURPS uses advantages for these things, not skills); and there is no Provoke skill (since that mechanic doesn’t really exist in GURPS).
  • The Fate skill Lore is renamed here as Knowledge, to be more generic.
  • Clearly, not all Fate skills are of equal value, GURPS-wise! Empathy, Investigate, and Stealth only have a couple/few GURPS skills each, while Knowledge and Fight have dozens.
  • As with most creative endeavors, this is subjective by its very nature. You may prefer to list certain GURPS skills under a different Fate Core skill.

Myself, I plan to use this to kind of “eyeball” characters for conversion, but for a slightly more codified system, I would suggest having each GURPS skill equate to a “+1” in Fate terms. For example, if your GURPS character has Boxing, Knife, Shield, and Two-Handed Sword, then his Fight skill in Fate Core would be Great (that is, +4, as noted here). If the GURPS PC has three Knowledge skills (say, Administration, Economics, and Geography), his Knowledge skill in Fate Core would be Good (+3). And so on (though this would need to be tweaked for Fate skills that cover fewer than four GURPS skills).

Going the other way, if your Fate character has Deceive at Great (+4) and Investigate at Fair (+2), in GURPS he could choose four skills from under Deceive and two skills from under Investigate. For skill levels, the simplest method would be to use the Fate numeric value as the GURPS relative skill level. So, if the Fate character above chose Counterfeiting, Disguise, Holdout, and Sleight of Hand as his four Deceive skills, they would be at IQ+4 or DX+4; if he chose Criminology and Research as his two Investigate skills, they would be at IQ+2.

If you really want to go nuts, take the GURPS skill difficulty into account as well, so Very Hard skills count as three ‘levels,’ Hard as two, Average as one, and Easy as half (giving two Easy skills per level). So, in the above example of four Deceive skills, Counterfeiting and Sleight of Hand are both Hard skills (two levels each) and Disguise and Holdout are Average skills (one level each). A Fate Deceive skill at Great gives four levels, so the GURPS character could take both Counterfeiting and Sleight of Hand at IQ+4 and DX+4, respectively; or Counterfeiting, Disguise, and Holdout at IQ+4; or any other combination that adds up to four levels.

It’s rare to have perfect analogs between two RPG systems, and GURPS and Fate are no exception; but this should hopefully be “good enough” to at least get skill conversions in the ballpark.

 

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1 Comment

  1. Where would you start Fate characters with fate points if you didn’t want to indulge in the usual Fate Point economy(with compels etc)? I haven’t gotten to play, so I don’t have a “feel” for the back-and-forth points yet. I’ve noticed disagreement on how it should go, when I’ve read discussions.

    How many Fate Points should they start each session with?
    Since they’re used to fuel Stunts/special powers, that’s kind of my problem.

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