Skills

Besides Attributes, you’ve also got Skills, which are basically abilities in specific areas. You can invent whatever Skills you want, but here’s a good default list you can use which covers many of the basic things you might want to do. You can list your character's Skills at the bottom left of the character sheet.

• Acting: Your ability to act and seem to be someone other than you are.
• Animalism: Your understanding of nonhuman animals and non-sentient monsters and/or alien life forms, giving you insight into their communication patterns and allowing you to manipulate them.
• Appraisal: Your capacity to evaluate the value, function, or status of any object.
• Balance: How well you can retain your equilibrium in situations where it’s threatened.
• Brawling: Your ability to fight without weapons or to engage in posturing without them.
• Climbing: Your ability to move over different elevations and to climb up and down things, from trees to sheer cliff faces.
• Comestibles: Your ability to cook.
• Composition: Your ability to convey ideas in writing, including exposition and persuasion (narration requires the Art Skill).
• Confabulation: Your ability to deceive yourself by retroactively revising your memory, otherwise known as the "Believe False Thing" or "Doublethink" Skill. It's of limited use in situations where mental health is relatively common.
• Connections: Your street smarts and ability to find people and materials you need.
• Contorting: How easily and fluidly you can move your body into different positions. Contorting is commonly used in dancing, escaping from bonds, and breaking falls.
• Cosmology: Your knowledge of the structure of the universe.
• Culture: Your knowledge of your culture and other cultures.
• Descrying: Your ability to detect magic with a nonphysical sixth sense, if magic exists in your world.
• Discernment: Your ability to perceive the nuances of social interactions or evaluate your own psychological processes.
• Disguise: Your ability to look like what you aren’t, or make other people, places or things look like what they aren't.
• Dodging: Your proficiency at getting out of the way of dangerous things moving about in your vicinity.
• Driving: Your ability to steer moving devices.
• Evocation: Your ability to activate magic items (such as abraxases, fetishes, talismans, and relics) should any exist in the world you inhabit.
• Flying: The art of moving unassisted through a gaseous medium without the aid of the ground.
• Gaming: Your ability to win at social games (such as card games) and gamble.
• Grasping: Your ability to hold onto things or open stuck jars.
• Hefting: Your ability to achieve feats of raw strength, like lifting things.
• Herbalism: Your knowledge of herbs, poisons, and the like, used to find, recognize, and prepare herbs and poisons for consumption or use.
• Hypnosis: Your ability to place people in trances and manipulate them with brainwashing.
• Infrastructure: Your knowledge of the various infrastructures of the world (e.g. sewer, telephone, or power systems).
• Initiating: Your capacity to make simple, reactive movements with haste, useful in any situation where taking an action quickly is of use, most especially combat.
• Instructing: Your ability to teach to others any abilities or information (including spells, Skills, and some Benefits) which you possess.
• Intimidation: Your ability to motivate others by making them afraid of you.
• Jumping: Your ability to leap over objects or distances.
• Legends: Your knowledge of the many legends and bits of lore surrounding your world — its history, races, civilizations, spirits, technologies, monsters, animals, and so forth.
• Listening: Your ability to hear quiet or obscure sounds.
• Logic: Your pure logical reasoning ability and math skill, including your ability to create, recognize, and develop codes.
• Mechanisms: Your ability to identify, tinker with, modify, or create machinery, from lever-and-pulley level technologies to electric razors and starship engines.
• Medicine: Your knowledge of applied anatomy and physiology.
• Melee: Your ability to hurt people with hand-to-hand weapons, disarm people, or engage in Posturing.
• Memory: Your ability to recall details and facts.
• Missile: Your ability to maintain and fire missile weapons, including firearms, or to engage in posturing with them.
• Mystical Resilience: Your ability to resist magical and other mystical effects with the exception of psionic powers, should any exist in the world you inhabit.
• Navigation: Your ability to navigate and find your way around different areas.
• Occult: Your knowledge of the supernatural.
• Parrying: Your ability to knock aside sharp, pointy, or otherwise dangerous objects flying into your vicinity.
• Persuasion: Your ability to convince others of true or false ideas using logical appeals, pseudo-logical appeals, emotional appeals, or advertising. Persuasion is usually verbal, but may also use other mediums.
• Politics: Your capacity to understand political and legal systems.
