Skills

Skills are specialties, areas of knowledge, and stupid human tricks that round out a character and fill in the gaps not covered by hooks, tropes, and trademarks. A character's skill list does not represent an inventory of everything they know. In fact, the vast majority of a character's skills (in the non-game mechanic sense) are already represented by the Hooks, Tropes, and Trademarks. While most games do have a handful of "binary" abilities that can only be used by characters with an appropriate trait--for example, most characters only speak the lingua franca of the default setting unless they take skills in other languages--those are the exception, not the rule. Instead, skills represent abilities that are notable but not notable enough to be a hook. If you think of your game as a TV series, the audience should have a good idea of a character's hooks, trope scores, and trademarks by the end of the first episode. Skills are the little things that are revealed as they become relevant to the story and may never come up again: the character's fluency in French, their interest in philately, the fact that they have a lovely singing voice, or their mastery of Frogger, for example.
The number of skills a character begins the game with is based on their Brain Trope, as shown on the table below.

Brain	Skills
0	2
d4	3
d6	4
d8	6
d10	8
d12	10

Skills do not have a rating and do not affect the character's dice pool. Instead, having an appropriate skill allows the player to ignore a number of 1s equal to their Hero Factor when determining whether they've rolled a Costly Success.

Common Skill Examples

A few general categories of endeavor that work as skills in most games include:

• Foreign Languages (American Sign Language, Klingon, Spanish).
• Knowledge of a particular topic (Astronomy, Biology, History).
• Artistic abilities (Drawing, Sculpting, Topiary).
• Performing talents (Harpist, Puppetry, Sword Swallowing)
• Athletic abilties (Baseball, Climbing, Train Hopping)
• Common/Work skills (Cooking, Fishing, Typing)
• Leisure pursuits (Dancing, Gambling, Sports Fan)
• Minor natural gifts or advantages (Double-Jointed, Good Memory, Keen Eyesight)

Hooks Vs. Skills

In some cases, the line between hooks and tropes can be blurry. When deciding where a particular ability should fall, there are three main considerations:

• Breadth: Hooks are broad, skills are more narrowly-defined. If you're a decent bowler, that's a skill. If you're a perfect physical specimen who eats right, goes to the gym every day, and excels at half a dozen sports, a hook like "Natural Athlete" is more appropriate.
• Training: Skills typically represent amateur or incidental abilities--they're natural talents, self-taught skills, or something you picked up from one class in college or a training program at work. Being good at keeping plants alive is covered by the "Green Thumb" skill. Having a PHD in Botany is a hook.
• Usefulness: Abilities that are likely to significantly affect the outcome of common game activities on a regular basis should typically be bulked up to function as hooks. This doesn't necessarily mean that skills should be useless or even infrequently-used, just that they shouldn't regularly give the character a big advantage in situations where there are meaningful stakes. The premise of the game is a major factor in weighing the usefulness of a potential skill. Being a talented cook is a good example for most games: even if your character cooks every meal the party eats, it's unlikely that their amazing ribs will regularly affect the resolution of major plot points. If you're playing Barbeque Barons: Amazing Adventures in Pork, on the other hand, the cooking skill might be broken down into a number of character classes or trademarks. There might even be an in-depth cooking system where recipes are treated like spells in a fantasy game.