Step Five: Determine Skills and Action Modifiers
In addition to determining your character’s natural abilities, you will also need to determine your character’s learned abilities. Whether juggling vials of acid, flying a helicopter, or fast-talking a guard, skills are used represent all the things your character has learned through study, training, practice, education, and experience.
The Two Types of Skills: Common and Concept
Your character possesses two types of skills. The first of these types of skills, Common skills, are skills possessed by all characters regardless of the character concept. They encompass very broad categories of tasks and reflect your character’s overall level of ability when performing any tasks that fall within that category while making a living or trying to survive on a day-to-day basis. The second type of skills, Concept skills, are more narrow categories of tasks specifically related to your character’s concept. They represent extra time your character has spent studying a specific topic or performing more specific sorts of tasks than those reflected by a Common skill.
Hujraad’s Hacks: Common Skills versus Concept Skills
To get a good idea of the difference between Common and Concept skill, let’s consider a character concept in which the Role is defined as “a swordsman”. A swordsman would naturally be someone who is particularly good with a sword, however, he might be a soldier who excels in the use of a sword or a socialite who has taken up fencing in his spare time and has gotten rather good. Both characters would have a Concept skill of Swordsmanship indicating a significant amount of time practicing with a blade over and above what they normally spend their time doing living their daily lives. The soldier, however, would tend to be better at the Combat Common skill as he spends most of his time training and fighting, while the Socialite would tend to be better in the Social skill, as he spends most of his time hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
The Six Common Skills
There are six Common skills defined within the game rules.
The first Common skill, the Academic skill, is used to represent your character's learning through schooling or other formal education. It represents your character’s ability to do math, read and write, speak languages outside your character’s native language, and your character’s general knowledge of the world’s natural phenomena.
The second Common skill, the Athletic skill, is used to represent the time your character has spent practicing feats of physical prowess such as running, weightlifting, parkour, or gymnastics.
The third Common skill, the Combat skill, is used to represent your character's experience in combat and covers multiple facets of combat, from the use of firearms and melee weapons, to explosives, tactics, and strategy.
The fourth Common skill, the Fringe skill, is used to represent your character's experience living outside of the laws of civilization and society or dealing with such individuals. It includes anything from surviving on the wild frontier to eking out a living on the rough urban streets.
The fifth Common skill, the Social skill, is used to represent your character's experience dealing with people. This includes practice reading and intuiting people’s emotions and motives and using that knowledge to perform such tasks as predicting behaviors, inspiring, motivating, manipulating or commanding others.
The sixth Common skill, the Technical skill, is used to represent time your character has spent learning to perform tasks based on technology. This includes tasks such as using tools to build, grow, repair, or create things, piloting and operating large craft and vehicles, using computers, painting, and singing.
The Three Concept Skills
In contrast to the six Common skills, there are no specific Concept skills defined by the game rules. Instead, you are allowed to select any three specific things you think your character would be really good at that are related to his character concept and declare them as your character’s Concept skills.
To declare a Concept skill, all you need to do is simply name the skill and write it down on your character sheet. You may declare a Concept skill with any name you wish; whether you declare a Concept skill using either a more formal tone such as “Automobile Driving” or in more colorful terms such as “Mad Driving Skills” makes no difference.
When you declare a Concept skill, it must be significantly narrow in scope so as to reflect a small number or types of tasks. A Concept skill that is too broad in scope and enables your character to perform a large number of tasks defeats the purpose of the Concept skill, which is to help reflect those few things your character is not just good at, but actually better at than most others, and makes him unique from other characters.
Hujraad’s Hacks: Significantly Narrow In Scope?
You may wonder what it means that a Concept skill must be significantly “narrow in scope”. As an example, if your character concept says your character is a “fighter”, you may at first wish to select “Fighting” as a Concept skill. But “Fighting” can include almost as many types of tasks as the Combat Common skill, so that would not be allowable as a Concept skill. Similarly, if your character concept has a Role of “Pilot”, you might rightfully think declaring “Piloting Stuff” as a Concept skill is more narrow in scope than either the Technical or Athletic Common skills. But “Piloting Stuff” can still include anything from a boat to a plane to a helicopter , however each of these is vastly different in nature from one another, so “Piloting Stuff” would also not constitute a Concept skill; you would still need to narrow the scope a bit to “Piloting VTOLs (Vertical Takeoff and Landing Vehicles” or “Piloting Fixed-Wing Aircraft”. Ultimately, the Director will let you know if any of the Concept skills you declare are significantly narrow in scope to be allowed, and will help you if you have trouble defining your character’s Concept skills.