• Prestidigitation: Your slight of hand and ability to make delicate movements, including juggling and picking pockets.
• Psionic Resilience: Your ability to resist psionic effects, should any exist in the world you inhabit.
• Psychology: Your understanding of how people think, feel, and act.
• Research: Your ability to locate appropriate sources of information, disregard the trivial and irrelevant, and find what you need to know.
• Resisting Discomfort: Your ability to control your reaction to pain and fatigue usually due either to rational self-talk or good old-fashioned repression.
• Resisting Disease: Your ability to resist diseases.
• Resisting Distraction: Your ability to stay focused on a desired task in spite of distractions.
• Resisting Poisons: Your ability to resist poisons. Also called Tolerance.
• Resisting Urges: Your ability to avoid being led around by your desires and whims.
• Riding: Your ability to stay on an animal and direct him or her to move as you wish.
• Running: Your competence at self-propelled ground-based locomotion, including walking on your legs or hands, crawling, or pulling yourself along with your tongue.
• Searching: Your capacity to find stuff — secret doors, hiding places, subtle markings, or whatever.
• Security: Your ability to pick locks (high-tech or old-fashioned) and mess with security systems.
• Seduction: Your ability to manipulate others with sensuality.
• Smelling/Tasting: The accuracy of your sense of taste and smell.
• Sneaking: Your ability to move about stealthily or stay unnoticed while stationary, or otherwise perform any action without affecting the perceptions of others. This Skill may be called Stealth.
• Spotting: Your ability to notice things around you visually.
• Structures: Your proficiency at designing and directing the creation of buildings, ships, boats, tents, wigwams, pueblos, artificial caves, mining shafts, towers, canals, bridges, tunnels, pyramids, hollow trees, giant popsicle stands, and in fact any structure with the potential for instability or dysfunctionality.
• Survival: Your ability to survive in hostile environments, from cities to wildernesses.
• Swimming: Your proficiency at moving efficiently through a liquid medium.
• Throwing: Your proficiency at throwing something (daggers, rocks, spears, banana cream pies, your party members) at a target with accuracy.
• Touching: Your ability to detect tactile things and make fine distinctions using your sense of touch.
• Tracking: Your directional knowledge, understanding of potential hazards in a given area, and ability to follow someone or something based on the signs of its passing.
• Treatment: Your knowledge of what causes pain and pleasure to an entity, and your capacity to put this knowledge to use.
• Vocalization: Your ability to exercise control over the muscles and organs involved in the production of sounds, allowing you to mimic different kinds of sounds, throw your voice, and control such things as the volume, timbre, and pitch of your voice.
• [Extraordinary Ability]: Your ability to use some kind of amazing paranormal or technical ability, such as a mutant power, cyborg implant, psionic power, spell, miracle, or other. Develop a version of this Skill for each extraordinary ability you take. In order to write an extraordinary ability Skill on your character sheet, generally your character must have a justification for how she acquired it.
• [Crafting]: Your ability to craft a general type of thing (wood, metal, or something else); choose one when you take the skill
• [Art]: Your ability to create original, emotion-provoking art by selectively presenting some kind of material (choose a type of art for each time you develop this Skill within a new medium).
• [Item Enchantment]: Your ability to enchant items. To use this Skill, identify he way you want to enchant an item. The GM will apply a modifier based on the power of the item and the available materials; you can then roll
• [Language]: Your knowledge of a given language (develop this skill for every language you know beyond the first). Once you gain a skill of 8 in the language, you can assume fluency and no longer need to roll to communicate.
• [Science]: Your knowledge of the scientific method. If the world you're in permits anything beyond a general understanding of science, you should choose a specialty (biology, chemistry, etc.)

Characters start with a 0 in every skill, which means it's still possible to succeed at that skill, but this is equivilant to having nothing more than dumb luck on your side when you roll. To increase a single rating in a Skill, it costs the same as whatever rating you're reaching. For example, for a character to develop her Persuasion from a 4 to a 5, it costs 5 experience points; for a character to develop her Dodging from 1 to 2, it costs 2 experience points.

Skill to Level of Competence

There is no absolute limit on Skill advancement, but gamemasters will probably wish to require special circumstances for a character to get much past 14 or so.

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