Skills Overview

Skills Overview

Player A can slip quietly into a room, press an ear to the door, and eavesdrop on the gang next door. But if Player B tries the same thing, his lack of skill will probably make a noise and draw the gang's attention. If a fight breaks out, though, he can simply pull out a pistol and take down his opponents. All of these actions depend on the characters' Skills.

Specifically, the Skills needed in the example above are Stealth (Sneaking), Investigation (Listening), and Firearms (Pistols).

Skills represent the many kinds of actions you have learned to do through your own study.

These abilities come from training, so the minimum is 0. Compared with a character's Attributes, Skills are more specialized and narrower, but they can make you a true expert. Often, an Attribute alone is not enough for a roll; you need the matching Skill.

Skill levels 1 to 5 are the mortal range, and 5 is an expert among mortals. Levels beyond 5 rely more on supernatural or extraordinary powers, and are not described further here.

Skill Categories

Like Attributes, Skills are divided into three groups: Physical, Mental, and Social.

Physical Skills: Athletics, Brawl, Drive, Firearms, Larceny, Stealth, Survival, Blade, Archery

Mental Skills: Academics, Computer, Crafts (has sub-skills), Investigation, Medicine, Occult, Science

Social Skills: Animal Ken, Empathy, Expression (has sub-skills), Intimidation, Socialize, Subterfuge

Because the rules have gone through several versions, a few Skills still appear under older names in the original Chinese rules and resources (older names for the Social Skills, Medicine, Animal Ken, and Intimidation). They mean the same Skills. This translation always uses the current names.

Skills at Level 0:

Physical Skills: Physical Skills are not purely technique. Many of them can be attempted on raw physical ability without any training. If a Physical Skill is 0, you can still attempt the roll, but you lose one success.

Mental Skills: Mental Skills are pure knowledge and technique. If a Mental Skill is 0, you cannot make the roll at all; it automatically fails.

Social Skills: Social Skills usually combine technique and knowledge. As with Physical Skills, if a Social Skill is 0 you can still attempt the roll, but you lose two successes. For some Skills, or even some uses of a Skill, the ST may rule that a roll at 0 is impossible and automatically fails, for example Expression - Piano.

Gaining Skill Levels

When creating a character, players will find that the Skills they can learn are limited, and so are their levels. Characters aren't as versatile as real people. However, the Skills on your character sheet don't truly represent everything the character can do.

A character may be familiar with things like cooking, climbing over walls, riding a bicycle, or driving a car. But being able to do these things doesn't mean the character actually has levels in Crafts - Cooking, Athletics (Cycling), Drive (Cars), or climbing. Those Skill levels represent professional-level mastery.

For example: entering a world cooking championship, a rock-climbing competition, the Tour de France, or drifting.

So how should things be handled without Skill levels?

First, not every action needs a Skill roll. Ordinary daily life and work are easy, so easy that no roll is needed: picking up a cup and drinking from it needs no roll at all.

In ordinary life, the DC of everyday actions is negligible. Something slightly difficult is at most DC 1, let alone anything higher. On ordinary days, you aren't fighting enemies to the death, you aren't soaring through the sky, and you have no strict time limits. That lowers the difficulty so much that you can succeed even without the matching Skill levels.

However, only Skills bought with experience are what a character can truly rely on to protect themselves and save others in a crisis.

A Skill's level represents how well the character has mastered it. Each of a character's Skills has a level from 0 to 15. When making a Skill roll, add the Skill level to the roll: each level means you roll one more die. So the higher the Skill level, the better the result. The level reflects how good and how well trained the character is in the Skill.

In general, a character with Skill 10 is more skilled and more professional in using it than a character with Skill 9.

So at certain levels, we reward the character with extra successes.

A Skill grants 1 extra success on its rolls at each of levels 5, 10, 11, 13, and 15, for a maximum of 5. In some special cases your Skill level may go beyond 15, but unless stated otherwise, you gain no more extra successes from Skill levels beyond 15.

Skill levels are raised by spending the XP you earn in play.

Skills can be raised to at most level 15. Raising a Skill by exchanging with the Overseer costs (current Skill level - 1) x 2 XP, at least 1. As a special case, raising a Skill from level 0 to level 1 costs 3 XP.

