by Scarik » Fri Feb 09, 2018 11:48 pm
And to follow that up, here's a massive post that I had meant to finish logn ago explaining more about what the skills do.
Archery
Archery is the skill of using ranged weaponry, either in a conflict or on targets that don’t actively resist your attempts to hit them (like a bull’s-eye or the broad side of a barn).
• Overcome: Unless, for some reason, you need to demonstrate your Archery ability in a non-conflict situation, you probably won’t be using this skill for normal obstacles much.
• Create Advantage: In physical conflicts, Archery can be used to perform a wide variety of moves, like trick shots and the like. Youcan disarm people and pin their sleeves to walls—pretty much anything you’ve seen in an action movie.
• Attack: This skill makes physical attacks. You can make them from up to two zones away, unlike with Fencing. (Sometimes the range will change with the weapon.)
• Defend: Archery doesn’t really have a defense component to it.
Awareness
Awareness represents a character’s overall perception and ability to react to changing circumstances. Because of this it is also the skill of playing music.
• Overcome: Use Awareness to overcome obstacles that are sensory obstructions such as darkness or smoke, to listen through heavy doors or see far off objects. Awareness is also the primary skill used to determine who acts first in a conflict.
• Create Advantage: Few Advantages are created through Awareness. For that deliberate sort of inspection use Examine.
• Attack: Awareness isn’t really used for attacks.
• Defend: You can use Awareness to defend against any uses of Stealth to get the drop on you or ambush you, or to discover that you’re being observed.
Contacts
Contacts is the skill of knowing and making connections with people. It presumes proficiency with all means of networking available in the setting.
• Overcome: You use Contacts to overcome any obstacle related to finding someone you need to find. Whether that’s old-fashioned “man on the street” type of work, polling your information network, or searching archives and computer databases, you’re able to hunt down people or somehow get access to them.
• Create Advantage: Contacts allows you to know who the perfect person to talk to is for anything you might need, or to decide that you know the perfect person already. It’s likely that you’ll create story details with this skill, represented by aspects.
• Attack: Contacts isn’t used for attacks; it’s hard to harm someone simply by knowing people.
• Defend: Contacts can be used to defend against people creating social advantages against you, provided your information network can be brought to bear in the situation. You might also use it to keep someone from using Deceive or Contacts to go “off the grid”, or to interfere with Investigate attempts to find you.
Crafts
Crafts is the skill of working with machinery, for good or ill
• Overcome: Crafts allows you to build, break, or fix machinery, presuming you have the time and tools you need. Often, actions with Crafts happen as one component of a more complex situation, making it a popular skill for challenges.
• Create Advantage: You can use Crafts to create aspects representing features of a piece of machinery, pointing out useful features or strengths you can use to your advantage (Armor-Plated, Rugged Construction) or a vulnerability for you to exploit (Flaw in the Cross-Beam, Hasty Work). Creating Crafts advantages can also take the form of quick and dirty sabotage or jury-rigging on mechanical objects in the scene. For example, you might create a Makeshift Pulley to help you get to the platform above you, or throw something into the ballista that’s firing on you to give it a Jammed Pivoting Joint and make it harder to hit you.
• Attack: You probably won’t use Crafts to attack in a conflict, unless the conflict is specifically about using machinery, like with siege weaponry.
• Defend: As with attacking, Crafts doesn’t defend, unless you’re somehow using it as the skill to control a piece of machinery that you block with.
Deceive
Deceive is the skill about lying to and misdirecting people.
• Overcome: Use Deceive to bluff your way past someone, or to get someone to believe a lie, or to get something out of someone because they believe in one of your lies. For nameless NPCs, this is just an overcome roll, but for PCs or named NPCs, it requires a contest, and the target opposes with Examine. Winning this contest could justify placing a situation aspect on your target, if buying into your lie could help you in a future scene. You can also use Deceive to do small tricks of sleight-of-hand and misdirection.
• Create Advantage: Use Deceive to create momentary distractions, cover stories, or false impressions. You could feint in a swordfight, putting an opponent Off-Balance and setting you up for an attack. You could do the whole, “What’s that over there!” trick to give you a Head Start when you run away. You could establish a Wealthy Noble Cover Story for when you attend a royal ball. You could trick someone into revealing one of their aspects or other information.
• Attack: Deceive is an indirect skill that creates a lot of opportunities you can capitalize on, but it doesn’t do direct harm to an individual.
• Defend: You can use Deceive to throw off Examine attempts with false information and to defend against efforts made to discern your true motives.
Examine
Examine is the skill you use to find things out. It’s a counterpart to Awareness—whereas Awareness revolves around situational alertness and surface observation, Examine revolves around concentrated effort and in-depth scrutiny.
