Skills
Skills are the primary mechanical representation of specific character capabilities. In a sense, almost every element of the game can be expressed either as a Skill-based operation or by way of analogy to such things. The most common of these mechanics are skill checks.
A skill is essentially a score on your character sheet that expresses your degree of competency at a certain subset of knowledge or expertise; the higher the number, the better at that capability you are.
Using Skills
A skill is chiefly used through the use of a skill check, or sometimes a skill contest. These operations involve rolling d% dice to determine whether you have succeeded or failed at using a skill and also govern opportunities for advancing or improving your score in a skill.
These are not the only ways skills can be used. Your setting may have adopted extra modules of rules which define, essentially, special contests for handling specific situations. Also, Combat, while essentially a Skill Contest, has its own special rules.
Skill Checks
The process for making a skill check is simple on its surface. Simply roll d% and compare the result to your score. Counting double-0s as a score of 100, if the result of your roll is less than your score at the relevant skill, you may consider this a success.
The Facilitator and the player making the check should work together to determine which skill is relevant for a check in any situation where it seems unclear or arguable. For example, depending on the skills available in your setting, there may be more than one skill that touches on the same subject. Computer Use could potentially substitute for "Electrical Engineering" in a situation where the electronic being examined is itself a computer, for example. This allows some flexibility in situations where there may be close-equivalents between skills for a given scenario. The best rule here is to say that "when in doubt, go with what makes sense". Just because a scenario writer didn't predict the argument that mechanical engineering could be useful when attempting to do auto repair doesn't mean the two skills don't arguably overlap to some degree on the practical end.
Boon and Bane
Some traits, abilities, or situations will grant "boon" or "bane", sometimes as a quantity, to a skill check. In short, the quantity is a number of extra dice (if none stated, the quantity is 1) to roll during a skill check, representing the low (ones) digit of the resulting score. Boons and banes cancel out in the same way that adding positive and negative integers can cancel out.
Let's use the following rather complex example to handle that description:
Jane Whittaker is a Lagos outlaw in the Howl Basin setting. She's a Comer Lagos, meaning she has an automatic boon on a social skill. She's attempting to convince her husband, Jack, to take her side in a mining conflict. Since they have a very good relationship and Jack is used to taking his wife's advice, she has two additional boons on Diplomacy checks, according to the description for that skill as implemented in the Howl Basin setting. However, because the mining conflict is liable to become dangerous, and Jack values his skin, this also grants her a bane on the same check.
This can be expressed as "1 Boon (Comer Lagos) + 2 Boons (Excellent Relationship) + 1 Bane (Life-Threatening Request) = 2 Boons".
After rolling the resulting number of extra 10s dice in your skill check, apply the following rule:
- If the dice were boons, take the lowest result
- If the dice were banes, take the highest result
In this way, boons improve your odds of a lower result (making you more likely to succeed) and banes improve your odds of a higher result (making you more likely to fail).
Difficulty Modifiers
In addition to boons and banes, Facilitators, Setting Developers, and Adventure Developers have another tool in their toolbox for modifying the way that players interact with the world using their skills: Difficulty Modifier. In general, the difficulty modifier should be used when the target of the skill is an object or other inanimate difficulty, and boons/banes or skill contests should be used when the encounter is direct competition between two or more characters.
Difficulty modifiers act against the character's relevant skill score, raising or lowering it in a set manner for the purpose of that single check. Simply multiply their skill score by the factor listed below before making the roll.
| Modifier | Factor | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Extreme | 1/8 | Driving over the designed speed of a roadway in rainy weather at night near the maximum speed of the vehicle. |
| Very Hard | 1/4 | Branson put a quality lock on the door that Millie is attempting to break into instead of a bog-standard one. |
| Hard | 1/2 | Having almost, but not really exactly, the right tools to perform a crafting task. |
| Easy | 1.5 | Breaking the encryption of a coded message of which a large portion of the plaintext is already known. |
| Very Easy | 2 |
If something is so easy as to be considered trivial, don't require players to make a check to do it. Also avoid asking for skill checks when there are no stakes for failure. In a setting where driving is a relevant skill, running routine errands in your own personal automobile does not require a skill check. Avoiding a collision, on the other hand, very well should.
Criticality of Success and Failure
A result of 5 or fewer or 95 or greater implies what is known as critical threat on the skill check that results in it.
If the result is 5 or fewer (after accounting for boons and banes), this is automatically a success regardless of other modifiers on the check. A second check is then made, and if successful, this is a critical success. Whether by luck or by great familiarity with the skill in question, the player has had remarkable success with their behaviour.
If the result is 95 or greater (after accounting for boons and banes), this is automatically a failure result regardless of other modifiers on the check. After accounting for difficulty modifiers, 'if the character's score in the skill exceeds 70%, they may roll again. If this second roll is also a failure, they have now failed critically. In spite of their prowess, their actions have made the issue in question effectively unredeemable.
During the confirmation check for a critical result, do not apply the under-5-over-95 rule.
