Skills

[kofeiiniturpa]

Skills

I was checking out the character sheet a while ago, and I made think what of those will be and/or should be applied since definitely not all of those will get there.

So, instead of another rant about combat, I'll just make a thread about skills overall.

I don't know how many skills there'll be, but just for examples sake let's say there'll be a range of 20 to 30 of them.

Here's a question:
What would you like to see there, and how would you like to see them used in practice, (and if you have a preference, how many skills would you like to see)? A familiar set of combat, utility and diplomatic as seen in many other games? Something more unusual and varied? Something you just made up?
(Eg. "I'd like to see the Motorcycle skill, that governs how well my character can steer at different speeds."; "I'd like to see Diagnose Illness so that I can attempt at diagnosing a patient and if I'm succesful, my chances at healing him/her improve."; "I'd like to see Forgery applied so that I can create more convincing fake ID's so my chances of passing through different levels of security with them improve." ...)

 

[Sardukhar]

Hmm. This is an excellent thread idea and highly relevant, since it will strike to much of what is the heart of an RPG, even more so than combat.

I'd like to see -at least- two skills per attribute. And up to 10, but that would unbalance certain attr, ( hello, REF!), which will happen anyway.

For those of you who don't know, CP2020 uses a Skill+Attribute+Dice ( + gear, environment, etc) system.

Here is the character sheet and list of skills and stats.

Let's assume the weapon skills are in: Pistol, Rifle, Melee, Heavy, Martial Arts. Most of us Refs think SMG should be dropped as a separate skill.

Perhaps Martial Arts is now either REF or BOD, making BOD more useful. Perhaps not.

What others would I expect to see?

INT ones would be Awareness/Notice, Computer Programming, System Knowledge at least. Diagnose Illness...I dunno. Maybe. Or combo DI with First Aide/Medical Tech. Library Search, renamed to Google-Fu? Dunno. Shadow/Track, perhaps. Stock Market! That should affect how well your stocks do by upping your success rate a bit.

ATTR: Tough one. If they even keep this stat, I'd like to see Personal Grooming add to NPC responses, maybe toss in another social skill.

LUCK and MA don't have skills, perhaps they need some. Could put Athletics into MA and leave Luck as it's current boost-stat.

So those are a couple of mine. I'll add more later as other people do, too.

 

[Suhiira]

I don't see many of the INT skills (accounting, anthropology, chemistry, etc.) making it into the game.

 

[wisdom000]

Hehe, I made that available on the site about 2 years before I did IU... when I was still hand drawing every single character in the actual box...

 

[Sardukhar]

Hehe, I made that available on the site about 2 years before I did IU... when I was still hand drawing every single character in the actual box...

Yeah, it's pretty good, actually. I should have posted its pair, with gear and weapons, but this did the job.

 

[Poet_and_Gentleman.598]

No surgery (or anatomy) skills? How are you going to resell organs on the black market then?

or explosives skills? I would expect IEDs to be very highly popular against cyborgs.

No comms/electronic warfare skills? That could give the Marid Auran type the legs up they need against a fully cybered opponent.

I hope they add these three.

 

[Sardukhar]

Those are TECH skills, not INT skills, and I'd hope to see versions of the last two, anyway. First I'd roll into First Aid and Medtech and Diagnose Illness - could be either Tech or Int based.

 

[Suhiira]

No surgery (or anatomy) skills? How are you going to resell organs on the black market then?

INT Biology + SPECIAL Medical tech = Surgery

or explosives skills? I would expect IEDs to be very highly popular against cyborgs.

TECH Demolitions + SPECIAL Jury Rig = IED

No comms/electronic warfare skills? That could give the Marid Auran type the legs up they need against a fully cybered opponent.

TECH Electronics (not on sheet) + ? Commo = EW

There's no reason in the world to have every possible skill available separately. If you include "blanket" type skills (like Biology) you can easily require two or more blanket skills at a certain level to perform/create anything.

This is a problem Traveller has had over the years. Originally there was a very limited skill set that allowed you to any/everything you wanted but over the years more and more specific skills have crept into the system to the point it's now nearly impossible for a character with any significant skill levels (3+) in anything and characters have become more and more specialized to the point of becoming one-dimensional.

 

[Sardukhar]

Originally there was a very limited skill set that allowed you to any/everything you wanted but over the years more and more specific skills have crept into the system to the point it's now nearly impossible for a character with any significant skill levels (3+) in anything and characters have become more and more specialized to the point of becoming one-dimensional.

Yeah, that's annoying. I liked Unknown Armies, where the skills were descriptions of what you could do - the minutaie weren't that important. So as an Emerg doctor, you'd have one thousand skills, sure..but it could all be summed up by "Keeping Your Ass Alive" and "Those Wounds Would Have Killed You If It Weren'T For Me." Or whatever.

Cyberpunk 2020 isn't bad - but a pal of mine and I made ourselves in our mid 20s - skills no higher than 4, I think, typically 2 or 3 - and we had more than 80 points apiece. And that's when we sucked.

 

[Suhiira]

I'm actually pretty liberal with skill points on character creation because I "discourage" one-dimentional characters by having lots of things that involve what many would consider "secondary" or "hobby" skills relevant to getting ahead in the game. This also goes a LONG way toward encouraging role-play.

 

[Calistarius]

In pnp rpg's I used to dump everything into a few skills... but over the years that changed. And during the past 12-15 years I have had more of a tendency to pick one to three or four skills which I consider the "main ones", where I try and get "max" (as in how much your allowed to buy from the start) or close to max in skill, and then the remaining points I spread out over a huge amount of other skills which I find to be relevant, or just plain "normal to have".

In practice it means I have a few skills which I have somewhere between 60-75'ish % chance of successing when using the skill (this often tends to be combat skills for me), which in one of the games I play is represented by having to roll 12-15 or lower on a D20. And then the majority of skills I have tend to be about the 50% chance to succeed mark, which usually of course is represented by having to role 10 or less on a D20 (buying more then 10 tends to start costing more then the base cost, like double the cost for example). And then some skills I put a few points in to get about the 35% mark, so roughly a need to roll 7 or less on a D20. Of course, the game we play the most replaces the D20 with 3D6's (and difficulty is changed by adding or removing D6's to the role, where as in the D20 system you get minut or plus to your D20 roll instead), but the skill levels are virtually the same between the two systems.