Skill-Point Deficiencies

I'm focusing on cyberpunk here, because I'd done this math before and remember how wide the gap was. I don't mean any offense against Cyberpunk, though, as just about every game system has similar issues. The point I'm trying to make is, there's a big disconnect between:

1. the way skill-systems are traditionally written in most RPGs
2. the character concepts considered acceptable for those games
3. the skill points most games give starting characters

Case in point: Cyberpunk 2020's typical police officer. In order to just carry out the day to day requirements of his job, he would need all the skills below:

Authority: 6 Personal Grooming: 1 Endurance: 1 Strength Feat: 2 Interrogation: 3 Intimidate: 3 Streetwise: 2 Human Perception: 2 Leadership: 2 Social: 1 Awareness/Notice: 4 Education & General Knowledge: 3 Expert (Police Procedures): 3 Hide: 3 Library Search: 2 Mathematics: 3 Shadow/Track: 2 System Knowledge: 2 Athletics: 3 Brawling: 2 Dodge & Escape: 2 Driving: 3 Handgun: 5 Melee: 2 Stealth: 2 Basic Tech: 1 First Aid: 2

To get those numbers, I just went through the skill descriptions on pages 36-43 of Cyberpunk 2020. If the skill specified a level a beat cop would have, I chose that. If it mentioned Detectives, but not beat cops, I dropped it by two points. If it said a human average, or high school equivalent, I went with that. So the above is really the MINIMUM a Cyberpunk Cop could get away with having without being a total failure at his job or flunking out of school. It's 67 points of skills. There were a few grey areas, so you may be able to skimp on something and argue it down to 60-65 points.

Player characters in Cyberpunk start with 40 to 60 skill points, but to get the upper number you need human maximum in Intelligence and Reflexes. A starting character can be a beat cop, as it's one of the character roles (aka: classes) you can choose. Yet a starting PC would find it almost impossible to have the minimal skills a beat cop needs to graduate high school and do his job. In order to have a shot at it, your beat cop would need the brain of Einstein and the Reflexes of Bruce Lee. Even so, he'd be a terrible generalist. His highest Attribute + Skill would total at 16, giving him a roll of 17-26 on Authority. In other areas he'd be far weaker, in some cases rolling less than 10, and never ever scoring above a 23 on anything but Authority and Handguns. Looking at the difficulty chart, we see that an "average" task is difficulty 15, and the next difficulty above that is 20.

As James pointed out in the comments to another post here, this disconnect results in "backfilling" - the process where a player spends their first several XP awards filling in skills and abilities their character should have already had. Man that bugs me - it bugs me enough I felt compelled to type this rant.

As I said, it's not really fair for me to pick on CP2020. That game was written 17 years ago, and gaming has come a long way since then. These days, you could reasonably rely on "character templates" or more innovative character creation systems to ensure starting characters have all the skills they reasonably should have. Despite advances in system, templating, and terminology, it seems that game-designers tend to make the same mistakes again and again.