The Action Modifier
Your character’s ability to perform tasks related to a skill is reflected in a single stat known as that skill’s action modifier. The action modifier takes into account both the amount of time your character spends practicing a skill and your character’s natural abilities.
Grade
The amount of time your character has spent learning or practicing a skill is measured in terms of a stat referred to as the skill’s grade. The lowest grade of any skill is 0, which represents a character unskilled or lacking any significant amount of training or practice performing tasks related to a it. Increasing grades in a skill represent more time spent using it.
Hujraad’s Hacks: What Does a Grade Mean?
A grade represents a rough estimate of the amount of time your character has spent doing a particular set of activities, regardless of whether your character was educated formally through some sort of training/schooling program or informally by living life and learning things necessary to survive. Each grade of a skill reflects roughly 1,000 hours of practice using the skill. To put this more descriptively, you can think of a grade of 1 as representing a character who practices the skill occasionally or has only done so for a short amount of time, a grade of 5 representing a character who has become a journeyman or of a professional level of skill, and a grade of 10 representing a character who is a master of that skill.
Related Attribute
For each skill, one attribute, referred to as that skill’s related attribute, is used to indicate the natural ability that most often affects tasks related to that skill.
For each Common skill, a specific attribute is designated as the related attribute as follows:
Common Skill Related Attributes
- Academic = INTL
- Athletic = STR
- Combat = RFLX
- Fringe = RSIL
- Social = WILL
- Technical = PERC
For each Concept skill, unlike a Common skill, you are required to choose the related attribute for each skill.
Hujraad’s Hacks: Concept Skill Related Attributes
The rules assume that as characters learn to perform a tasks of a certain type, they also learn how to use their natural abilities to best effect when performing those types of tasks. For example, suppose two characters each have the Concept skill “Sneak Around”. One character might rely on his PERC attribute to notice the darkest shadows and avoid squeaky floorboards while another character might rely on his RFLX attribute to react quickly and move away from a squeaky board or slide into a shadow as its level of darkness changes with the opening or closing of a door.
Completing Step Five
To complete this step and determine your character's skills, you will need to perform three tasks.
Declare Concept Skills and Select Related Attributes
The first thing you will need to do is declare your character’s three Concept skills and decide upon each skill’s related attributes. To do this, look at your character concept and take a minute to think of the three things your character would be really good at doing that fit in with the concept you have written. Next, declare these three things as “Concept skills” by writing them down in the appropriate place on your Character Sheet,
Next, you will need to determine the related attribute for each Concept skill you have declared. To do so, think about what natural abilities would help your character the most when performing tasks related to each skill and find the attribute most closely matching it. If you feel that two or more attributes are related to a Concept skill, then you may choose the higher attribute of the two as the related attribute for that Concept skill and record the attribute and its value on your Character Sheet in the appropriate space next to the name of the Concept skill.
Once you have declared all three Concept skills and selected their related attributes, you will submit them to your Director for her approval to ensure they are within the scope of a Concept skill.
Assign Grades
Once the Director has approved your character’s Concept skills and their related attributes, you need to assign grades to all of your character’s skills.
You will start by assigning grades to your character’s six Common skills. To do this, look at your character’s History and take a minute to think about what a character with such a background would spend most of his time doing. Next, keeping this in mind, assign one of each of the following grades to each Common skill: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Remember that a grade of 0 means your character spends the least amount of time doing those types of tasks and a grade of 5 represents the types of things your character does the most often if not every day.
Next, you will assign grades to your character’s three Concept skills, Keeping your character concept in mind, assign one of each of the following grades to each Concept skill: 6, 7, and 8. Remember that the skill with a grade of 8 represents the skill that most strongly reflects your character concept.
Calculate the Action Modifiers
Finally, with the grades and related attributes for your character’s skills determined, you can determine the action modifier for each skill using the following calculation:
Action Modifier = Grade + Related Attribute
As you determine each skill’s action modifier, write its value in the appropriate space on your character sheet.
Step Five Example: Johnny Parkour
Ogun now needs to selecting his character’s skills and calculate their action modifiers.
Ogun begins by first declaring his character’s Concept skills. Reading his character’s concept, he first decides to reflect the Descriptor “acrobatic” in his Concept skills. Rather than just using the word “Acrobatics” however, he decides to give his character a Concept skill of “Crazy Parkour Skillz” to reflect the sorts of running and jumping actions he envisions his character performing. He next thinks about which attribute would most closely be related to performing tasks associated with Parkour. He decides that his character’s PERC attribute of +1 might help to find handholds or judge distances, his RFLX attribute of +5 might help Johnny time moves or grab objects, and his STR of +4 might help him jump farther distances and move more quickly. The highest of these three attributes is RFLX at +5, so Ogun selects RFLX as the related attribute for this Concept skill and writes “Crazy Parkour Skillz” along with “RFLX” as the related attribute in the appropriate spaces on the character sheet.
