Skills

While Abilities and Talents are used predominantly in combat, Skills come into play in a variety of different contexts. Skills partially determine how players can interact with the world around them. They are often used in both scripted interactions and conversations.

General Use

During any situation where a skill is checked against a challenge’s level of difficulty, the party member with the highest relevant skill is represented as the starting benchmark. If their skill outweighs the difficulty score, the player’s efforts succeed. For this reason, it’s best to have specific characters in your party to master one skill instead of steering everyone toward a jack of all trades.

Resource Items

Some items are used in different scenarios to alter how skill checks occur. The most obvious example is the use of lockpicks to complement the Mechanics skill. Other items and tools do not deplete when used.

Skill Advancement

At first level, characters have only their class’ inherent bonuses to two skills. These bonuses are always considered when calculating the character’s total skill value, but they are not counted when the character advances their skills.

Each level after first, the player gains 6 points to spend toward upgrading their skills. It’s worth noting that points can’t be stored for later, and that spending points might not elevate a skill to its next highest level.

Skill Bonus

Stealth

The Stealth skill allows the player and/or the party to move near an NPC (non-player character) without being detected. Whether to slip by a guard unnoticed or to surround a group of enemies in order to make a sneak attack, these situations call for the use of the Stealth skill.

Athletics

Athletics allows characters to jump, climb, swim, or run exceptionally fast. These interactions all typically occur within scripted interactions or (occasionally) conversations. Climbing walls, jumping over a chasm, or diving into a deep section of a river to investigate a glint at the bottom would all be covered by Athletics.

In combat, Athletics impacts how much Fatigue a character can endure before suffering skill penalties.

Lore

Lore represents a character’s accumulated miscellaneous knowledge and trivia, often of occult or esoteric topics. Outside of conversations and scripted interactions, Lore is used to activate scrolls. Higher Lore values allow the character to use higher level scrolls.

Mechanics

The Mechanics skill allows the manipulation of any sort of mechanical device. From opening locks to disarming traps to changing the behavior of a complex machine, the party needs to use their Mechanics skills.

Survival

The Survival skill is a measure of how knowledgeable and capable a character is in wilderness settings. It can be used to identify creature tracks or remains, and create consumable items from natural ingredients.