XP discounts: as Skill levels rise, players can pick up certain abilities and techniques on their own. When a Skill reaches levels 6, 9, 12, and 15, the player may each time choose one Feat whose prerequisites include that Skill, or one self-created ability based on that Skill. When learning that Feat or creating that ability, its XP cost is reduced by 12/28/44/66, to a minimum of 0.

A discount cannot be split across several different abilities (different levels of the same Feat or Title count as different abilities), but discounts can stack on one ability, and you don't have to learn the ability as soon as you choose it. So if ability A costs 70 XP, a character whose Skill reaches 12 can stack 84 XP of discounts on A and get it for free.

Only Skill levels gained through XP or permanent increases qualify for XP discounts; levels from copying, temporary increases, and the like do not.

An XP discount works only once for a given character. If a character is inherited, count the situation before the inheritance: if the discount was used, it still counts as used after inheritance. If characters merge, count the situation before the merge. Only a permanent merge can use XP discounts; whether the merged character can use a discount depends on the Skill levels it inherits from the original characters, and if the original character had already used it, it counts as used; otherwise it can be used. In any other situation, the ST decides based on the above.

Some abilities raise a Skill level automatically. If you lose such an ability (for example by resetting your points), count the effective XP you have invested in that Skill and buy it again; any leftover XP must also go into that Skill until the remaining XP is made up and it levels up as normal. (For example, a Skill at level 2 is raised automatically to 3, then the player spends 4 XP to raise it to 4. If the player then resets, the Skill goes back to 2; the 4 invested XP raise it to 3, with 2 XP left counted toward the Skill, and once 2 more XP are invested, it rises to 4.)

Specialties

When using Skills, we use certain Specialties.
Each Skill covers a huge category, and one Skill may represent different fields and specialities, so we divide them up.
In general, a Specialty in a Skill costs 1 XP. Once you have it, Skill rolls that fit the Specialty gain the matching specialty bonus, usually 1 DP.
Note that if you don't have a matching Specialty in the Skill, your Skill level counts as halved (rounded down) for that roll, though you still count as having the Skill.
This means that although you may be a runner, you aren't professional enough when it comes to the long jump.
And when a Skill reaches levels 3 and 5, you immediately gain one free Specialty in it, however it was raised. You can also hold off and take it later when you need it.
In the resources section, Specialties are usually written in parentheses after the Skill, such as Blade (Axes), Medicine (First Aid), or Subterfuge (Disguise).

Some Skills have special sub-categories, written as "Skill name - sub-skill".
In that case, the Skill's Specialties become sub-skills. When buying the Skill, you choose one of its Specialties and raise the level of the sub-skill that Specialty represents, and you gain the specialty bonus as normal.
For example, "Crafts - Tech Armor". It has its own level, so you might have both "Crafts - Tech Armor 3" and "Crafts - Tech Weapons 5", each used in its own situations. Each of these Skills must be raised separately with XP.

These Skills also earn the XP discounts above, but for each Skill only the first sub-skill to reach a given level earns it. That is, if "Crafts - Tech Armor" is the first of all Crafts sub-skills to reach level 6, it earns the discount. If "Crafts - Tech Weapons" later reaches level 6 too, it does not earn the discount again.
Sub-skills still count as Specialties: a "Crafts - Tech Weapons" roll gains the specialty bonus for having the "Tech Weapons" Specialty (really the sub-skill).
However, such Skills do not grant free Specialties when a sub-skill first reaches levels 3 and 5.

When an action fits several Specialties, the specialty bonuses do not stack.

Using Skills

Using a Skill requires a Skill roll. The bigger the result, the better the character does. The result must equal or exceed some value to succeed (usually the difficulty, DC for short, or an opponent's result). The harder the task, the higher the value needed.

Circumstances can affect Skill use. In general, with no outside interference, a character can concentrate and is unlikely to make simple mistakes. With plenty of time, a character can try again and again for the best result. With others helping, a character may accomplish what they couldn't alone.

In general, the roll for any action uses key Attribute + key Skill level (matching Specialty).

This represents the character's natural gifts (Attribute) + training (Skill level) + specialization in the field (Specialty) + luck (the dice).

Of course, other abilities or circumstances can also affect a character's Skill rolls.

When making a Skill roll, the player adds up the dice above, applies any other abilities or circumstances that affect the roll, arrives at the number of dice to roll, and rolls. Success is judged by comparing the successes against the difficulty (DC).

Besides difficulty, there is also the opposed roll: the character's result is compared with another character's (or several characters') result. Success is judged by the opposed roll rules.

