Skill Basics

Skills

Your ability scores are your raw aptitude; skills are your training and experience at particular tasks, from your background and your adventures. Each skill is keyed to an ability and used for a set of related actions.

Ranks and Skill Points

• At 1st level, two skills start at rank 2 from your chosen background, and every other skill starts at rank 0. Some Genetic traits give extra talents or skills.
• You also start with 6 skill points to spend on new skills or improving current ones, and gain 4 more at every level after 1st.
• Each rank costs 1 skill point. A skill's maximum rank is half your level (rounded down) + 2.

Key Ability

Each skill is tied to a key ability that you add to its checks: skulking through a city at night with Stealth uses Reflex; navigating court politics with Society uses Intellect.

Using a Different Ability

The key ability reflects a skill's most common use, not a hard rule. If a player describes an approach where a different ability genuinely fits the fiction better, the GM can allow it for that check. It isn't a loophole for always rolling your best ability: the approach has to justify the swap. For example:

• Hunting for a trap with Thievery but rolling Perception instead of Reflex: a trained eye for how mechanisms are built and hidden, not nimble fingers.
• A caster trying something wholly unconventional: one player asked to channel Mysticism through an enchanted item to wrench a closing portal open by hand, offering to take a level of Exhaustion if it worked. The GM allowed a Might + Mysticism Skill Challenge instead of a normal Mysticism check, since it was as much a feat of strength and will as of magic.
• Intimidating someone with sheer size and physical menace instead of clever words might use Might instead of Charisma.

When in doubt, the GM asks: does the approach really rely on a different capability than the skill's normal use, or is the player just picking their highest score? The first is worth allowing; the second isn't what this rule is for.

Skill Bonus

Skill Bonus = ranks + key ability + any other bonuses or penalties. It's added to the d20 when you make a check (see Playing the Game). Advantage and Disadvantage levels are applied as usual.

Secret Checks

Sometimes you can't know whether you succeeded. For an action with the Secret trait, the GM rolls for you and tells you the effect without revealing the roll: searching for something hidden, deceiving someone, translating a tricky text, remembering lore. That way you don't know what your character wouldn't. This is the default for Secret actions, but the GM may make some or all of these rolls in the open.

Exploration and Downtime Activities

Activities with the Exploration trait usually take a minute or more; those with Downtime may take a day or more. They usually can't be used in an encounter, though the GM may bend this. If you're not sure you have the time, ask.

Trained Actions

Actions with the Trained trait are harder to do well, so you need at least 1 rank in the action's skill to attempt them. Where older wording says Trained, Expert, Master or Legendary, read 1, 2, 5 and 9 ranks.

Actions in Combat

In an encounter a skill action costs 1 AP unless it says otherwise (② means 2 AP; a reaction costs RP). Track and Cover Tracks become single actions in an encounter. The actions listed for each skill aren't everything you can do with it: if you have an out-of-the-box idea, talk to the GM, who decides which skill fits best (if any).

Skill Challenges

Use a Skill Challenge when a task is too complex or involved for one check, or when you need more shades of success and failure:

1. Decide the skill being used and set the DC.
2. The challenge succeeds if you get 3 successes before 3 failures.
3. A natural 20, or beating the DC by 15 or more, is a success that also removes 1 failure (or counts as 2 successes if there's no failure to remove).
4. A natural 1, or missing the DC by 15 or more, is a failure that also removes 1 success (or counts as 2 failures if there's no success to remove).

How hard is it? The target number (TN) is the lowest d20 roll that succeeds on each check; the chance is of ending with Yes, And, Yes or Yes, But.

Skills at a Glance