• Overcome: Examine obstacles are all about information that’s hard to uncover for some reason. Analyzing a crime scene for clues, searching a cluttered room for the item you need, even poring over a musty old tome to try and find the passage that makes everything make sense.
• Create Advantage: Examine is probably one of the most versatile skills you can use to create an advantage. As long as you’re willing to take the time, you can find out just about anything about anyone, discover nearly any detail about a place or object, or otherwise make up aspects about nearly anything in the game world that your character could reasonably unearth.
• Attack: Examine isn’t used to make attacks.
• Defend: Examine is the skill of internal discovery and so is used to uncover lies as well as truths. Use it to defend against Deceive.
Fencing
The Fencing skill covers all forms of close-quarters combat (in other words, within the same zone), both unarmed and using weapons.
• Overcome: Fencing is not often used to overcome obstacles. You might use it to display your prowess in a demonstration, or to participate in some kind of regulated bout or sport, which would allow you to use this skill in a contest.
• Create Advantage: You’ll probably use Fencing for most of the advantages you create in a physical conflict. Any number of special moves can be covered with advantages: a targeted strike to stun, a “dirty move,” disarming, and so on. You could even use Fencing to assess another fighter’s style, spotting weaknesses in his or her form that you can exploit.
• Attack: You make physical attacks with Fencing. Remember, this is for close-in work, so you have to be in the same zone as your opponent
• Defend: You use Fencing to defend against any other attack or create an advantage attempt made with Fencing, as well as pretty much any action where violently interposing yourself could prevent it from happening. You can also use Fencing to defend against the Archery attacks of Nameless NPCs.
Lore
The Lore skill is about knowledge and education. It is used for all form of literacy including calligraphy and painting.
• Overcome: You can use Lore to overcome any obstacle that requires applying your character’s knowledge to achieve a goal. For example, you might roll Lore to decipher some ancient language on a tomb wall, under the presumption that your character might have researched it at some point.
• Create Advantage: Like Examine, Lore provides a lot of very flexible opportunities to create advantages, provided you can research the subject in question. More often than not, you’ll be using Lore to get a story detail, some obscure bit of information that you uncover or know already, but if that information gives you an edge in a future scene, it might take the form of an aspect. Likewise, you can use Lore to create advantages based on any subject matter your character might have studied, which gives you a fun way to add details to the setting.
• Attack: Lore isn’t used in conflicts.
• Defend: Lore isn’t used to defend.
Might
The Might skill is a counterpart to Prowess, representing the character’s natural physical aptitudes, such as raw strength and endurance.
• Overcome: You can use Might to overcome any obstacles that require the application of brute force—most often to overcome a situation aspect on a zone—or any other physical impedance, like prison bars or locked gates. Of course, Might is the classic skill for arm-wrestling matches and other contests of applied strength, as well as marathons or other endurance-based challenges.
• Create Advantage: Might has a lot of potential for advantages in physical conflict, usually related to grappling and holding someone in place, making them Pinned or Locked Down. You might also use it as a way of discovering physical impairments possessed by the target—grappling the old mercenary tells you that he has a Bum Leg or some such.
• Attack: Might is not used to harm people directly—see the Fencing skill for that
• Defend: Though you don’t generally use Might to defend against attacks, you can use it to provide active opposition to someone else’s movement, provided you’re in a small enough space that you can effectively use your body to block access. You might also interpose something heavy and brace it to stop someone from getting through.
Provoke
Provoke is the skill about getting someone’s dander up and eliciting negative emotional response from them—fear, anger, shame, etc. It’s the “being a jerk” skill.
• Overcome: You can Provoke someone into doing what you want in a fit of emotional pique. You might intimidate them for information, piss them off so badly that they act out, or scare them into running away. This will often happen when you’re going up against nameless NPCs or it isn’t worthwhile to play out the particulars. Against PCs or important NPCs, you’ll need to win a contest. They oppose with Will.
• Create Advantage: You can create advantages representing momentary emotional states, like Enraged, Shocked, or Hesitant. Your target opposes with Will.
• Attack: You can make mental attacks with Provoke, to do emotional harm to an opponent. Your relationship with the target and the circumstances you’re in figure a great deal into whether or not you can use this action.
• Defend: Being good at provoking others doesn’t make you better at avoiding it yourself. You need Will for that.
Prowess
The Prowess skill represents your character’s general level of physical fitness, whether through training, natural gifts. It’s how good you are at moving whether on foot, mounted on horseback or sailing. As such, it is a popular choice for nearly any action-y character.
