See Also: Improving Skills, Skills Martial, Skills Magical, Skills Other
Skills are the knowledge both physical and mental to accomplish tasks. Anyone can pick up a sword and swing it, but someone with even a little bit of training will swing it more effectively.
Skills are used to judge how well or even if an action can be performed. For example anyone can ride a horse, but not anyone can make a horse: jump or recover from a start. So while horse riding is not skill needed to ride a horse having the skill significantly improved a characters ability to respond to adversity or perform an action in difficult circumstances.
A Skill Check is performed to determine the success or failure of an action. They fall into 2 categories: Opposed and Unopposed.
The checks are performed when the character's action can be affected by an opponent. The character makes a skill check and if successful the action may succeed. The opponent can use their skill check and block the action. If the opponent makes their skill check, the action fails. Note: Melee is special subset of Opposed Skill Checks that is explained here Rules Melee.
This skill check applies when the act is not dependent upon another creature. For example climbing a wall is an unopposed skill check. A GM can rate how successful the action is by the size of the GAP. In most cases simply rolling beneath the skill is sufficient. The GAP can be used in circumstances where a less then perfect result might be significant.
For example say the player is climbing down a cliff. At the bottom of the cliff is a band of goblins. If the player were to dislodge too much debris while climbing he might be noticed by the goblins. Even though the player rolls below their skill check (IE they don't fall) they might have a small gap and GM could consider that they knocked loose a rock, potentially alerting the goblins below. In fairness the GM should say what the gap threshold is in advance. "If your GAP is less the 10, then some debris from your climb, could alert the Goblins"
Prerequisite Example: Basic Melee provides you with the general ability to survive in hand to hand combat. Blades skill provides you with the ability to use a sword in hand to hand combat with competence. However you can not learn the Blades skill without first learning Basic Melee. Basic Melee is a prerequisite skill for Blades.
Skill Attribute Example: Blades is based on the dexterity attribute. The character has a dexterity of 50. The character has a skill value of 50 in Blades.
Improved Skill Value Example: Blades is based on the dexterity attribute. The character has a dexterity of 50. The character has a skill value of 50 in Blades. The character invests additional skill points into Blades and is skill level 3 in blades. The characters skill value for Blades is 50+(5*3) = 65%.
Page Last Updated: 2008-04-09 07:35:36