First up: read the sidebar on page 136. It will probably be useful to you.
Second up: lockpicking is not like breaking. Nothing ends up broken. This is kind of an important difference.
Third up: lockpicking is kind of a weird edge skill that most people will have never attempted in their lives. So it makes sense for it, like surgery, to be gated behind a stunt.
Fourth up: A high Scholarship rating is not what you use to represent skill at Greek History. That's what stunts are for. A high Scholarship skill means that you are highly intelligent and broadly educated/well-read. As a guy with decent Scholarship in real life, I can tell you that this is not unrealistic.
Which is what I was trying to get at earlier. Scholarship 5 includes everything that being intelligent and broadly educated would make you good at and nothing else. By the same token, Investigation covers everything that being perceptive and analytical would make you good at and nothing else. Finding food outdoors and preparing it so that you can live off of it and finding shelter and so on requires more than being perceptive and analytical.
Fifth up: posts like Haru's are what I was trying to head off with my reply to Mr. Death. Most of the successful DFRPG games I've seen do not fit the mold (s)he speaks of. (I'm thinking of Night Fears, Evil Acts, Forced To Fight, and Enduring The Apocalypse here.) And most of the failed games I've seen do fit that mold. (I'm not saying which, sorry.)
DFRPG is a good system to play mortal gangsters with. It's also a good system for a dungeon crawl, and it can handle a game of high-stakes corporate politics too.
Basically, I think that DFRPG is a pretty general system. It can cover almost anything with only a few hacks. So I don't understand or like the whole idea that it's a game about being Harry Dresden.
Though I suppose I could be misunderstanding what Haru means here.
First: I am well aware of the sidebar. I think it's a useful middle ground between separate skills and a kitchen sink skill, but I prefer more well defined skills without having to work through "okay, so what is a reasonable specialty subject? Is history too broad? How about language? Should language be limited to just the rules of grammar and diction, or does it also include literature?" etc. I'm aware that most players will never deal with that question. But *I* do. Besides that, I don't find that marking specialties is a particularly accurate way of dealing with the situation. I, for example, have fairly low Scholarship, but that doesn't mean that I only have one or two areas of knowledge. That just means that I'm not deeply entrenched in books. However, I don't think Butters has five specialties worth of knowledge, since he's mostly been shown to be a medical whiz (reflected by his stunts) and competent with computers and nerd cred. Should his Scholarship be bumped down to give him less specialties? I don't think so. YMMV.
Second: "Breaking" doesn't necessarily mean "taken apart beyond repair". Might does that. Craftsmanship's breaking trapping I've always seen as "disassembling", which allows it to be put back together again. In that respect, I think lockpicking is absolutely a subtrapping of breaking, because it's using tools to force a lock to disengage without breaking it completely.
Thirdly: Fair point on a stunt, though if we maintain the argument on specialties, Craftsmanship is definitely up for inclusion, and locksmith is a definite valid category, which I imagine would include knowledge of the tools to open a lock on demand.
Fourthly: I stepped away from GURPS and D&D because I don't like the "broadly intelligent" application of a knowledge skill or stat. I believe that people who focus on learning for the sake of knowledge will probably be broadly knowledgeable, but that's not the same thing as assuming that anyone who is knowledgeable is broadly so. Again, this is an issue of balance for me. I don't think stunts are the answer to representing a focus in this matter when a variety of skills does the same thing... without costing precious Fate Points.
Fourthly section b: I agree. It requires knowledge of the plants and fungi that are safe to eat, and knowledge on the habitats and patterns of other critters so you don't squat in someone else's home. Which is why I suggested Investigation limited by Scholarship (or, in my skill list, Medicine, which covers biology and poisons).
Fifthly: I agree. I see DFRPG as a mode of Fate, which is my system of choice. I'm currently using it to run swords and sorcery. I can see the system being well up to the challenge of running a more social-oriented game, with no physical combat whatsoever. In fact, I generally think that's Fate's greatest strength, since physical combat can easily be covered by three skills or less. Next to magic, social combat tends to be where most of its depth is invested.
More than anything I would argue that this skill is definitely setting appropriate...
Whether or not it's mechanically necessary is going to vary from group to group, but I don't see any negative consequences to including it and because of that I don't see any reason to dissuade others from using it if they feel so compelled.
Thank you. This is what I was getting at with my OP. In general, we seem to be on the same page, so I won't bother repeating your arguments.
This may be crazy talk, but I'm thinking about an all-purpose Profession skill. Some thoughts:
Each rank buys you a Skill Trapping from another skill, or lets you make up a new trapping with GM oversight. . All the bought Trappings use the final Skill Rank to resolve. Maybe open to abuse.
Or maybe each Profession (whatever) skill you take allows you to borrow 2-4 Skill Trappings from other skills, with GM oversight (maybe just from the Scholarship/Crafting/Performance skills). Probably not outright combat skills.
Or maybe the skill's purpose is that it simply allows Declarations and Maneuvers within the skill's idiom.
I think Fred's blog has some musings about this, or something very similar. Don't feel like dredging through it right now, but it'd be worth a look. I'm not generally in favor of it myself, simply due to a general dislike of trapping-per-skill point. All of your average skills are going to be sorely lacking, and widely applicable skills are not the same thing as strongly potent skills. :/