Poor & Terrible Skill Ranks: For When Mediocre Just Isn't Bad Enough

[bibliophile20]

A thought, spawned from the making of a 9 year-old NPC:
Is it possible, workable, and/or even advisable to assign skills to the Poor and Terrible ranks? 

Expanding  on the thought:
Would it be a workable idea to assign a skill to a rank below Mediocre, and potentially get a rebate on skill points, to help depict a deficiency in the character as compared to an average adult person?  Or should those be compels against the character's aspects?

My current thought on limiting this to avoid abuse is that the pyramid still applies, just in reverse: you can't have more Poor skills than you have Average skills, and you can't have more Terrible skills than you have Poor skills. 

The thought came from working on a 9 year-old child NPC; she shouldn't have even Mediocre Endurance, and, as a child, having a +0 Might (with only needing a +3 on the dice to pick up and move a sofa!), or be able to, 1 time out of 81 tries, be able to afford something under $10,000 with a Mediocre Resources.

Thoughts?

[devonapple]

Allowing sub-Mediocre skills would require us to potentially drop Stress boxes when applicable.
I'd reduce or trump extraordinary results with a Compel against an immaturity-related High Concept.

[wyvern]

I don't reduce stress boxes for sub-mediocre skills.  And I do use them all the time - for an ordinary person, there are plenty of skills that *default* to -2.  For example, survival, weapons, lore, guns, burglary...  All of these are things that, for an example, I personally just can't do unless I get really lucky, or have a lot of time to do the research and set things up (i.e. take extra time on several preparatory maneuvers.)

I treat a skill value of +0 as being mediocre... for someone who actually makes common use of that skill.  Thus, PCs defaulting to +0 on skills is something that makes them *special*, a cut above the normal human.

I wouldn't give any rebates, though.  And keep in mind, the pyramid is a PC-only thing; the only times I use it for NPCs are when I know that NPC is likely to "join the party" so to speak, and thus needs to be balanced against the PCs for relatively long term use.  (Or, ok, when I'm just having fun statting up a character for my own entertainment.)
If anything, just move the base of the pyramid up or down; if someone starts with -2 everywhere, then buying up to -1 costs them a skill point, and their peak skill is likely to be +1 or +2 at the most.  Which, hey look at that, fits right in with the book's notion on what an NPCs skill in the-thing-they-do-for-a-living ought to be - +1 up to maybe +3 for particularly good musicians / programmers / truck drivers / whatevers.

[Haru]

Well, as we have 2 stress boxes per default, so poor could drop that to 1 stress box, terrible to 0, so you would have to take a consequence for even the tiniest scratch, which seems about right.

As for the chances blibliophile, that is what the dice are for I think. At least in the case of resources, it would not be the case of the character suddenly having a lot of money, but he would be able to get what he needs with the resources he has. Like he found someone selling stuff that fell of a truck. If you don't want that to happen, you can always compel it to.

But I like the use of negative skills. Do you refund the skill points? So if you have 25 skill points and take 1 skill at poor and 1 at terrible, you have 28 skill points for the rest. I would do it like that. It might empower minmaxing even more, but if it is just for show, you would only need compels and not negative skill points.

[Richard_Chilton]

I can't see the system working for PCs, but NPCs could have lower skills.

Right now I'm thinking about Amber Diceless, where the starting value for stats were "Amber" and if you wanted to you could sell down to either "Chaos" (+10 points) or "Human" rank (+25).  If you had mere Human rank in something it didn't matter if you average, high average, or near the best a human could be - you were only Human rank and you wouldn't really be a speed bump for anyone who had Amber rank.

But maybe....

I'd suggest there would have to be limits for going below zero - otherwise everyone would have their dump skills at -2.  Say a negative pyramid where you couldn't have more at -2 than you had at -1 than you had at zero.  That would mean that the more skills you had at +1 or better the few you could have a -1 or -2, suggesting some bleed over between skills.

The problem is how to reward something like that.... Giving more skill points seems counter intuitive... say for every two points below zero you got an extra refresh, so have two skills at -1 and one at -2 would give +2 refresh.  And, like the refresh you get for being a Pure Human, these refresh could be lost if you raised or otherwise chained your skills...  And to raise a skill back up it would cost a skill point, which basically means you're exchanging skill for power.

And I'm not sure if exchanging things that way would break the system.

Richard

[InFerrumVeritas]

I think this sort of thing is best represented by an aspect and several compels against it.  "You're nine.  You can't drive. -2 on your skill roll.  You can try, and you've seen it done but this won't be pretty."

[TheMouse]

In general, when Fate wants to represent someone being particularly bad at something, it uses Aspects to do that. People tag the, "Just a little girl," Aspect to gain a bonus, or something happens in compel land.

However, this is not to say that Fate is inimical with negative traits. It's not like, "Oh, no! You're 2 or more numbers below average!" *explodes* Just remember that if you allow the player to allocate the points gained for negative traits, your little girl is going to be really good at some other stuff. This will tend to turn all children into prodigies.

[devonapple]

I feel that applying a balance mechanism to this sort of thing opens the door for abuse. Either by rewarding terrible skills with bonus skill points elsewhere, or by providing Refresh, which can then be spent on Stunts.

And then, the question hypothetically, is: why should a Kid (who lowered some skills below Mediocre) get more Stunts or Fate Points than a Cop?

I think we want to look to Aspects to fill in those niche cases where other systems have modifiers. Are you small? Only matters if you have a Fate Point to spend on your "Plucky Kid" Aspect.

Putting in hard-wired limitations for these things risks bringing us back to creating a codex of situational modifiers, which is counter to the spirit of the FATE system.

[sinker]

I'm with Devon on this. I don't see any reason not to have skills below mediocre (especially for NPCs), but I don't know if giving points of any kind in return is ideal. I don't think it's really a great method for PC's in general, and I think I'd rather compel in most of those instances.

[Sanctaphrax]

I don't think there's any balanced way to do this. Having Poor Craftsmanship or Performance will essentially never make a difference to many characters. Any benefit would be too much. And no benefit is clearly not enough.

So I'd use compels for the kid.

The things that you mention about Might and Resources are just wonkiness resulting from the fact that you actually roll those skills. If it bugs you, make those skill trappings (and maybe some others) unrolled. It probably won't break anything.

[Tedronai]

And then, the question hypothetically, is: why should a Kid (who lowered some skills below Mediocre) get more Stunts or Fate Points than a Cop?

Here's a better question: why should a kid be built on the same budget (feet in the water, chest deep, etc) as a cop?

[InFerrumVeritas]

Here's a better question: why should a kid be built on the same budget (feet in the water, chest deep, etc) as a cop?

To make it so that everyone in the party can contribute equally.

[Haru]

Here's a better question: why should a kid be built on the same budget (feet in the water, chest deep, etc) as a cop?

Being a hero is not a question of age, at least not in a story sense. The kid as a PC is more of a hero than any run of the mill NPC that is just there to add color to a scene, even if that NPC is a whole lot older than the kid. And in being a hero, the kid and the cop can be equally so, just in different ways, according to their concept. See Ivy

[zenten]

I think rather than giving "negative skills" moving the skill default (and thus the whole pyramid) down might work.

[devonapple]

Going forward, we should probably specify whether a particular scheme is intended for just NPCs or for PCs as well.