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I like the idea of completely rewriting the skill and talent content because it allows us to sweep up legacy issues without bitching about balancing.  Fresh eyes and a clean slate informed by the mistakes of the past can allow for a better finished product and I like the principles of this except that I wonder about a number of the existing talents: Rolling more up into talents is an interesting start except that now you're proposing talents that are as weak as skills (because they used to be skills) and that's going to throw off talent balancing.
Following on past discussions and the above statement of intent the goal is to reach coherent character concepts and varied gameplay by limiting what a character can do to avoid the, "Every character does everything except for a few things that everybody agrees are useless," concern of the GH1 system.  Unfortunately I don't see that the current system or future proposed system will be any more suited to producing coherent character concepts than the previous one.  It's been my observation that it is a significant general problem of skill based RPG systems that without limits or differences imposed elsewhere in the process that everybody will eventually get every skill at their maximum ability if the system lets them do that.  The number one way I'm familiar with for these games to do away with that is a bonuses and penalties system as found in GURPS and Ars Magica.

I have some minor concerns about the specifics of this draft portion of this plan;

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

Scientist Skills: Skills known by scientists.
* Science: Knowledge of sciency stuff.
o Robotics (Talent): Seriously, is there any roboticist in the source material who is not also a scientist?

I can point to Ed from Cowboy Bebop offhand, Ed was a hacker who teleoperationally controlled a million things, and I'm far from the most devoted student of anime and manga.  In a far-future where highly powerful computers, robots and mecha are everyday, commonplace things I don't see why robotics wouldn't generally be the province of mechanics moreso than for research scientists, especially since sentient devices (the three original huge biomonsters) have been around since before the night of fire.  I think if you're going to stick it on any skill it ought to be general repair.

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

Coolness Skills: Skills taken by performers, celebrities, and other such ne'er-do-wells.
* Performance
o Combat Song (Talent): Use Performance in combat to inspire allies.

Arrrgh... do we have to have D&D bards?  Music is used to inspire, inflame, arouse or otherwise emotionally-manipulate people... provided they're listening.  I don't see a role for this as-is in combat, although if you ever have anything psychic around you may consider Warhammer 40k noise marines for an idea.

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

Thief Skills: Sneaky, underhanded skills for Criminal characters.
* Stealth: Very useful for avoiding detection while robbing a place, and avoiding police patrols afterwards.
o Pick Pockets (Talent): This one wasn't getting much love as a skill, but might make a decent talent.

The reason it wasn't getting much love was because it didn't have a full range of tricks and it had an effect that cost you more that it ever won you no matter what you did with it.  That said this is a good skill to graft pickpocketing to.

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

*Electronic Warfare: Allows the use of ECM defenses in a mecha. and helps to avoid mecha status effects. The causing of status effects will no longer be determined by this skill, but instead by the DC of the weapon used.

Uh... hmm... I know that Electronic Warfare provides an extra partial-dodge IF you have an ECM unit and that made this skill more powerful than a number of the other mecha warfare helper-skills but I don't see keeping a weakened version of this when you've already fused artillery+gunnery and fighting+weapons.  Perhaps it's best to just get rid of it unless you implement multiple-crewmember mecha with a position for an EW chair and have recovery from and resistance to status effects aided by repair since that's what's probably happening on a successful roll (since the pilot is busy with everything else they're doing anyway).  Only problem there is that repair becomes more powerful.  Perhaps not fusing mecha and general repair is the answer to that....

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

Questionable Skills: There are some skills I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I could leave them as skills, or change them to talents.
* Biotechnology: I'm not sure about this one; it could be added as a talent for Repair or Medicine instead. Still, I think this could be an interesting skill in its own right, if its role were expanded.
* Cybertech: Instead of making this a skill, I was thinking it could just be a talent. Everyone would have a natural cybertech tolerance based on their Ego stat; you can install this much cyberware and never worry about dysfunctions.

