FATE Da Cool Shit! Skill: Ingenuity

Overcome: Ingenuity allows you to build, break, or fix machinery, presuming you have the time and tools you need. Often, actions with Ingenuity happen as one component of a more complex situation, making it a popular skill for challenges. For example, if you’re just fixing a broken door, neither success nor failure is interesting; you should just succeed and move on. Now, if you’re trying to get your car to start while a pack of werewolves is hunting you...

Create an Advantage: You can use Ingenuity to create aspects representing features of a piece of machinery, pointing out useful features or strengths you can use to your advantage (ARMOR-PLATED, RUGGED CONSTRUCTION) or a vulnerability for you to exploit (FLAW IN THE CROSS-BEAM, HASTY WORK). Creating Ingenuity advantages can also take the form of quick and dirty sabotage or jury-rigging on mechanical objects in the scene. For example, you might create a MAKESHIFT PULLEY to help you get to the platform above you, or throw something into the ballista that’s firing on you to give it a JAMMED PIVOTING JOINT and make it harder to hit you.

Example Stunts:

• Always Making Useful Things. You don’t ever have to spend 1 fate point (FP) to declare that you have the proper tools for a particular job using Ingenuity, even in extreme situations—like being imprisoned and separated from all your stuff. This source of opposition is just off the table.
• Better than New!. Whenever you Succeed with Style on an overcome action to repair a piece of machinery, you can immediately give it a new situation aspect—with a free invocation—instead of a boost, reflecting your overall improvements.
• Surgical Strikes. When using Ingenuity in a conflict involving machinery, you can filter out unwanted targets from whole zone attacks without having to divide up your shifts.