Skills in the Near Apocalypse

[Anderlith]

I'm making a skill list for a for a game in making.

Skills will be divided into Basic & Advanced. Anyone can learn Basic skills but Advanced skills are those that need to be taught traditionally or involve intense study. Some Basic skills will be prereqs for Advanced skills
I.e. You need 3 ranks of Herbalism to get Surgery.

I'm having a hard time coming up with skills without being too general or too specific.

[Ravens_cry]

Hmm, Water Wisdom? You are adept at finding water and you know what are signs of water is safe and not safe to drink.
Butchery, Hunting, Tracking, and Plant Lore (what's edible, what's not, when it's in season, etcetera). would also be useful. Making shelter could also be its own skill, as could be camouflage as an advanced skill.
Some interpersonal skills also sound appropriate. Knowing how to bargain for items you need as well to calm down and appease who try to take by force are both valuable skill. The tricky part is you want to be able to make a character who is good at this, but you also don't want roll play to replace role play.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Hmm, Water Wisdom? You are adept at finding water and you know what are signs of water is safe and not safe to drink.
Butchery, Hunting, Tracking, and Plant Lore (what's edible, what's not, when it's in season, etcetera). would also be useful. Making shelter could also be its own skill, as could be camouflage as an advanced skill.
Some interpersonal skills also sound appropriate. Knowing how to bargain for items you need as well to calm down and appease who try to take by force are both valuable skill. The tricky part is you want to be able to make a character who is good at this, but you also don't want roll play to replace role play.
Can I suggest something like Natural Resource Knowledge as a better name for Water Wisdom?

Butchery - yes, if you puncture certain organs (like the lower bowel) while gutting an animal you can contaminate the meat and make it poisonous, and some animals have organs that are toxic to consume, or they are only edible at certain times of the year. Plus some forms of butchery can be hazardous to the butcher (for instance, opening shellfish risks a knife in the palm, while boning a joint can lead to a blade in the femoral artery, which is why some people wear chainmail gloves or aprons), and the more skillful you are, the more meat you can get per animal, and the quicker you can get it.

You can also potentially split it into fowl, fish/shellfish and animals. While the left over body parts can be useful with the right skills (and not just tanning skins for leather).

Plant Lore could also split into food and the aformentioned Herbalism.

Scavenging and jury-rigging might be very useful if it's post-apocalyptic. And I agree you'll need trading/interpersonal-type skills.

I'd also suggest some advanced skills might need multiple basic skills - for your surgery example, you might need herbalism (natural anaesthetics and antibacterials), but also first aid (anatomical knowledge and post-operative care). Maybe even some butchery for the actual cutting :smallamused:.

[TheOOB]

I'm making a skill list for a for a game in making.

Skills will be divided into Basic & Advanced. Anyone can learn Basic skills but Advanced skills are those that need to be taught traditionally or involve intense study. Some Basic skills will be prereqs for Advanced skills
I.e. You need 3 ranks of Herbalism to get Surgery.

I'm having a hard time coming up with skills without being too general or too specific.

This is a hard issue to help with, because it depends on so many factors. How your skill system should work, and how specific or general the skills should be depends a lot on the mechanics of the system and the feel you want it to have. A system that has base physical and mental attributes needs less broad skills, whereas a system where skills are all you have needs skills to be as broad as possible. Areas where the game mechanics are dense needs more specific skills, where areas that are more loose can afford more broad skills. (eg, a system with deep tactical combat might have a dozen skills for different weapons, but one one or two for social situations). Setting also plays a role, a sci-fi setting might have one skill for animal handling, tracking, survival, and nature knowledge, while a survival focused setting may well need to split those all into separate skills(but in turn only have one "drive" skill)

Having skills as prerequisites for skills is something I generally avoid. The point of a skill system is customization, and if you force players along certain paths you're losing some of that. You may find more value out of making classes of some sort that give some abilities, but keeping the skills more free to customize beyond said classes.

Skill costs is also an important issue. If combat is important to your game, and skills determine combat ability, non combat skills need to be broad and very effect, as any point put in a non combat skill is a point you didn't use to help your character survive a fight. If things like combat are handled outside of the skill system you have more leeway, as the opportunity cost for getting non-combat abilities is not as high. You also have to consider your rules for things like knowledge or crafting skills, these skills often have little direct effect, but are very flavorful, so how do you encourage players to take them instead of more "practical" skills.

For anyone looking to make skill systems, I'd suggest reading Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, second edition, and Legend of the Five Rings, fourth edition. Both have interesting takes on skills that will make you rethink the way D&D and White Wolf do their systems. Neither are perfect, but both are interesting and educational.

[Ravens_cry]

Can I suggest something like Natural Resource Knowledge as a better name for Water Wisdom?

Butchery - yes, if you puncture certain organs (like the lower bowel) while gutting an animal you can contaminate the meat and make it poisonous, and some animals have organs that are toxic to consume, or they are only edible at certain times of the year. Plus some forms of butchery can be hazardous to the butcher (for instance, opening shellfish risks a knife in the palm, while boning a joint can lead to a blade in the femoral artery, which is why some people wear chainmail gloves or aprons), and the more skillful you are, the more meat you can get per animal, and the quicker you can get it.

