Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Captain Anorak's Pool Test for Skill Systems
Lots of RPGs have skills. These are handled in different ways by different games, and some of these are problematic. I've developed a test for skill systems, to evaluate what problems they have.

HOW DOES THE POOL TEST WORK?

The Pool Test works by asking how a skills system stats a character from a modern (late 20th-early 21st century) first world country. It is assumed that any character from such a society would have at least some experience of playing pool. A good skill system should be able to create characters with the following abilities:
Case 1 - Someone with a slightly better than typical pool-playing ability for his society.
Case 2 - Someone with a typical pool-playing ability for his society.
Case 3 - Someone with a below typical pool-playing ability for his society.
Case 4 - An immigrant from a third world country who has never seen a pool table before, whose playing ability is based solely on his natural ability to do the things that pool requires.

Triviality - Many games let a player design his character by buying skills with points. Since playing pool is a fairly trivial life-skill for most characters, players will generally not think of putting any points into it. In most such games there are only enough points to go around the most important skills. Even if this is not so, there are so many skills in which a character has a small amount of experience that a player simply can't think of them all during character creation.

GURPS

In GURPS, if character points are put into a skill, then it has a value based on the number of points invested and the value of a primary stat, which would be Dexterity (DX) in the case of Pool. If no points are put in, then the skill has a default level based on DX.

Ignoring Triviality, the four cases should work out like this:

Case 1	Case 2	Case 3	Case 4
2 points	1 point	1/2 point	0 points

This would create characters who (if they had the same primary stats) would have their skills ranked in the correct order. From that point of view, it's perfect. Another plus point is that skills vary with both the primary stat and the amount of points put in (representing experience of playing pool) so both natural ability and playing experience are reflected.

Where it falls down is Triviality: in reality, each player would put no points into Pool because it's trivial. So, although most characters should have about one point invested in the skill (Case 2), in practice all player characters will have no points in Pool. So, if we look at it in the light of how players really stat characters (ie. they don't stat trivial skills), we must say that putting no points into Pool represents a typical member of society. We then end up with the following scheme:

Case 1	Case 2	Case 3	Case 4
1 point	0 points	Can't be done	Can't be done

CALL OF CTHULHU

Call of Cthulhu has a list of skills with 'basic' values, which a character gets automatically. Character skill points can be added to these basic values (some of which are 0) to increase them. A character may have other skills as well, which have a basic value of 0, so every point in the skill has to be payed for.

Since playing pool is trivial, most characters don't have the skill. If the GM called for a Pool roll from such a character, the skill would be 0%. Since this represents a typical character, it must represent Case 2. Case 1 would then be represented by putting a few points (say 10) into the Pool skill.

CoC doesn't allow negative skills, so it's impossible to stat Case 3 and Case 4. This leaves us with the following:

Case 1	Case 2	Case 3	Case 4
10%	0%	Can't be done	Can't be done

Historic footnote - I got the idea for the Pool Test from a Call of Cthulhu character created by my old chum Paul. He wanted to play a character who was bad at playing billiards: it was a trait of his character that he always lost at Billiards. So he gave him a low Billiards skill (about 20% I think). But no other CoC character I know of has ever had a Billiards skill. So in fact, this character who was 'bad' at Billiards was the best Billiards player of all the CoC characters I've ever known.