Which key Skill and key Attribute an action uses is described in detail below.

Anything not described depends largely on the ST's common sense, and several Attribute + Skill combinations may fit; the ST picks the most fitting one. The rules give some common ways to roll.

Retrying

In general, if a Skill roll fails, the character can retry any number of times. However, the consequences of failure must be taken into account. Some tasks can only be attempted once; after a failure, that Skill won't work. For most Skills, succeeding again after an earlier success makes no difference.

Example: Player A attempts a climbing roll and fails right at the start. He falls, but the height is very low, so there are no consequences, and he can keep trying.

But when he fails at a height of 10 meters, he takes falling damage as the consequence of failure. He can still get up and try again.

Time and Skill Rolls

Skills take different amounts of time to use. Some take no time, some take 1 round, and some take several rounds or longer. Most Skill uses fall into standard actions, move actions, or full-round actions. These categories define how long the action takes in combat rounds (1 round = 6 seconds) and how it relates to movement (see the Scenes and Actions page).

Skill rolls that react instantly to an event, or that are part of an action, don't count as separate actions. Some Skill rolls include moving the character, such as jumping, climbing, or swimming.

When a character does something very long, we use an extended roll.

An extended roll is for something that takes a long time and can be pushed forward bit by bit.

Such as: making a suit of armor or a weapon, operating on a patient, writing a piece of code. All of these need extended rolls.

An extended roll has an interval and a total DC.

The interval is the unit of time for each roll. The character records the successes of each roll and adds them up; when the total reaches or exceeds the total DC, the roll succeeds. However, if during the process the number of 1s rolled exceeds the total DC, the extended roll automatically fails: all accumulated successes are lost, any resources invested are lost too, and there may even be extremely serious consequences.

Example: Player A operates on another player. This is an extended INT + Medicine (Surgery) roll with a DC of 10 and an interval of one hour. Player A's first roll gets 3 successes, the second 2, the third 2, and the fourth 5. The total now exceeds 10, so the operation succeeds after 4 hours.

If during that time Player A had rolled more than ten 1s, the operation would have failed, all the time spent would be lost, and the patient's injuries might get worse (as the ST decides).

The "prolonged roll" mentioned in some parts of the resources section is the same as the extended roll.

Impossible Tasks

Characters sometimes attempt things that are practically impossible. The DC may then be 40, 60, or even higher.

So-called impossible tasks are hard to define in advance; most are absurd and pure luck. For example, swimming up a waterfall against the current, digging a 10-meter pit with bare hands, or jumping off a 30-story building unharmed. The ST decides what is completely impossible and what is nearly impossible.

But our characters are extraordinary people who gain countless superpowers over the course of play, so characters with special abilities or very high Skill levels may still be able to pull off amazing feats.

Several Characters Using a Skill Together

When several characters use a Skill toward the same goal, their efforts may add up.

This depends on whether the effect applies to each person or to another target.

For example: characters can make something together. In that case, everyone can use their Skill toward the same goal, and the effects add up.

For example: characters need to swim across a stretch of sea. In that case, they can't all use their Skill toward one goal; each is responsible only for themselves.

But even then, we can still choose to help others.

In that case, a character can give up their action this turn to make a roll for the matching action on the target's behalf. When the target then takes that action, they gain a circumstance bonus equal to the helper's successes.

Example: Player A is making a swimming roll. Player B decides to help Player A, so on his turn Player B gives up his action and makes a STR + Athletics (Swimming) roll, getting 3 successes. Then, when Player A acts, their STR + Athletics (Swimming) roll gains a 3 DP circumstance bonus.

Note that when helping this way, if the person being helped doesn't take the matching action on their next turn, the circumstance bonus is lost.

Attribute Rolls

If there is no suitable Skill for what a character wants to do, make an Attribute roll.

That is, instead of key Attribute + key Skill level (matching Specialty), roll just the key Attribute.

For example: arm wrestling, tug-of-war, and similar contests involve no Skill; they are simply opposed STR rolls.

Skill Table

Physical Skills	Mental Skills	Social Skills
Athletics	Academics	Animal Ken
Brawl	Computer	Empathy
Drive	Crafts	Expression
Firearms	Investigation	Intimidation
Larceny	Medicine	Socialize
Stealth	Occult	Subterfuge
Survival	Science
Blade
Archery