Ogun next decides that nothing else in his character’s concept reflects any specific skills, so he returns to his character’s history for other ideas. As he reads it, the mentioning of searching high and low for the missing fortune teller suggest to him that a “Tracking and Trailing” skill would reflect this. Ogun now needs to choose a the related attribute for this skill. He figures his character’s PERC of +1 might reflect a natural ability to find a trail or signs of passage, his WILL of +2 might be used to reflect his persistence and drive that would help him find clues when others might quit, and his INTL of 0 would be helpful to logically deduce where a person he is tracking might go next or do next. The highest of these three attributes is WILL at +2, so Ogun selects WILL as the related attribute for this Concept skill and writes it next to the Concept skill of “Tracking and Trailing” in the appropriate spaces on the character sheet.
For his third Concept skill, Ogun decides that Johnny’s search for the missing fortune teller has led to his developing a high level of investigation techniques, so he declares his third Concept skill to be “Sleuthing and Investigation”. Looking at his character’s attributes, an INTL of 0, that would represent his character’s ability to piece things together, his PERC of +1 to reflect noticing clues, and WILL of +2 to reflect making creative and intuitive leaps of inductive reasoning, Ogun decides to select WILL as the related attribute for this Concept skill and writes it along with the Concept skill of “Sleuthing and Investigation” on the appropriate spaces in on the Character Sheet,
With his character’s Concept skills selected and their related attributes assigned, Ogun shows his list to the Director, and she approves it, allowing him to move on to assigning grades to his skills.
Ogun first assigns grades to his character’s Common skills. He decides that since most of his character’s life has been spent practicing acts of physical prowess such as high-wire walking, flying in the trapeze, lifting weights and so forth, he assigns the highest grade of 5 to his character’s Athletic skill.
Ogun then thinks a little bit more and decides that the circus life is one of constantly being on the move and living off the land wherever he and his circus family set up their tents, and not really grounded in one place or in one community, so he assigns his grade of 4 to his character’s Fringe skill.
Next, Ogun figures that his character has had to work with the public when filling in as the ticket booth salesmen, ring announcer, and barker, so he has developed his Social skill to some extent, so he assigns it a grade of 3. Ogun also figures that living in the circus would also require occasionally helping with repairing tents, maintaining wagons, sewing costumes, and driving the wagons, so he assigns a grade of 2 to his character’s Technical skill.
Finally, looking at his remaining Common skills, Ogun decides that between the Combat and Academic skills, his character has had to learn to read and write and not really spent a significant amount of time in situations where fighting was necessary, so he assigns his Academic skill a grade of 1 and his Combat skill a grade of 0. His resulting skill grades are as follows:
Academic 1
Athletic 5
Combat 0
Fringe 4
Social 3
Technical 2
Now, Ogun turns his attention to his Concept skills. Immediately, he assigns “Crazy Parkour Skillz” a grade of 8 because it is so strongly a part of his character concept. Next, looking at his two other skills, Ogun figures since his character spends more of his time on the outskirts of towns, he probably uses his Tracking and Trailing skill more often and for more than just tracking down the fortune teller from his history such as when hunting when in more rural areas and the funds are particularly low. He assigns the grade of 7 to “Tracking and Trailing” skill and a grade of 6 to his “Sleuthing” skill. His resulting skill grades are as follows:
Mad Parkour Skillz 8
Tracking and Trailing 7
Sleuthing and Investigation 6
Now all that remains is for Ogun to determine the action modifiers for his character’s skills as follows:
Academic Action Modifier
= Grade (1) + INTL (0)
= +1
Athletic Action Modifier
= Grade (5) + STR (+4)
= +9
Combat Action Modifier
= Grade (0) + RFLX (+5)
= +5
Fringe Action Modifier
= Grade (4) + RSIL (+3)
= +7
Social Action Modifier
= Grade (3) + WILL (+2)
= +5
Tech Action Modifier
= Grade (2) + PERC (+1)
= +3
Now Ogun has to determine the Action Modifiers for his character’s Concept skills as follows:
Crazy Parkour Skillz Action Modifier
= Grade (8) + RFLX (+5)
= +13
Tracking and Trailing Action Modifier
= Grade (7) + WILL (+2)
= +9
Sleuthing and Investigation Action Modifier
= Grade (7) + WILL (+2)
= +9
Ogun records all of the action modifiers he has calculated on his character sheet, and is now ready to move on to the next step of the character creation process.
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