I made a character last week and got stuck on pretty much everything. Then someone gave me a given a wonderful gift, the gift of backwards. The method worked like this:
Take your character concept and build their ultimate, like, 15 refresh uncle nutsy skill tree. In my case, I built a little skyscraper, five blocks high and three blocks wide. Then I was commanded not to fill that in, instead I was to make three 'clouds' under the skill tree.
Bottom Cloud - Skills your character avoids or would not do. (Stealth for a Hawaiian shirt, deceit for a mountie, athletics for a companion cube.)
Next Cloud - Skills that have no real aptitude for or practice at. (Drive skill for an animal, contacts for a newborn, lore for non-clued-in people.)
Top Cloud - Skills you don't practice, but are reasonable to be capable of. (Anything that might have occupied your +1 skill blocks.)
While skills that aren't on your skillblock are rolled at +0, we're imagining skills that would be rolled at +0, -1 and -2 in character. Now comes the fun part, collapsing Controlled Demolition of the building.
We name R6 through R10 as reasonably as we can. We then proceed to Backwards.
R10 Pillar of the Community, 35 skillpoints.
R8 Entrepreneur, 30 skillpoints.
R7 Medical Student, 25 skillpoints
R6 Student, 20 skillpoints.
Pillar needs to drop two columns down, we keep one skill at +5, which for our Pillar is probably resources or contacts. We drop that column down and we're just a smaller version of our ultimate tree. As the tree keeps falling apart it gets more messy so you make some choices: from entrepreneur to med student presence or resources might fall off the top and drop into +0, from med student to student there's a big hit in say...discipline and scholarship.
Because the GM was fiddling with the skillpoints and insisted I have a set of skills for action (athletics, drive, guns) I had to do some serious reworking of the character by the templates I made this way were really helpful in that.
Does anyone else rely on a specific strategy for skills/stunts/powers they find really useful or opinions on those skills/stunts/powers that influence how they use them? (Gaseous Form is gamebreaking so I should never pick it, Alertness comes up too often to drop, you can't get decent lore research down without a High Quality Workspace stunt.)