Skills

If aspects define who a person is, skills define what he can do and how he does it. Some skills are straightforward, like Cohen's Shooting and his capability with a sword. Others are more open, like Tharen's ability to get what she needs through her resources and charisma. And Hellstrom's own capability to wield the forces of magic.

A skill is a word that describes a broad family of competency at something— such as Athletics, Academics, or Deceit—which your character might have gained through innate talent, training, or years of trial and error. Skills are the basis for everything your character actually does in the game that involves challenge and chance (and dice).

Skills are rated on the adjective ladder. The higher the rating, the better your character is at the skill. Taken together, your list of skills gives you a picture of that character’s potential for action at a glance—what you’re best at, what you’re okay at, and what you’re not so good at.

We define skills in two ways in Fate—in terms of the game actions that you can do with a skill, and the context in which you can use them. There are only a handful of basic game actions, but the number of potential contexts is infinite.

Full Article: Actions

We cover these in more detail in Actions and Outcomes, but here’s a quick reference so that you don’t have to flip all the way over there right now.

• Overcome: True to its name, you tackle some kind of challenge, engaging task, or hindrance related to your skill.
• Create an Advantage: Whether you’re discovering something that already exists about an opponent or creating a situation that helps you succeed, Creating advantages allows you to discover and create aspects, and lets you get free invocations of them.
• Attack: You try to harm someone in a conflict. That harm may be physical, mental, emotional, or social in nature.
• Defend: You try to keep someone from harming you, getting past you, or creating an advantage to use against you.

There are also some special effects that some skills perform, such as giving you additional stress boxes for a conflict.

Even though there are only four actions that all skills adhere to, the skill in question lends context to the action. For example, both Burglary and Crafts (see the default skill list below) allow you create an advantage, but only under very different contexts—Burglary allows you to do it when you’re casing a place you’re about to break into, and Crafts allows you to do it when you’re examining a piece of machinery. The different skills let you differentiate the PCs’ abilities from one another a bit, allowing each person to have a unique contribution to the game.

These skills anyone can take. All skills on this list start out a Mediocre(+0) unless character development demands that they start lower. As an example, a purely spiritual being would not have a Physique skill.

Power skills, sometimes called Restricted Skills, can only be chosen by a character that has one or more aspects dedicated to why a character can access a power skill. As an example a character has Priestess of Vayne as an aspect, she could easily justify taking several of the power skills related to the powers of her god or an Elemental can take the Elemental power to reflect their natural abilities.

All power skills, unless otherwise noted, have a range equal to your line of sight (or other targeting sense) and can be split as a spray attack.