I do think you should make Biotechnology as useful as robotics since biomonsters huge and small are part of the continuity; letting players build hunter-X and gremlin biocritters would be cool.
As for cybertech, the content and rules-wraper of the cybernetics system needs to be redone from scratch, if I had a spare I'd send you a copy of my Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook but you're not getting my last one.  If you're interested I could try to summarise later but for now I go to sleep.

Posted by Joseph Hewitt on the website:

Changing the Rules

You know, the discussion we've been having lately on the forum has got me to thinking about the character generation/advancement rules. I'm going to lay out some radical new ideas I've had which might make things a whole lot better... or they might not. At the moment I'm not seriously planning to do any of this, but it's something to think about.

Before I start on that, though, here are some of the goals I have for character creation.

    * It should be possible to complete the game with a variety of different character types. Not all winning characters should be identical.
    * Outside of a basic competency at mecha piloting, no skill or talent in the game should be mandatory.
    * Different types of characters should lead to different strategies and result in different playing experiences.
    * There should be challenges and rewards for all specialties.
    * Nobody can do everything.

What is a skill? A skill is something that a character has trained to do better than natural ability alone would predict. If a character knows a skill, this should be part of their character concept. Consequently, skills should be things that integrate nicely with character concepts.

What is a talent? A talent is something that a character does better (or differently) than their equally skilled peers. It's a further level of specialization above and beyond a skill.

At the moment, I suspect that there are too many skills in GearHead. Many of them skills aren't particularly exciting. Almost all of the skills are based on a mechanic rather than a concept. There are so many skills that adding content specific to each one is going to be a hassle. Here are some changes that could be made:

    * Reduce the total number of skills. Some skills will be merged, others will be converted to talents, and a few will disappear entirely.
    * Skills should be based on concepts, not on mechanics. Individual skills should be fairly powerful.
    * Increase the effect of stats on the skill score formula, so stat selection and the Jack of All Trades talent will become more meaningful.
    * Delink stat increases from skills. You can increase any stat you have the experience for; the cost to increase a stat is determined by both how many times that stat has been raised and how many total stat points have been raised.
    * Delink skills from stats. Most skills will still mostly use a single stat, but certain skills may use different stats in different circumstances. See the skill list below for details.
    * Because there will be fewer skills total, there will also be fewer skill slots. The basic combat skills may be exempt from the slot limitation.
    * HP, MP, and SP will increase automatically based on experience point total. Certain skills may bestow an additional bonus.

Now, on to the slashed skill list. I've arranged these skills into groups; note that these groups don't have any game effect, they're just helping me to conceptualize how things should work.

Basic Combat Skills: These will presumably be the most used skills in the game. A character with competency in the mecha skills should be able to complete all mandatory combat in the game; some optional content may require a more combat-focused character.

    * Mecha Gunnery: This skill merges Mecha Gunnery and Mecha Artillery into one. Different weapons will use different stats for their attack rolls: small guns will still use Reflexes, and big guns/missiles will still use Perception.
    * Mecha Fighting: This skill merges Mecha Weapons and Mecha Fighting. It handles all sorts of close combat attacks and shield blocks.
    * Mecha Piloting
    * Small Arms: Now covers Heavy Weapons as well. As above, different weapons can use different stats.
    * Close Combat: Merges Armed Combat and Martial Arts. As with the missile weapon skills, different weapons can use different stats. Hammers and maces might use Body to attack, while whips might use Speed.
          o Kung Fu (Talent): Activates the funky martial arts.
    * Dodge
          o Acrobatics (Talent) Allows an extra Dodge roll if light armor worn.

Interpersonal Skills: These skills are used when speaking with NPCs. Nearly every character should have at least one item from this list.

    * Conversation: The art of persuasion.
          o Flirtation (Talent): Gives a +5 Conversation bonus if the NPC finds you sexy.
    * Shopping: The ability to bargain and haggle. Useful not just in stores, but also when making bribes or negotiating.
    * Intimidation: The ability to make an NPC feel very, very afraid.

Advanced Combat Skills: Most characters should be able to get by on the basic skills alone, but if you plan to create a combat monster you'll want some of these. These skills exist to differentiate the MILIT and ADVEN characters from the rock stars who also happen to pilot a mecha.

