Book:Skills
Skills are the very bread and butter of doing something in roleplaying. Skills represent your character's knowledge, expertise, and specialties in comparison to everyone else. While any given 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.
Skill Checks
Whenever a challenge comes along that requires a roll from a player that involves a skill, the GM will announce that all the players that are part of that action need to make rolls.
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 – Muscle with Swim for example. A skill is usually associated with a single ability, but sometimes your GM might have you use a different one. 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.
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.
If the roll fails—that is, your total roll including the number rolled on the dice, ability, and skill bonuses is less than the Difficulty Level—the character fails for that attempt at the task. Some tasks cannot be retried.
Example: Jay wants his character Riordan to jump a chasm. The GM decides since it’s a really big, wide chasm the difficulty is rather high, setting the DL at 27. So even if Riordan had the maximum allowed stats in both his Athletics skill and Muscle ability, Jay still has to roll a 7 on his roll, which is pretty crazy. So Jay rolls his dice and the score comes up as 5. Riordan’s Athletics skill is 8 and his Muscle is 8, so the final result is 21, not nearly enough to jump the chasm and Riordan likely falls to an untimely, sticky death. Cue the GM’s maniacal laughter.
