Unknown Armies:Skills

Skills are a narrow application of stats. You can be a huge strong guy, but if you've never been in a fight or got trained to throw a punch, a lot of people can clean your clock.

Skills work on a percentile basis—from 1-99. You roll percentile dice and compare the result to your skill. How this works depends on the situation, since you make one of three different kinds of skill checks.

There is a limit to how high your starting skill ratings can be. The limit depends on which kind of campaign you are going to play:

• Street-level maximum: 55%
• Global-level maximum: 70%
• Cosmic-level maximum: 85%

If you have a good reason for a higher starting skill than allowed, you can ask the GM for approval. But starting with a single skill to high cripples your other skills within that stat.

There is no comprehensive skill list. You can pretty much define any skill you want, but the GM has to ok it first.

One rule: Your skill number can never exceed its governing stat. If you have body 30, no way are you going to be able to handle the training to get boxing at 45%.

Buying skills

As with stats, you have a certain amount of points to spend on skills. But unlike stats, there is no fixed list. You can take as many or as few different skills as you like. It's better to take a few skills at higher scores than lots of skills at lower scores.

The amount of points you have to spend on skills is based on the stat that governs those skills, because every skill is tied to a single stat. If you have a Body of 60, that gives you 60 points to spend on Body-based skills.

You also get some bonus points you can distribute among your skills regardless of which stat they are tied to. These bonus points are based on the kind of campaign you are creating a character for:

• Street-level bonus points: 15
• Global-level bonus points: 70
• Cosmic-level bonus points: 125

The four groups of skills are: Body skills, Speed skills, Mind skills, and Soul skills.

Notes on skills

Free skills

Before you spend any points on skills, you get some free skills per stat right off the bat. All of these begin at 15% except for Initiative, which starts at half your Speed score. You can use some of your points to improve them, or just let them be and spend the points on something else. As a quick reference, the free skills are:

• Body: General Athletics, Struggle
• Speed: Dodge, Driving, Initiative
• Mind: General Education, Notice, Conceal
• Soul: Charm, Lying

Skill names

You can call your skills whatever you want. Rename the free skills if you like. Instead of Struggle, you could use Take 'Em Down Street-Style, or make boring old Driving into Reckless Driving.

Skill penumbras

A skill is more than a direct action. It's also the knowledge you have related to that skill. This area of knowledge around a skill is the penumbra. Your Firearms skill lets you shoot guns, but it's also the skill you use for knowledge about firearms: what the gun laws are in your area, who sells guns on the black market, how much a gun is worth, and so on. The penumbra is abstract knowledge, it's knowledge of people with similar skills and interests, and so on.

Got a skill in Egyptology? The skill's penumbra means you know about current Egyptian antiquities exhibits touring the country's museums, or who can figure out how old that mummy in your basement is, or where to sell stolen grave goods. It's all right there in that one skill.

The higher your skill, the wider your penumbra. Someone with a Firearms skill of 30 is unlikely to know any arms smugglers. Someone with an Egyptology of 70 is on a first name basis with nationally recognized experts in the field.

Obsession skill

Your Obsession isn't just what drives you. It also governs what you're good at. Pick one of your skills as your obsession skill. It's gotta be related to your obsession. Put a star next to that skill. Every time you make a roll on your obsession skill, you can choose to flip-flop the roll. You only get one obsession skill, and never get another, and can't change unless you somehow change your obsession—so pick carefully.

If you're an adept, your school of magick must be your obsession skill.

Unskilled Actions

Sometimes you need to do things that you don't know how to do-you don't have the right skill, or even the right skill penumbra. You may be in luck, if the dice are on your side.

For minor and significant skill checks, you can roll against the appropriate stat. But your stat has a -30 shift. If you make it, you succeed, but only barely-no finesse, no user-definable results, just a lucky but marginal success. Pat yourself on the back and next time, find somebody who knows what she's doing.

For major checks, you can roll a Hail Mary against the appropriate stat. Only matched successes and crits succeed. You don't get to treat the results as a match or a crit, either-they just give you a half-assed, marginal success. Any unskilled failure is unusually bad. The GM comes up with an appropriate screw job as you bumble your way to disaster.

But some things are just plain impossible. Even if you have all day to sit in the cockpit of an F-15, humming to yourself and pushing buttons in relaxed comfort, you're just not going to get it off the ground.

The GM is the final arbiter of all unskilled action attempts. She may choose to impose stiffer penalties if it seems appropriate, and may even disallow attempt outright. In some cases, she may choose to make things easier.