You can also potentially split it into fowl, fish/shellfish and animals. While the left over body parts can be useful with the right skills (and not just tanning skins for leather).

Plant Lore could also split into food and the aformentioned Herbalism.

Scavenging and jury-rigging might be very useful if it's post-apocalyptic. And I agree you'll need trading/interpersonal-type skills.

Heh, Water Wisdom is pretty corny, but Natural Resource Knowledge sounds far too broad, in my opinion.
I like the idea of jury rigging and scavenging skills, yes.
As society breaks down, so do the supply chains, so knowing how to make do and repair is vital.


I'd also suggest some advanced skills might need multiple basic skills - for your surgery example, you might need herbalism (natural anaesthetics and antibacterials), but also first aid (anatomical knowledge and post-operative care). Maybe even some butchery for the actual cutting :smallamused:.
I like that! Certainly something to be expanded on. Another idea is that some skills can sub for other skills, but at a penalty. Say you're a vet, but they need a doctor, or vise versa!

[Anderlith]

The setting is a postmodern dark age. Society still exists, no one has dropped a bomb. But enough war, infrastructure loss, & socioeconomical collapse caused everything to break apart, so its like the middle ages, old world ruins being used by opportunistic warlords & such. There are still nations & city-states. No MadMax or Fallout apocalypse.

@TheOOB, I recognize this & that's why I'm asking for help. Combat is a big thing but not everything, character do not gain XP by defeating things but I do have a focus on combat.
I like the idea that small skills open you up for big skills because you can't put together a generator without learning some Tool Use, & you can't drive a tank without being able to cross skills with a car.

[The Great Wyrm]

Some crafting skills:
-Mechanics: make things with moving parts (crossbow, bicycle, waterwheel)
-Materials can generally be made (scrap metal is plentiful and can be melted down)

-Chemistry: make chemical things (distilled alcohol, biodiesel, batteries, gunpowder, smoke bombs, acids, water purification tablets, simple poisons, simple medicines)
-Materials usually need to be scavenged. Some are common, some are uncommon.

-Electronics: make things that use electricity (electric motor/generator, flashlight, radios of various types, simple automated systems)
-All but the most simple materials need to be scavenged. Some are common, some are uncommon.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

The setting is a postmodern dark age. Society still exists, no one has dropped a bomb. But enough war, infrastructure loss, & socioeconomical collapse caused everything to break apart, so its like the middle ages, old world ruins being used by opportunistic warlords & such. There are still nations & city-states. No MadMax or Fallout apocalypse.
Don't forget that a lot of effort was put into keeping government working in the event of nuclear war during the Cold War, so, even if there's been a slow decline rather than a single catastrophic event, there's likely to be remnants of official bodies still around, possibly at varying stages of effectiveness - the capital and a few cities and towns scattered around could be very much under official control, but anything further than, say, 10-20 miles away is on their own.

Major facilities could become centres of population - a power station for example, or a hospital. And if there's something like a nuclear weapons silo, there could be a lot of interested parties trying to control it.

Going back to skills - if there's very few or no places making ammunition, then skills like arrow and bow making would be very useful, forging and smithing to turn scrap metal into proper items (rather than just jury-rigging things together in a Scrapheap Challenge way), construction skills to build a forge (masonry and wood working), dig ditches and so on, plus charcoal making.

Weaving would become quite an important skill as mass produced clothes and fabrics phase out, and you can throw in arts and crafts skills like basket weaving, pottery, plus farmyard skills such as shoeing horses, sheep shearing, dry stone wall building etc.

[Thisguy_]

Computer Use could be a skill. If we're postmodern, pretty much all the PCs will know how to the Internet, but having practical knowledge outside of that could help them uncover plot hooks or bonus information. Is the Internet still around?

[LnGrrrR]

I like the idea of basic skills adding up to a complicated skill, but I don't think they necessarily have to be codified. Say, for instance, that your character wants to build a car. There's a few ways to do it.

1) Have a skill labeled "Automotive Repair". This is a bit too specific in your generic RPG, so probably not the best.

2) Have a skill labeled "Repair". It might take multiple checks to create a working car, with each failure adding to the time needed or lessening the quality of the car. You could also add a bonus for skills that might enhance your chances. (For instance, the "Drive" skill may give you a bonus to your roll.)

3) Require multiple skills to finish a complicated task. Similar to 2, but you need both Repair AND Drive to make the check. (Perhaps adding both skills together and dividing by 2.) Shadowrun somewhat does this; most skill checks are a combination of an attribute and a skill.

There are other ways I'm sure, but I'm most familiar with one of the three sets above. 3 is the most interesting, but requires you to give a healthy amount of skill points unless you want your players to be handicapped. (Which you might! Depends on how awesome you want the PCs to be.)

[Strigon]

Architecture and engineering are important, too.
Knowing if a building is structurally sound, helping make fortifications (or bringing them down) would most certainly be an asset.