I had not seen “pick your skills” until the past few years poking around the boards. No one who has played my games has expected to pick their skills (well, I suppose some might have, since my gaming is either play by post or Roll20, I don’t require people roll their characters up in front of me).
For the way I play, I don’t think I’d like having players pick skills, it would seem to lead to too much optimization.
Counterpoint: For most folk, at least some sizable part of our skills are a result of choices we made (sometimes the choices were 'learn this or not eat' but still a choice). Some people in our world are really thinly focused (others are all over the map).
Funnily enough, my main group had one or two that would focus on a key skill, but all the rest typically wanted 1 or 2 level 2+ and 1s and 0s in a lot of other skills. This was in the generous brownie-point enhanced MT expanded character generation. They could have built skill-4 and skill-5 focused characters with fewer skills, but after playing long enough, you tend as a player to want to be of general utility in almost every situation a) because you can't always tell which PCs will end up in the soup (so good to have broad skill ranges) and b) because they you can participate in more scenes effectively (vs. kind of watching from the sidelines).
My own self portrait:
Electronics-2 (college)
Computers-3 (college plus 15 years of work)
Mechanics-1 (my dad, spare time since)
Languages-2 (bits of many, some idea of parts of linguistics) (interest, some in university - French and Russian)
Physics-1 (university)
Chemistry-0 (university but not my best subject)
Brawling/Martial Arts-1 (5 years of 2-4 times a week 3 hour training sessions - karate and aikido)
Wheeled Vehicle-1 (owned a sports car for 13 years, didn't die)
Small Watercraft-1 (basic cruising, intermediate cruising training and practice from the CYA)
Handgun-1 (pistol club member, have a friend that's a gun guy)
Tactics-1 (wargaming, infantry training, studying spec ops and SWAT for a long time as a hobby)
Rifle-0 (infantry training, gun guy friend)
Small Blade-0 (interest ongoing in knife fighting)
Instruction-1 (taught at a college, learned how to do it right first)
Liaison-0 (contractor working with many different clients and government agencies)
Medical-1 (emergency first aid, CPR, lots of wound treatment practice, grew up with a nurse for a mother, looking at full EMT training)
Navigation-1 (coastal navigation course and grounside nav training)
Recon-0 (infantry training, paintball, and just generally learning how to be quite and watch in the wilds)
Stealth-1 (known for being sneaky - co-workers stuck me with 'the savage' because I constantly scared them just by my silent approach, plus military training, plus paintball)
Robotics-0 (college, pneumatic and electrical industrial robots and logic controllers)
Steward-1 (3 meals from scratch per day for a long time plus lots of practice and reading/watching chef shows)
Survival-0 (military training, survival training)
History-1 (major hobby focus, courses during my university time, study of classics from various eras, etc)
Of those, I chose to go to the schools (uni and college), to join the infantry reserve, to have a wide range of interests and friends with military, police, medical, and tech friends, worked in tech programming for many domains/projects, interested in sailing and going offshore (Lake Ontario, not the oceans). Interest in history pursued, ditto Steward. I chose to teach courses. I chose to go to gun ranges.
I can't think of much that I was just forced to take or that randomly came up. So pick the skills might not be crazy given that, though I have never done it as a GM or player.
Frank
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Rolling to determine skills is probably, in my experience anyway, one of the most ignored rules.
Just about everyone I know/knew much, much preferred to pick their skills.
Even the few Trav computer games (the MicroProse ones were my favs), let you pick skills.
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