• Overcome: Prowess allows you to overcome any obstacle that requires physical movement—jumping, running, climbing, swimming, etc. If it resembles something you’d do in the decathlon, you roll Prowess. Use it for overcome actions to move between zones in a conflict if there’s a situation aspect or other obstacle in your way. Or for a chase or race in any contests or challenges that rely on these types of activities.
• Create Advantage: When you’re creating an advantage with Prowess, you’re jumping to high ground, running faster than the opponent can keep up with, or performing dazzling acrobatic maneuvers in order to confound your foes.
• Attack: Prowess is not meant as an attack skill.
• Defend: Prowess is a catch-all skill to roll for defense in a physical conflict, against close-quarters and ranged attacks. You can also use it to defend against characters trying to move past you, if you’re in a position to physically interfere with whoever’s making the attempt.
Rapport
The Rapport skill is all about making positive connections to people and eliciting positive emotion. It’s the skill of being liked and trusted as well as speaking eloquently in both poetry and prose.
• Overcome: Use Rapport to charm or inspire people to do what you want, or to establish a good connection with them. Charm your way past the guard, convince someone to take you into their confidence, or become the man of the hour at the local tavern. For nameless NPCs, this is just an overcome action, but you may have to enter a contest to sufficiently ingratiate yourself to a named NPC or PC.
• Create Advantage: Use Rapport to establish a positive mood on a target or in a scene or to get someone to confide in you out of a genuine sense of trust. You could pep talk someone into having Elevated Confidence, or stir a crowd into a Joyful Fervor, or simply make someone Talkative or Helpful.
• Attack: Rapport doesn’t cause harm, so you don’t use it for attacks.
• Defend: Rapport defends against any skill used to damage your reputation, sour a mood you’ve created, or make you look bad in front of other people. It does not, however, defend against mental attacks. That requires Will.
Stealth
The Stealth skill allows you to avoid detection, both when hiding in place and trying to move about unseen.
• Overcome: You can use Stealth to get past any situation that primarily depends on you not being seen. Sneaking past sentries and security, hiding from a pursuer, avoiding leaving evidence as you pass through a place, and any other such uses all fall under the purview of Stealth.
• Create Advantage: You’ll mainly use Stealth to create aspects on yourself, setting yourself in an ideal position for an attack or ambush in a conflict. That way, you can be Well-Hidden when the guards pass by and take advantage of that, or Hard to Pin Down if you’re fighting in the dark.
• Attack: Stealth isn’t used to make attacks.
• Defend: You can use this to foil Awareness attempts to pinpoint you or seek you out, as well as to try to throw off the scent of an Examine attempt from someone trying to track you.
Strategy
Strategy skill represents your skill in the direct mental competition that is battlefield command as well as more peaceful games such as the popular weiqi.
• Overcome: Use this action to negate an opponent’s strategic advantage as well as for simple contests of strategy.
• Create Advantage: The main use of Strategy is to outmaneuver ones enemy and give their own force the advantage. It is used to take advantage of terrain, weather and logistical assets such as Charging Down Hill, or to have The Wind at Our Back.
• Attack: Strategy does not make direct attacks.
• Defend: Strategy is not a defense unless applied, for that use Overcome.
Sorcery
This skill is for master of the unusual and the supernatural. It is used to perform religious rites and to enact changes over people and the environment. With it a sorcerer can command the wind, slow a raging river, beguile the mind, transmute one substance into another and call upon the power and wisdom of gods and spirits. For each odd level of this skill the character picks one category of magical ability to master.
• Overcome: Use Sorcery to dispel hostile spells or to bind unwilling spirits by pitting your skill against the effect rating of the opposing magic.
• Create Advantage: This is how spells are cast. Choose an effect within the purview of one of your mastered disciplines and then divide your shifts among reducing the time to complete the ritual, strengthening the effect and extending the duration.
• Attack: Magic can create dangerous forces and effects, but it does not attack in and of itself. For that use the rating of the effect generated.
• Defend: Much as it can create danger some magic can create wards. Just like with Attack it is the rating of the spell, not the skill of the caster that is used.
Will
The Will skill represents your character’s general level of mental fortitude, the same way that Might represents your physical fortitude.
• Overcome: You can use Will to pit yourself against obstacles that require mental effort. Puzzles and riddles can fall under this category, as well as any mentally absorbing task, like deciphering a code. Use Will when it’s only a matter of time before you overcome the mental challenge, and Lore if it takes something more than brute mental force to get past it. Many of the obstacles that you go up against with Will might be made part of challenges, to reflect the effort involved.
• Create Advantage: You can use Will to place aspects on yourself, representing a state of deep concentration or focus due to practice or meditation.
• Attack: Will isn’t really used for attacks.
• Defend: Will is the main skill you use to defend against mental attacks from Provoke, representing your control over your reactions.