I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the Gamecraft 2.0 skill list was final. I did a little tinkering, and decided to take out the Survival skill. When I created the skill list, I wanted each skill to be general enough to cover a wide variety of uses. For example, Awareness covers virtually everything having to do with sensory perception (or extrasensory perception), including things like danger sense, tracking, and crime scene investigation. Survival was just too . . . narrow. It coved finding food and shelter, both in wilderness and settled environments, but that just seemed like it was too limited in utility, and in practice, playtesters didn’t really use Survival all that much. So, I dropped it. But that left me with eight skills, and that seemed like too few. Nine was a good sweet spot, and I designed character creation around nine skills; any fewer and I’d have to re-examine character creation, and I’m actually quite pleased with how it works now. So that begged the question, what should I replace it with?

While answering that question, I came up with and discarded a number of options. The main problem with virtually every single one was that, while they each covered things that the other skills didn’t, they weren’t universally applicable to different settings. A realistic modern urban setting doesn’t need a Magic skill, and a high-flying Wuxia setting has little use for Pilot or Drive. So what then? The answer was staring me in the face: Skill X.

Simply put, Skill X is a create-your-own-skill slot. The idea is that, when you create a setting for use with Gamecraft 2.0, you decide what Skill X is, and tailor it to the needs of your setting. In a fantasy campaign, you might have Magic, while in a cyberpunk setting you could have a Cyberspace skill. If you want the Survival skill back, it would probably be pretty useful in a post-apocalyptic wastelands-type game, or some other setting where living off the land and finding shelter is important. I’ve already decided that, for Wild Blue, Skill X is Sorcery, and this decision allowed me to create a much better, more flexible magic system than I had originally designed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Gamecraft 2.0, Gamecrafting, Wild Blue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.