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Revision as of 03:52, 13 March 2010
Skills are the very bread and butter of doing something in role-playing. Skills represent your character’s knowledge, strengths, and specialties in comparison to everyone else. While a person may be able to perform a skill, even be decently good at it, a character with ranks in a skill is exceptionally and heroically good at it.
The Skill Check
A skill check is equally comprised of luck, ones innate ability, and relevant experience. In game terms, is comprised of the following:
A die roll
- + ranks in the skill
- + points in the relevant ability
- + relevant bonuses from trumps, spells, items, etc.
The relevant ability is what a character might use in conjunction with the skill – Endurance with Swim for example. It's usually constant, but sometimes your GM might have you use a different ability. For example, if you're trying to stay afloat in strong current, not just swim a long distance, the GM might tell you to use Muscle instead.
The sum of the die roll, skill points, ability points, and any applicable bonuses is your total skill check.
Pass or Fail
To pass a skill check, you want the total number to meet or exceed a Difficulty Level determined by your GM. If your total is less than the Difficulty Level your character fails for that attempt at the task. Some tasks cannot be retried.
Teamwork
Skills marked with an asterisk (*) can have assistance added to them when a check is made. Decide on one ally to make the actual check. Each ally assisting in the activity can add their own ranks in the skill to the result (as well as any supernatural bonuses, like from spells or trumps). The GM should decide if there is a limit to the number of people who can assist a given task.
Skill Ranks
Like all things, skills are bought with Expoints. You can buy 1 skill rank for 2 Expoints. Magic school ranks cost 3 Expoints for every 1 rank. You can only have a maximum of 10 ranks in any skill without the purchase of the Legendary Skill trump (see the Trumps and Faults chapter for more information about this trump).
Skills represent knowledge or practical experience your character has. He or she didn’t just wake up the day after slaying a giant with inexplicable knowledge of opening locks. Like all upgrades to your character, the GM should have final approval on what your character learns and how he or she learns it. Without an available book, scroll, mentor, or loads of trial and error, your character has a slim chance of learning a skill.
There are two kinds of skills: standard skills, the ones listed in the table to the left, and special skills: weapon skills and magic skills.
Time
Some skill checks are instantaneous. That is, used during combat, they cost no Action Points (Chapter 9 gives a brief overview of how to use AP in combat). The skills that take no time to perform include Spot, Listen, Discern (sometimes), Focus, Lore, Occupation (for occupational knowledge only), and Estimate. Some skills are used as part of another action in combat. Some skills have AP costs inherently. A few can take days or weeks.
Take 5
On skill checks that carry no penalties for failure (see the Retries portion of the skill description) and your character is in no immediate danger, you can choose to take 5 instead of rolling. This is useful if a low roll might be too small, or a high score might not benefit anything, but the middle would probably work.
Take the Best
On skill checks that carry no penalties for failure and your character is in no immediate danger, you can choose to take 10 as if you had rolled it. (This does not count as a critical). As opposed to “Taking 5”, taking the best requires far more time. In game terms, your character keeps trying until the check is done perfectly. Usually, this means taking the time it might normally take for one attempt and multiplying by 10 or more.
Difficulty Levels
A Difficulty Level (DL) is the minimum target for success when making skill checks. The lower the number, the easier it is to complete the task. Many skills have some example DLs listed, but the GM should ultimately decide this number. As a quick tip, increase the DL by 5 for each major obstacle in the way of completing the task. Minor obstacles should increase it by 1 or 2. Effects that are helpful should similarly reduce it by the same amounts. The following table gives some examples of DLs and who might be able to meet them.
| DL | Who could do it? |
|---|---|
| 0 | Anyone |
| 5 | Even the village idiot |
| 10 | Your average person |
| 15 | Only people with related experience |
| 20 | Experts |
| 25 | Very lucky experts |
| 30 | One with maximum human potential |
| 35 | Someone with powers beyond human |
| 40 | A legendary hero (or villain) |
Stupidly Impossible Tasks
Sometimes you might want to do something that absolutely defies all rhyme, reason, or logical sense. But even physics and logic are just guidelines in a fantasy game. DLs of ridiculous tasks should be 40 or higher and made by your GM. You might decide you want to try Climbing up a solid marble wall. Your GM laughs audibly and might say the DL for such a mockery of physics is 80. This chapter won’t list any DLs over 40. Since you can probably come up with far more ludicrous tasks than we can, we’ll leave it up to your GM to figure out their DLs.
Skills
Muscle
Agility
Endurance
Intellect
Insight
Cunning
Personality
Presence
Persuasion
Special Skills
In addition to the skills listed above, there are two special types of skill ranks: Weapon Skills and Magic School Skills.
Weapon
Ranks in a weapon skill represent intense training your character has devoted to a particular type of weapon, for example, longsword, whip, dagger, or tuba. It is important to note that a character does not need to have ranks in a weapon to use it in combat, nor does the character take minuses for trying to use an unfamiliar weapon. If a character is unarmed and in danger, it makes perfect sense to pick up and wield whatever is nearby that could be considered painful to an attacker. Obviously, Attack Rolls with a weapon in which the character has no ranks will be fairly low.
A character's ranks in the weapon figure into combat maneuvers, such as attacking, parrying, disarming, and the like.
Weapon skills are used alongside Cunning in an Attack Roll.
 |
+ | Cunning | + | Weapon Skill | + | Muscle | + | Weapon Damage |
A parry for an attack would be:
|
+ | Cunning | + | Weapon Skill | + | Armor | + | Endurance |
Magic School
You can buy ranks in any of the magic schools with the ownership of the Spellcasting special power. Magic School ranks cost 3 Expoints instead of the usual 2. See the magic chapter for a list of schools. Your number of ranks in magic schools affects the length of time a spell lasts, or how big an area it can cover. You can add your magic school rank to both Spell Attack and Spell Defense rolls. For instance, if you have 5 ranks in the Fire School, the following is a Spell Attack roll for a Fireball.
|
+ | Agility | + | 5 (School) | + | Fire Damage |
Against a fire spell, this mage can add the school rank to his Spell Defense roll.
|
+ | Agility | + | Dodge | + | 5 (School) | + | Endurance |
See the magic chapter for more details on Spell Attack and Spell Defense.
