On Skills
What are skills?
The BRP UGE SRD describes skills as “a specific set of
knowledge and aptitude”. To put it another way, skills represent a scope of
influence your character has over themselves and the world around them in
the game. It might be a specific domain of knowledge, resistance to the
elements, ability to climb, or invoking the power of a god.
Defining this scope of influence is an important part of
creating the skill list and communicating to the players what the game is
about. Each skill shown on the character sheet communicates to the player that
it is worth taking and is worth caring about for a game. It may not come up
every session, but it should have an impact to the story line.
Skills in BRP-derived games are associated with a number,
starting at 0 and sometimes going over 100, but most often between 1 and 100.
This is called the skill rating and represents a percentile change of
the character succeeding in the skill. Thus, if you have a skill that allows
you to invoke the power of a god at 42%, you have a 42% chance to invoke the
god under most conditions.
The Skill List
In Mythras, the list of skills available is broken down into
two varieties of skills (for the most part, there is one exception) – Standard
Skills and Professional Skills.
Standard Skills
Standard skills are any skill that everyone in the campaign
has. They may not be good at it, but they can attempt it and have a chance of
success. These are most often things that are inherent to a character but also
represent things that are universal in the campaign – touchpoints that everyone
can relate to in some way.
Many of these skills will be universal across many games.
Most games will include Endurance (to show physical resilience to fatigue,
toxins, and injury), Willpower (to show mental resilience to being misled or to
resist desperation), Evade (to show physical agility in avoiding injury),
Influence (to represent emotional control over others), Perception (the ability
to notice things in the environment), and Stealth (the ability to hide one’s
self in the environment).
In a few specific cases, a character may not have a Standard
skill. This is most likely due to not possessing a Characteristic that the
skill requires. For example, a non-corporeal being wouldn’t have a CON
Characteristic, so they wouldn’t have an Endurance skill (which is based on CON
x2).
Professional Skills
Professional skills represent specialized scopes of
aptitude, knowledge, or influence that a character must be trained in to
perform. Without this training, they have no hope of performing an action that requires
a Professional skill. For example, you are extremely unlikely to be able to
give a speech in Latin if you don’t know how to speak Latin. Even if you have
it written in front of you, your performance will be extraordinarily poor as
your accent will be off and you will miss pronunciations.
This is not to say that an action always has to require a
skill. In fact, most actions don’t require training, but in some cases they do.
Getting someone to come home with you after a date will work with Influence as
well as Seduction. It might be easier with Seduction, but Influence will
certainly do the job. In these cases, the GM may impose a penalty or give a
bonus. Author’s note – I prefer to give a bonus to Professional Skills rather
than penalize Standard skills. It always feels better to give or get a bonus.
Save penalties for more universal barriers.
Defining the campaign
The skill list as a whole is a tool to tell the players what
can be expected in the campaign. If you are intending to run a high fantasy
medieval campaign, having a Cybernetics skill on the list will seem out of
place and a player who chooses that for their character will be disappointed by
not being able to use it much. Conversely, if your campaign has locks, not
having some skill that covers lockpicking communicates something quite
different to the players.
Professional skills, more than Standard Skills, communicate
what the setting is about. The specialized knowledge in Professional skills
give color and flavor to the game and highlight things that stand out from the
norm. They can be a way to offer a niche for a particular character if that is
desired. Having “the tracker” in the group means that one character has the
Track skill, likely has invested in it, and can expect to utilize that over the
course of the campaign to have their moment in the spotlight.
Scoping Skills
Each skill needs to have a scope decided for it. Scoping of
skills determines how broad or narrow the application of the skill is within
the campaign. This can relate to a number of things, but the most common is
that broad base skills tend to be used less frequently than narrowly defined
ones. Mythras talks about scoping skills very briefly, and in an unusual
section – on pages 87 and 88, when discussing how many weapons to put into a
combat style. In this section, you get an idea of how making the skill have a
scope can change the feel of the game.
Single Skills
Most skills are singular in nature. They don’t have any
specializations, no fancy tricks. They are what they say on the tin and handle
all aspects of these interactions within the game. A skill named Native
Language, for example, handles speaking and perhaps reading and writing of the
character’s native language. They are the easiest to handle and understand.
Specialization Skills
Some skills can have specializations within them that a
character is required to choose when they learn the skill. A good example is
the Culture skill, which covers the aspects of distinct cultures in the
setting. However, it usually requires a specialization – Culture (Elves) or
Culture (Korantia) for example. Each one of the specializations gains their own
percentage, and they are essentially treated as their own skills, but with the
same base of characteristics and similar activities, but a different scope in
that their cultures are different.
Specialization is useful when wanting to make strong and clear
distinctions between different areas of knowledge, you want the characters to
pay “full price” for the skills, but don’t want to consume a lot of room
repeating the same text over and over again describing a skill. It can also
provide for a cleaner look on the character sheet. Examples of this in core
Mythras include Art, Culture, Craft, Language, Literacy, Lore, Musicianship,
and Navigation.
When you are determining how intricately detailed to
specialize these skills in your campaign, consider how likely it is to come up,
how much you want that, and how the players will react. It can represent a very
heavy expenditure for characters to increase many specialized skills. This can
dramatically slow advancement and can also create many niches for particular
characters. This is somewhat similar to how many weapons to put into a combat
style and using those guidelines can assist you in determining their scope.
Multi-Skills
Though it is not called as such in the rules, and there are
no examples in core Mythras, Luther Arkwright presents an option for
Linguistics that can be utilized for certain skills. In this case, the skill
gains additional specializations equal to 1/10th the skill, all at
the skill’s rating. This allows a character to have a very wide scope with
little investment.
This is a fantastic option for skills you don’t expect to be
used often or don’t wish to spend a lot of time on but do want to show some
distinction. In the case of Luther Arkwright, it also covers reading and
writing in each language, as well as speaking. Anyone who invests in this skill
will become multilingual quickly, and anyone fluent (>60% skill) will be
fluent in half a dozen or more different languages.
It is also useful for specializations that have larger
amounts of overlap. Perhaps navigating in your world, regardless of the
environment, is roughly the same. This would then be a viable choice for
Navigation. Or for sciences where you want several people to be polymaths with
robust, broad, and perhaps a bit pulpy science background.
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