Author Topic: Skill Options  (Read 2855 times)

Offline Enjorous

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Skill Options
« on: April 11, 2010, 07:39:42 AM »
I was running a character creation session yesterday and one of my players had a really interesting idea that I hadn't thought of. He asked if he could drop certain skills into the negative range in order to boost some of his other skills up by one or two skill points. I scrolled through the PDF and didn't see something specifically with this option and told him I'd have to think about it.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this topic or suggestions?
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Offline Mal_Luck

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Re: Skill Options
« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2010, 07:45:08 AM »
I was thinking about this the other day as well. Perhaps put a limit on how much they can "suck", no getting an extra 8 points for being legendarily crappy at athletics. Maybe make them have to do it in the normal pyramid structure, but I'd still limit it. No more than 5 without good reason.
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Offline Deadmanwalking

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Re: Skill Options
« Reply #2 on: April 11, 2010, 07:48:43 AM »
This is usually a bad idea, because, almost universally, skills overlap, leading to there being nothing you can do with a particular skill that you can't figure out some other skill to do it with. Take the guy with Great Fists and Superb Guns who drops Weapons to Terrible. He basically just got two free points, since with it at Mediocre he'd still never use it.

Now, if you have a way to ensure that a particular skill will come up alot, then maybe allowing it is doable, from a balance standpoint. Athletics (on characters with no Stunts allowing other Dodge skills) and Lore (if, and only if, you use it quite regularly), are the only two that this comes to mind as workable with.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2010, 08:01:06 AM by Deadmanwalking »

Offline kustenjaeger

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Re: Skill Options
« Reply #3 on: April 11, 2010, 09:24:33 AM »
Greetings

If everyone is generally Mediocre at skills then the reason someone is worse (-1) or (-2) should be coming out as an aspect anyway I would have thought.

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Offline void

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Re: Skill Options
« Reply #4 on: April 11, 2010, 01:25:54 PM »
I had this exact same conversation with one of my players. Basically, the answer is, there's no sane reason to do this on the skill sheet directly; this belongs purely as an Aspect, or simply as non-statted fluff.

Reason being: Remember the extremely course granularity of the skill system. Each jump on the scale is fairly significant, since 0 somewhat represents 'random person on the street asked to do something under pressure they probably aren't used to doing that way', and +5 represents 'damn near peak of potential absent other assistive factors'.

Conversely, considering that it's possible to get as much as a shift of 4 either way on your 4dF roll, someone with a base +0 is perfectly capable of doing absurdly horribly already. An intentional drop below mediocre isn't really going to significantly alter results in any real circumstances where the test actually matters. Considering the grade of tests even Feet in the Water tends to get when a roll is actually needed, if you were likely to fail with -1, it's probable you would have failed with +0 as well. Success or failure under those circumstances depends more on the application Aspect invocations and tags more than anything else.

And if being sucky ata particular thing is truly important to the character concept... well, here in Fate land, we use Aspects for things like that, not merely skill points.

After discussing all THAT, if someone still wants to do it, they're probably trying to min-max, since the skills dropped below Mediocre were certainly ones they didn't intend to rely on anyway.

In my opinion, that kind of intent is more than slightly antithetical to a narrative-focused game system like this.

Offline iago

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Re: Skill Options
« Reply #5 on: April 11, 2010, 03:11:45 PM »
I had this exact same conversation with one of my players. Basically, the answer is, there's no sane reason to do this on the skill sheet directly; this belongs purely as an Aspect, or simply as non-statted fluff.

This is correct, with strong emphasis on the aspect part. If you want to *suck* at something, it should be an aspect.  It'll come up as often as needing to be good at what you suck at comes up, and you'll get fate points when it does.
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