I was reviewing the list of skills for my game, and noticed that now that I have a mechanic named Loot, I really shouldn't have a skill named Loot as well. And once I noticed that, I started eyeing the Ninja skills--a little too much overlap there, I think--and the Amazon skills, which are a bit weak, and the complete lack of a Will skill, which would make sense as a resistance mechanic for things like Intimidate and Sweet Talk.

Now, while I don't mind certain skills simply being NPC-only--there's no reason for a PC to have, say, Carpentry or Military Weapons as skills in this game--I do think I need to streamline my skills list a bit more. Consequently, suggestions and advice would be appreciated.

Skills are divided into four categories, with four skills in each category: PCs choose one primary category, one secondary category, and still have the skills in the other two categories, but at very low levels. What I have right now are:

Amazon
Amazon Weapons
Intimidate
Parry
Wilderness Skills
Ninja
Ninja Weapons
Sneak
Dodge
Acrobatics
Space Pirate
Pirate Weapons
Use Ships
Carousing
Loot
Catgirl
Natural Weapons
Run Away
Sweet Talk
Sense

As you might guess, these are fairly broad skills. (I can post a link to more detailed skill descriptions later if requested, but most of them are pretty self-explanatory.) My main concerns are:

1) "Intimidate" and "Sweet Talk" have no PC-equivalent skill for resisting them. Should I bundle some sort of Will into Intimidate, and if so, what could I call it to encompass both those meanings?

2) The Ninja skills are a bit redundant; all but Ninja Weapons involve basically being really good at moving around places for one purpose or another. I could condense Dodge into Acrobatics, or Sneak--probably not both--but then I'd need replacement skills, and can't think of any.

3) Loot is a very boring skill, and I have another mechanic named Loot already. What other skill would a Space Pirate reasonably have? It doesn't have to be a particularly strong one--Ship Use is a very important skill already--but it should at least do something specific and appropriate for pirates.

Will could be an entirely different non-skill ability, like in White Wolf games - if you're splitting skills up that way, the idea that one group gets a strong will but the rest don't seems an unfair advantage.

Meanwhile, how about 'pillage' as something pirates do (experts, of course, can loot and pillage). I'm not sure exactly what a Loot skill does anyway, though; are there any rules so far available to look at?

As a Pirate skill to replace Loot, perhaps Find Safe Harbor? In the real world, pirates used inlets here on the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere; in the not-so-real world, you had Han Solo finding that cave inside the asteroid.

After some discussion, I've slipped Dodge into Acrobatics, so that Acrobatics covers both, and given the Ninja group Disguise to make up the full four. Then I replaced the Space-Pirate skill of Loot (which was a poorly defined skill anyway) with Bravado, which covers strong will and a few other things.

While characters can take one primary group and one secondary group, and still put points into the skills of the other two groups (only starting at lower defaults to build on), I do think that I'm running the risk of making the Space-Pirate class too useful; it's the only class with a resistance skill for any of the 'convincing' skills like Intimidate and Sweet-Talk, and its skill Ship Use is the base skill for all of space combat. However, the game does tend towards the piratey side of things anyway, as it's far easier to justify a group of pirates who happen to be amazons, ninja, and catgirls than with any other group as the focus, so this might be an acceptable arrangement...

I'm not entirely happy with the skills list, still, but I think those changes are improvements. I begin to suspect that I'm going to need to start whacking at this with serious playtest before I can ask more useful questions here.

I love everything about this game so far. Granted, I haven't seen much, but it's right up my alley.

Anyway, I don't see a skill that covers breaking-and-entering. Feng Shui calls this "Intrusion" and it covers both sneaking around and defeating security systems. Seems like a Ninja sort of thing to do.

I think the skill to resist Intimidate *is* Intimidate (maybe this has already been said).

Then you may want some sort of "unflappable" or "cool" aspect (maybe 'catgirl'?) for the character who isn't intimidating--but is hard to rattle.

Same/similar to sweet-talk (although I'd think that 'catgirl' would, perhaps, be more vulnerable to flattery than intimidation).

-Marco

I imagine - Sweet Talk resisted with Intimidation, and Intimidation resisted with Sweet Talk.

For skills that don't apply directly to most PC's, you could create a few very broad skill, that require further focus (more specific than the game's core skills). For example,

Occupation: Carpenter
Weapon: Rifle
Study: Nuclear Physics

That way, a mook soldier, for example, could be trained in only one or two. If the player wants to advance in that weapon, they are at a slight disadvantage, since they are putting points into just that weapon, while the others are advancing in a broader class of weapons.

Now, your players and NPC's have access to skills that aren't the core focus of the game, without drawing too much attention to them, or making a GURPS style skill list.

A few things, so I'll respond separately:

1) "Stealth" mostly covers what Intrusion would cover, but it doesn't really say much about actual lock-picking sorts of infiltration or the like, does it? I might expand Stealth to something that included both, if I could think of a decent name for it. Or if there was some way to bundle that in with Disguise in a logical fashion... It seems like the sort of thing appropriate for a Ninja.

2) Intimidate resisted with Intimidate makes sense to me, maybe less so for Sweet-Talk. I'm not sure about setting them as resisting each other; it seems more appropriate for the Big Thug with a high Intimidate to be easily swayed by the sweet-talking catgirl rather than the equally fierce amazon. For the moment, Bravado is resisting everything, but that does overbalance the Space-Pirate group. Will have to consider a way to work this out.

(This is part of the problem of trying to have roughly balanced skill groups without making them so parallel in skills as to be the same thing with different names in all cases. I suspect I need to work more on the 'balance' bit of that.)

3) At the moment, I'm allowing for created NPC-only skills much like you suggest, MachMoth, with the note that if PCs really want that skill, it should probably be folded into an existing PC skill. I suppose I could, however, have a sort of 'invisible fifth group' of NPC skills. All PCs would automatically default to 3 in those skills (which would only really exist as they happened to come up in game), but could theoretically buy them up; NPCs would default to 6 in any skill it was reasonable for them to have.

Of course, since I currently don't have any method at all for advancement in skills--there are mechanics for advancing in Notoriety, Loot, the Bribery Pool, and making a better ship, but not for individual skill upgrades--being able to increase a skill that doesn't come up in character creation isn't particularly useful. Hmm. Must think about this. I'm still gnawing over how to work out character advancement, if I include it at all in that sense.

Bravado resists intimidate, intimidate resists sweet talk, sweet talk resists bravado?

But then what would Bravado do to other people? Work like a bluff?

I dunno. Just thinking aloud.

What skill would I use if I wanted to smuggle something effectively?

iago wrote: What skill would I use if I wanted to smuggle something effectively?