    * Initiative: Increases your number of attacks per round.
    * Spot Weakness: Increases your chance of scoring a critical hit when using a single-shot weapon.
    * Electronic Warfare: Allows the use of ECM defenses in a mecha. and helps to avoid mecha status effects. The causing of status effects will no longer be determined by this skill, but instead by the DC of the weapon used.
    * Toughness: Increases the PC's HP total, and helps to resist personal status effects. This skill combines Resistance and Vitality. As mentioned above, though, HP will increase on its own as experience is gained- this skill merely provides a bonus on top of that.

Craft Skills: The kind of things Red Green would know if he had a giant robot. These skills deal with the repair, maintenance, and modification of equipment.

    * Repair: Combines Mecha Repair and General Repair. This skill would still allow a recovery roll for friendly mecha, but would not increase the amount of salvage awarded unless the following talent were taken.
          o Tech Vulture (Talent): Allows a repair roll against downed enemies when salvage is being collected. If the entire mecha can't be recovered, attempts to hack off a limb.
    * Mecha Engineering

Medical Skills: Skills known by doctors and nurses.

    * Medicine: Merges Medicine and First Aid. To prevent this skill from being mandatory, a new lancemate recovery item should be added- expensive, probably less reliable than a real medic, but there anyhow. Alternatively, lancemates could be revived at the cost of "karma".

Scientist Skills: Skills known by scientists.

    * Science: Knowledge of sciency stuff.
          o Robotics (Talent): Seriously, is there any roboticist in the source material who is not also a scientist?

Outdoorsy Skills: The kind of things Aragorn would know if he had a giant robot. These skills are useful to explorers and scouts.

    * Awareness: The ability to find secret passages and spot enemies at a distance.
    * Survival: Knowledge about navigation, wildlife, and how to make do without modern technology.
          o Dominate Animal (Talent)

Thief Skills: Sneaky, underhanded skills for Criminal characters.

    * Stealth: Very useful for avoiding detection while robbing a place, and avoiding police patrols afterwards.
          o Pick Pockets (Talent): This one wasn't getting much love as a skill, but might make a decent talent.
    * Code Breaking: Useful for thieves who want to steal items from public buildings or open doors without being detected. Everyone else usually just blows up locked doors.

Religious Skills: This is going to be a short list.

    * Mysticism: This skill's main purpose should be to open up special quest paths. It probably needs a new talent to sex it up a bit.

Coolness Skills: Skills taken by performers, celebrities, and other such ne'er-do-wells.

    * Performance
          o Combat Song (Talent): Use Performance in combat to inspire allies.
    * Taunt

Detective Skills: This is another very short list.

    * Insight

Questionable Skills: There are some skills I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I could leave them as skills, or change them to talents.

    * Biotechnology: I'm not sure about this one; it could be added as a talent for Repair or Medicine instead. Still, I think this could be an interesting skill in its own right, if its role were expanded.
    * Cybertech: Instead of making this a skill, I was thinking it could just be a talent. Everyone would have a natural cybertech tolerance based on their Ego stat; you can install this much cyberware and never worry about dysfunctions.

Deleted Skills: Some skills would simply be removed. Here they are.

    * Athletics, Concentration: Boring. To compensate for their loss, MP and SP will increase naturally with experience gain.
    * Weight Lifting: This one doesn't need to be boring- I could easily see a weight lifting competition quest. However, this skill is almost mandatory for characters without Acrobatics and I don't particularly like the mechanics. In its place the basic encumberance limit will be raised.
    * Leadership: It doesn't have much use at the moment, and I don't like the current mechanics.

There would be 25 to 27 skills in this new system. An average character would likely need 6 combat skills, one interpersonal skill, two concept skills and one free choice- 10 skill slots.

What do you think?

Edit [JH] - Changed the title from alias's "Rewriting most of Game System Content" back to the original as posted on the blog, so as to let people know that it's an extension of that discussion.

