Skills - Introduction

There are 30 or so basic skills in the Aquilar Republic game. Each of them covers a pretty broad area of expertise, for reasons of simplicity. I decided it was just better to be able to handle things in large units rather than messing with a lot of little finagling (such as having skills for both boating and sailing, or dividing the weapons into subsets).

Under each skill are several sub-skills. I tried to limit myself to 5 or 6 on any particular one to start, and am open to feedback from players on any new sub-skills they want to develop. Sub-skills are tricks of the trade, things that people learn only after they have picked up the basics of the skill, or specific focuses within the skill.

This should let players define characters with fairly broad strokes, then narrow down on some skills that are important to them and develop more detailed proficiency in them. I'm hoping this will work to provide a system that's both simple and flexible (like Pendragon), while still having room for complex actions and special tricks (like ED).

Characters begin play with 13 ranks of skills. Given the cost of buying new skills vs. raising existing one, I highly recommend that no one go beyond 2 ranks in any one skill, though you can go as high as three. Remember that you can't have more total ranks in sub-skills that you have ranks in the skill itself.

As I said before, talents are skills that adepts have learned to channel Karma through. They are very similar to skills, but characters can have any number of sub-talents, as long as none of those sub-talents have a higher rank than the base talent.

The vast majority of Skills have defaults for them, which players would do well to remember in play. Just because you don't have the Stealth skill it doesn't mean you can't be stealthy, it just means you aren't particularly good at it.

   

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