Unknown Armies:Body skills
The skills governed by your Body stat are anything you do with strength or endurance. It covers practices that are physically taxing or that require training and muscle memory, like the Martial Arts skill. Body can also govern inborn physical traits like "gorgeous" or "freakishly tall."
Your free Body Skills are General Athletics and Struggle. The first is any basic physical activity—running, jumping, throwing balls or rocks. The second is fighting without guns, using your fists, knives, baseball bats, etc.
Free Body Skill: General Athletics
General Athletics 15%. Running, jumping, swimming, catching, hitting—all that stuff you spend some time doing as a kid, including organized sports. This is a poor substitute for specialization, though. If you're playing dollar-a-point volleyball against someone with a Volleyball skill, you have to make a significant skill check. If the winner gets the loser's car, it's a major check.
What General Athletics means
| 10s | You can hit a fly ball—sometimes. |
| 20s | This is about average for someone with an inactive lifestyle. |
| 30s | This is about average for someone with an active lifestyle. |
| 40s | This level of skill is appropriate for someone with a very active lifestyle. |
| 50s | If you you're on the company softball team, you pitch and bat clean-up. |
| 60s | You could play AAA baseball, or possibly be a pro in a less-lucrative sport. |
| 70s | You could be on a professional baseball, basketball, or football team. |
| 80s | You could be a top professional athlete. |
Free Body Skill: Struggle
Struggle 15%. When you have to put the hurt on someone, this is how you do it. Even if you don't know Lotus Form from Lotus Notes, you can try to dodge, throw haymakers, pinch, spit, and bite. Besides, you might get lucky and roll that 01, right? If you want a martial-arts skill such as Tae Kwon Do or Savate, that's what Struggle becomes.
If you make Struggle your obsession skill—calling it Martial Arts or Big Brawl or whatever—then you get Cherries.
What Struggle Means
| 10s | Your combat skills are pretty much limited to slapping, shin kicks, and hair pulling. |
| 20s | This is about right for someone who grew up in a nasty neighborhood but who has outgrown weekly fisticuffs. |
| 30s | You're a skilled fighter. Nothing really impressive, but you're the equal of the average unarmed mugger. |
| 40s | If you've studied the martial arts, you may have your black belt. |
| 50s | If you don't pound on people for a living, you could. |
| 60s | You're a match for two average opponents, even if they've got knives. |
| 70s | You could go toe-to-toe with most pro boxers. |
| 80s | Your body is a finely tuned killing machine. |
Body Skill Examples
Distracting Physique. There's something about your body that just draws stares. Maybe you're almost inhumanly beautiful. Or maybe you have a gigantic goiter on your neck, a filmed-over eye, or one arm is a foot longer than the other. In any event, whenever someone sees you for the first time, you can make a Distracting Physique roll. If you succeed, the viewer is freaked out and is at -10% to all skills until you leave his presence. Unfortunately, this only works once per target—and it works on your allies as well as your enemies.
Hold Your Breath. You can hold your breath a freakishly long time. Normally a person can hold their breath number of seconds equal to their Body score. Then they have to breathe. Not you; you can hold your breath for an extra second for each point you put in this skil..
Hold Your Liquor. Normally people take penalties for sucking down booze like a dissipated writer; some people with iron guts can imbibe like William Faulkner and show no appreciable effects. At that point where an unskilled drinker would start taking penalties, the GM rolls this skill for you. If the roll succeeds, you don't take the penalty. If it fails, you still do—but you don't know it until you try to make a roll on your own. You cannot negate the effects of more than four drinks within a six-hour period.
Large And Hard To Move. You've got a low center of gravity, so you're hard to knock off your feet. Any attack or effect that would knock you down only does so if the person who rolled for it rolled over your Large And Hard To Move skill. (Note that you can also be Small And Hard To Move; ever try to push over someone who weighs 140 pounds and is only four feet tall?)
Do-it-yourself Body skills
Climbing, Boxing, Weight Lifting, Work Without Rest, Marathon Running, Football, Basketball, Judo, Swimming, Enduring Torture.