Sorry, but I'm gonna have to go with TL;DR here for the moment.  I am very tired though after working too many of the last 72 hours right now; I promise I'll give it another go when I've woken up.

....Dang, so I can't deploy a half-dozen robot pilots of my construction?  I need to rethink this--leadership seems relatively useless now if that's all it does.

That's one for free, leadership still works doesn't it?  I haven't gotten that far.

If you've got one or two, that could be a problem.  If you've got five, they can help each other, no?

Those lists are alphabetical, although if we actually get to the relative level of included content of GH1 insight ought to be at least as lucrative and helpful as code breaking.
If you read the comment you'd see that he says you're not supposed to get over 30 skillslots, not that you could very easily anyway.  The idea is that you make your minions take the repair skills since they've got extra room since they don't need social ones if you've got them.
And let's see what our new formula is....
My new battle comedian with a starting knowledge of 15 gets 23 slots at first.  Took stunt driving so he's gonna have a fun time in the arena first before I send him off to renown-fudging territory.
Uh, a character with 33 knowledge and savant gets gets 34 slots.  At first glance it looks like he put a hard-cap on knowledge skillslots at 29, and even if he didn't the cost of trying to raise knowledge from 15 to 33 (essentially eleventy-billion XP) is enough that you'll never achieve it for a very long time without the help of cyberware or something.  I know there's no content for it yet but I like having character goals and personality....
Y'know what I really want now?  Cyberware that explicitly gives me extra skillslots.  If you could load enough it'd be worth the extropian talent and eleventy-billion XP dropped straight on cybertech.

Ah, just Sourceforge being Sourceforge.  It's been years since I did any dev using it.  These should be functional links--I've tested one of them.  Darn linebreak issues....  These need the space taken out if you cut and paste instead of follow the link.

http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhea     d2/gh2-0540-sdl-win.zip
http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhea     d2/gh2-0540-ascii-win.zip
http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhea     d2/gh2-0540-source.zip
http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhea     d2/gh2-0540-image.zip

Well, after a skillslot nerf my old battle-comedian is no longer looking like such a great character to keep up with, he still needs more skillslots and he's way overspent.  I don't even want to open his stats up to see how badly.
So now it's time to pick what to abandon in my quest for most powerfulest battle-comedian evar--my initial goal since that's a good starting goal for trying to finish a game that isn't balanced yet.

Things he needs:

Social Skills
*Conversation
*Intimidation (because mecha salvage is nicer when it's not shot up)
*Leadership
*Performance (don't want this anymore but comes with)
*Shopping
*Taunt (comes with)

Mecha Driving Skills
*Electronic Warfare
*Initiative
*Mecha Artillery
*Mecha Fighting
*Mecha Gunnery
*Mecha Piloting
*Mecha Repair
*(I'll do without Weapons)
*Spot Weakness

Combat Skills
*Armed Combat
*Awareness
*Dodge
*Heavy Weapons
*Resistance (comes with and useful)
*Stealth

Not Fail At Life Skills
*Athletics
*Concentration
*Weight Lifting

Cool Stuff
*Code Breaking
*Insight
*Mecha Engineering
*Robotics
*Science

If Only Skillslots Were Free
*Acrobatics?
*Biotech
*Cybertech
*Dominate Animal
*First Aid
*Flirtation
*General Repair
*Martial Arts
*Medicine
*Mysticism
*Small Arms
*Survival
*Vitality?

UGH!
*Pick Pockets

Any suggestions on which to shift lists?

When I tried to download both SDL and ASCII versions just now they failed to do so, giving a possibly incorrect download path.  Here's the destinations I was sent to--perhaps there was an error in the URLs?

http://.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhead2/g h2-0540-sdl-win.zip
http://.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhead2/g h2-0540-ascii-win.zip
http://.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhead2/g h2-0540-source.zip
http://.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gearhead2/g h2-0540-image.zip

From website:

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

I've just uploaded GH2 v0.540 to SourceForge. This one continues with the deep adjustments to the rules of the game... Click below the fold to see which of your favorite god-skills have been nerfed.

