Readjustments to Skills

The last post about characters showed a bunch of character archetypes that had skills and such associated.  The goal there had been to give an idea of what types of characters set the stage for an Ehdrigohr game.  The astute of you might have noticed that many (all) of the skills shown didn’t match the standard FATE set of skills. That was partly because this was showing some of the early stages of joining what had been my old game system (that I had been writing from the ground up) to FATE and FUDGE.  Given time to settle, however, I’m finding some things need to be rethought.

One of the thing I want is a slightly more granular skill set where there was greater opportunity to specialize.  One of the things I kept running up against in FATE however was the thought that some of this can be done with aspects and stunts (tricks in this game). As I played with making full player characters however I found myself leaning more an more toward revising things to return to the FATE skill set with some tweaks. This past weekend I was able to sit down and rework things in a way that I’m feeling pretty good about.

I’m still adhering to this idea of skill ranks.  While I’m maintaining the Ladder for detailing the difficulty of conflicts and tests, skills themselves will have 4 ranks (unskilled, apprentice, expert, and master).  These ranks give you a -1,+1, +2, and a +4 respectively (these numbers are still being tweaked).  In addition to the bonus, the ranks will give you access to broader results, reduced time to complete tasks, and increased quality of results.  I want each of those ranks to be meaningful and something to reach for.

Many skill have been broken in to a multitude of particular skills. Academics being the main culprit here.  Knowledge is scattered, so it’s rare to find someone with the breadth of knowledge that the academic skill represents.  Instead it’s been turned into a Lore skill which you much purchase for each lore. A few other broad skills, such as fighting and weapons, have been adjusted this way as well (also to pave the way for some interesting martial arts rules).

I’m also not worrying about traditional FATE skill structures like the pyramid.  Since the power of individual skills is more granular people will have to double up a bit to get the benefit of traditional broad skills.  Again all this is still subject to testing and actual play over time.

I think this will allow for more variance in character and it will give you reasons to buy more skills as you advance.  Traits exist in the game and they act as modifiers to skill checks representing scales of power.  Traits have their own progression, known as “tiers of power” that take you from the common to the godlike. So while two people may be master swordsmen the master who’s controlling skill trait is common is going to have a tough fight against someone with a Grand trait. They’ll most likely (unless FATE points are used) get devastated by the master who’s trait is Mighty.

There some more character creation tests to run with some family and friends, but after that I’ll pop an actual character up for folks to take a look at.

In the meantime there is still a discussion of shivers forthcoming and how the people actually stave these things off and survive from night to night.

Thanks for reading.  Until next time. 🙂

-Allen T.

Allen Turner

Writer, Storyteller, Game designer, Teacher, Dad, Table-top RPG geek. I'm just a dude who likes to share my wild imaginings. Follow me on Twitter @CouncilOfFools

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