Some scenarios, or skills, may call out specific consequences for critical success or critical failure. In cases where these don't fit or aren't present, the Facilitator should come up with an engaging consequence to apply. Perhaps a necessary tool breaks on a critical failure, or critical success on a noteworthy task leads to a bonus for the character from their employer.
Skill Contests
When not otherwise avoidable, a Skill Contest can be used to resolve a conflict between two characters. While conceptually similar, this is difficult from the somewhat more structured combat ruleset.
It is up to the characters involved (through the facilitator) to decide which skills are relevant to the contest. In many cases, both characters will likely use the same skill to settle a skill contest; for example, two people engaged in a battle of wits over a game of chess might both be making opposing Chess skill-checks against each other. In other cases, it may not be appropriate to handle this way. Say an investigator is attempting to interrogate a suspect. In this case, the investigator might want to use a social skill like psychology while the suspect would probably be better off using a social skill like Bluff. Either option is okay, as long as the parties involved in the contest understand the logic of the comparison. For an example, using an Appraise skill check to undermine the effectiveness of a hacker's Computer Use skill check probably doesn't make sense except under especially contrived circumstances. Note that this can also be used with aptitude. A person attempting to hold a door against another who is attempting to force it are probably in a contest of Strength.
A skill contest is best of three, sudden death. Both parties to the contest produce three skill checks at normal difficulty (applying any relevant boons or banes) and keep a total of the number of successes they get; the individual with the most successes winning the contest. In a contest, a critical result counts for 2. In the event of a tie, each character makes one skill check at a time until a hand arises in which one character has succeeded and another has failed. The winner is the one who achieves the final success.
Skill Advancement
By Facilitator fiat, a character can earn an "advancement tick" against a specific skill. This is usually granted under one of the following conditions:
- At a critical success
- At the success against a Hard, Very Hard, or Extreme difficulty challenge
- At winning a Skill Contest
- For achieving a noteworthy or memorable success at a pivotal moment in the scenario.
At intermissions or other downtime (again at Facilitator discretion), characters with advancement ticks may do Skill Advancement. To do skill advancement:
- Erase one advancement tick from the relevant skill
- Roll a skill check against that skill
- If failure, increase your score in the skill by 1d10 (if score was under 50%) or 1d6.
- If successful, increase your score in the skill by 1.
- Note the advancement tick as a tick under Landmark Advancement.
- Continue until all ticks are "spent" in this way.
This process ensures that skills grow in a nuanced way based on their overall mastery.
Note that skills cannot raise to a score greater than 99 unless specifically called out in that skill's description.
Understanding a Skill Description
For ease of transition from setting to setting, Setting Developers are encouraged to build their skill descriptions to include the following basic elements.
Trained vs Untrained Usage
A skill description should include clearly whether that skill can be used trained or untrained. This is a distinction between the character's ability to take a specific action and the applicability of the skill. A skill is trained when a character has invested at least one skill point (during character creation or landmark advancement, or if otherwise awarded by the Facilitator) into that skill, or has caused that skill to grow above its base score through skill advancement.
If a skill can be used untrained, a character can always use that skill's base score in a situation when the check is called for that skill.
If a skill cannot be used untrained, a character must make an alternative check when attempting to do something that would require that check, usually by taking the aptitude check for the aptitude that forms the skill's base score, or by applying another skill that's relevant to the situation.
Successful use of an untrained skill or succeeding on an aptitude test in place of a trained skill is an automatic advancement tick for the relevant skill. This is to emulate the natural process of learning, which starts from relative ignorance and proceeds to mastery as far as a person is willing to chase it.
Skill Usages
Setting developers should include a list of example usages of the skill, above and beyond a dictionary definition of what the skill's name might mean. This is to help Players, Facilitators, and Scenario Writers determine the appropriate intended usages of a skill and to inspire players to make use of skills they themselves might otherwise not have much experience with in their day to day lives.
Base and Maximum Scores
All skills have a Base Score and some skills might have maximum scores.
A skill's Base Score is the starting score a character would have in that skill by some arbitrary point in their physiological and neurological development assuming they invested no effort in developing it. For most skills, this is usually expressed as a multiplier times an aptitude score. For example, the Library Use general-purpose skill might have a starting base value equal to 1.5 x Analysis, representing the fact that even without specific knowledge of how libraries work and what research methods provide the best results, fundamentally your ability to find information hinges on your powers of deduction and analysis.
A skill might also have a maximum score, usually 99. (This is because a roll of 100/double-zero is ALWAYS a failure). This is intended to represent that the basic aptitudes of a person have a limit no matter how hard you push them. It is generally assumed unless stated otherwise that 99 is the highest score possible in a skill unless otherwise stated (or it is explicitly stated that there is no limit).
Limitless skill growth should be restricted to skills where it is conceivable that you will never truly master them and that there is always meaningful improvement to be made. Chiefly, if used at all, it's recommended to only be used for magic or combat skills as a way to balance increasing scales of character power against one another.