    * Stealth-in-plain-sight now more difficult: It's now only possible if you're in the rear 180 degree arc, and there's a -5 penalty to the roll.
    * Altered the Performance mechanics: In a nutshell, I removed the massive experience gains so Performance is now a way to turn experience into mostly risk-free income. It still needs to be tweaked, though.
    * Conversation less effective as verbal attack tactic: Intimidation works much better.
    * Martial Arts will not use MP
    * Animals do not use funky martial arts
    * Restored Martial Arts damage bonus
    * Number of skill slots less dependant upon Knowledge: Most characters should now get around 20 to 25 skill slots. Getting more than 30 slots will be almost (but not quite) impossible.
    * Name generator should not repeat so often
    * No-one should taunt after quitting the game
    * GJoinLance will move target if not in play: So, if you call your friend in another building and they offer to become your partner, weirdness will not ensue.
    * No XP gained from attacking scenery
    * Verbal attack won't halt movement
    * Lancemates won't rapidly level skills they don't know
    * Added \HINT message formatting command
    * Tools may be used as robot parts
    * Last part added to robot will be indicated
This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:40 am and is filed under news.

Yeah, that is another perverse element of the game... death bothers you less than disability, which at least as far as meat malfunctions goes shouldn't be; the spinners have meat growing technologies down straight enough that you eat test-tube meat without comment.  Cloned parts should be the norm and get used regularly to repair long term trauma, minus some nano-organizational or genetic manipulation modification if necessary to correct inherent design problems and duplicate legacy advantages (rebuild your muscle memory).  Should we start a thread listing perverse elements of the game?
As far as the points regarding the game system handling of mecha design, maintenance and salvage goes, I'm waiting on weighing in further on the word of J. on what his design and theme intent is with regards to handling of mecha production, transport, modification, maintenance and salvaging is.  This discussion has proceeded well-past the envelope of what our currently-supplied level of content bible provides for.
What we do have established is that mecha are the world's equivalent of cars, and for some strange reason the insides of spinners are so large that you have a decent reason to use mecha inside them.  Without a greater understanding of what a standard wage and standard living expenses are we can't really conceptualize relative prices anyhow.  Keep in mind that today in early 21st century Earth economics in developed economies that people's time costs a lot more than automation and materials for most tasks relatively speaking, and it would be even more so in an environment with much greater overall technology to cherry-pick in designing solutions.

Okay, okay... please forgive me for being inspired to make a StarWars reference.
I'm actually surprised to read that it doesn't need a makefile, and a bit confused that he'd tell you to run to CVS for the latest version of JEDI-SDL instead of a named stable version.
I've been tossing the precompiled win-ascii and -SDL versions on an emulator myself as part of the maturing process of my custom sandbox implementations.  Getting it to run hitch-free and also making it work with memory debuggers/adjusters all inside the emulation sandbox at a good speed on crap hardware is a slightly different challenge than trying to make FPSes behave, no?

Well, if you want deeper answers you must seek the source.  To do this you must apprentice under a Pascal tutorial, find yourself a decent IDE and learn the dark and sinster art of makefiles, libraries and compiling.
For once you've got those answers; if you write up what the heck they are I'll editbash that into a professional looking document for you.  We don't want to ask JH to do everything because his task queue is already overflowing and we want to take away as many distractions as possible between him and making the content (and content creation tools) we all crave so addictedly.  

Hack the source Cruc, hack the source!

Crucifix: Regarding tools they seem to be a container item that you stick another thing in which you wear/wield; investigate the wrench coding for an example.  The functional tools in the game all seem to be wieldable items so perhaps there's some limit somewhere in the code that prevents more creative tool design.
In GH1 the design file documentation page listed how most items have very specific limits on what they can be put into or have put into them, and where GH2 hasn't modified them it seems to still follow the GH1 rules.  The relevant wiki page is here.
Warning, it is a big document.
http://gearheadrpg.com/wiki/index.php?title=Guides :Design_file_editing_%28GH1%29