Making Automatic Rolls for PCs Between Sessions

Player characters in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy games often have things to do in town between sessions.  Some of these things are interesting and require player decisions and should probably be played out.  Others are boring and don't really require decisions and might just be resolved by the GM between sessions, to save precious play time.  Where do you draw the line?

In DF Whiterock, I have a few house rules for this.

1. Within reason, any spellcaster who has a completely boring spell at 16+ and the Luck advantage can just automatically cast that spell between sessions.  This is the Continual Light rule.  In GURPS, Continual Light only lasts 2-12 days, not forever, so you pretty much want to recast all your Continual Lights before each delve so they don't expire in mid-dungeon.  Yawn.  Fine, they all succeeded.  Because if you rolled a 17, it's just 1 FP and you'd reroll.  And if you rolled an 18, you'd use your Luck to avoid the critical failure.  (Note: "within reason."  Of course this only applies if you're casting a reasonable number of spells.  If you're casting enough to light the whole town, that's boring.)

2. For spells and skills that are boring and obvious to use, but where failure matters and is not obvious, it's up to the player whether to have me automatically roll between sessions, or to have me roll for them during the session.  Luck will not be used, because you don't know you failed to use it.  Popular examples are Analyze Magic on every single magic item (Detecting the Magic is mostly easy in GURPS, for anyone with Magery), Connoisseur (Weapons) on every weapon found, and Merchant on every gem found.

3. If a spell is particularly risky to use, because the PC's spell skill is low enough that critical failure is likely, I'd rather wait until the session to use it.  If a player is going to accidentally summon a demon and be eaten by it, that should happen with everyone around and the player rather than the GM rolling dice.  "Your wizard died between sessions" is a sentence that should never be uttered.


What this means in practice:

1. Everyone has as many Continual Light items as they need.

2. Items that are easy to identify are mostly identified by the next session.

3. Items that are hard to identify (because they require a spell or skill that that PCs don't have, or don't have at a decent level, or because they require roleplaying or other interesting choices, like whether to hire an expert) stay unidentified until the next session, then the players sometimes remember to try to figure them out.