Skills

Skills represent the different specializations a hero has outside of attacking, defending, and using their ancestry features, class features, and equipment. Whenever you make a test, having a particular skill associated with the test increases your chance of success.

Applying Skills

If you have a skill that applies to a test you make, you gain a +2 bonus to the test. For instance, if your hero has the Hide skill, you have a +2 bonus to any test you make that involves hiding yourself. This might include an Agility test to hide behind a barrel, or a Presence test to disappear into a crowd.

The +2 bonus gained for a skill isn't an edge. A player can make a test that has both the +2 bonus for a skill and the +2 bonus for an edge.

You can't apply more than one skill to a test.

Justify the Skill

It's not the Director's job to know every task potentially covered by the skills in the game, or to know the specific skills your hero has. Instead, the Director asks you to make a test using a characteristic and you tell the Director if you think you have a skill that applies. If it's not obvious why the skill applies, tell the Director how your hero is approaching the task and justify why that approach uses the skill. The Director then decides if you get the +2 bonus the skill represents. If the Director disagrees with you, that's the final word.

Approaching problems creatively while remaining reasonable can help you get the most out of your skills. For example, if you're making a Presence test to impress a noble at a party, using the Brag skill is an obvious choice. But what if you don't have that skill? Maybe you could instead try to impress the noble with a brief but exciting lecture about the nature of the elements, making a Presence test using the Magic skill that you do have!

Sometimes you won't have a skill that applies to a test. That's okay! If your characteristic score is decent, you likely have a good chance of success without a skill.

Mixing Characteristics and Skills

Although certain skills are often paired with one characteristic more than others, a skill can apply to a test made using any characteristic that makes sense. The Director has the final say on which characteristic is used to complete a task, and can call for a different characteristic based on the circumstances.

For example, intimidating someone with a purely verbal threat is a Presence test. But if a player describes their character tearing a log in half with their bare hands to intimidate a foe, the Director is likely to call for a Might test instead. The Intimidate skill can apply to both tests. In the same way, scaling the side of a building is covered by a Might test, but if a hero does a series of leaps from one balcony to another to reach a roof, the Director could call for an Agility test instead. The Climb skill applies to both of these tests.

Many Specific Skills

Draw Steel includes a big list of skills, and each is fairly specific. For example, instead of one Athletics skill that covers climbing, jumping, swimming, and lifting heavy objects, your character might use separate Climb, Jump, Lift, and Swim skills. Instead of a Thievery skill that covers picking locks, picking pockets, and disabling traps, the game has three skills: Pick Lock, Pick Pocket, and Sabotage.

Having a wide range of specific skills means you'll frequently make tests that don't use one of your character's skills, simply applying a characteristic. By not having a few broader skills, it means that having a character who covers the spread of every skill is actually impossible. Luckily, the math of the game doesn't require you to have a skill to have a decent chance of success on a test. That means heroes can attempt tasks without the help of a skill just because someone needs to do it, and that's pretty darn heroic!

Since you don't need to worry about your character covering a wide spread of skills, you're free to choose the skills you think fit your hero best and are the most fun to work with. Maybe you're thinking about an elementalist who has a gymnastic background in jumping and tumbling, and who also studied religion and blacksmithing. Having that kind of specific backstory is a big part of cinematic storytelling.

The rules for skills allow for them to be flexibly applied to any test that is appropriate for the skill. This encourages clever thinking. A player can ask the Director, "I want to impress the duke with a story about how I ascended the sheer Cliffs of Azgahnan. Can I use my Climb skill for a +2 bonus to my Presence test?" Getting creative like that is a lot of fun. It paints a visual picture, and it's good tactical thinking! However, if the skills in a game are too broad in the kinds of activities they represent, players inevitably end up applying the same skill over and over again to as many tests as possible. This isn't fun for anyone, and doesn't make a very compelling story.

Edges on Tests With Specific Skills

Certain features and abilities grant a creature an edge on tests made with a specific skill. A creature making a test where the specific skill would apply gains an edge on the test even if they don't have the skill. For example, the conduit's Blessing of Fortunate Weather can create foggy weather that grants creatures who make tests using the Hide skill an edge on those tests. Any creature who attempts to hide in the fog gains an edge on the test as long as the Hide skill would apply to that test, regardless of whether they have that skill or not.

Are All Skills Equal?

When choosing skills for your character, deciding which skills will be most useful depends a lot on the campaign. For instance, the Swim skill might be used constantly during a campaign that takes place on the ocean and has heroes exploring underwater ruins, but it won't come up as much in a campaign that takes place entirely in a vast desert. The Psionics skill might come up a lot in a campaign where voiceless talkers are the main foes, and Magic might be more useful in a game where the heroes take on a circle of evil wizards. If you're worried about whether a skill you'd like to take will be useful, discuss your skill list with the Director after you create a hero. And if a skill doesn't work out, you can always trade it for another skill as you wish (see Changing Character Options in Chapter 2: Making a Hero).

Skill Groups

Skills are broken down into five skill groups: crafting, exploration, interpersonal, intrigue, and lore.

Crafting Skills

Skills from the crafting skill group are used in the creation and appraisal of goods and for jury-rigging contraptions. They are especially useful during rests and downtime.

Rewards for tests made with crafting skills typically include having leftover rare material used in the creation process, knowing a buyer willing to pay extra for goods or items you're appraising, or making a jury-rigged device so amazing that it lasts for more uses than it should.

Consequences for tests made with crafting skills typically include wasting rare materials used in the creation process, greatly overestimating or underestimating an item's value, and poorly jury-rigging a contraption so that it harms people (or at least the wrong people).

Crafting Skills Table

Exploration Skills

Skills from the exploration skill group are used to physically explore the environment around the characters, and to overcome physical obstacles.

Rewards for tests made with exploration skills typically include helping another creature engaging in the same task succeed without needing to also make a test, automatically succeeding on a follow-up test while engaged in the same task, reaching a destination faster than anticipated, and learning about or avoiding an upcoming hazard.

Consequences for tests made with exploration skills include harming yourself, your gear, or your allies; becoming lost; or stumbling headlong into a hazard or a place you were trying to avoid.

Exploration Skills Table

Interpersonal Skills

Skills from the interpersonal skill group are used to socially interact with other creatures, and are particularly useful during negotiations (see Chapter 11). Aside from the Handle Animals skill, you can generally only use interpersonal skills when you attempt to influence creatures who have emotions and who can understand you.

Rewards for tests made with interpersonal skills typically include gaining an extra favor, item, or piece of information from the people or creatures you interact with.

Consequences for tests made with interpersonal skills include making the creature you're interacting with angry, sad, embarrassed, offended, or otherwise upset or uncomfortable. This might cause them to ignore you, storm off, spread rumors about you, attack you, betray you, blackmail you, or otherwise attempt to harm you.

Interpersonal Skills Table

Intrigue Skills

Skills from the intrigue skill group are used in tasks centered around investigation, thievery, and spycraft.

Rewards for tests made with skills from this group typically include helping another creature engaging in the same task succeed without needing to also make a test, automatically succeeding on a follow-up test while engaged in the same task, discovering helpful information in addition to what you set out to learn, and performing an extra bit of clandestine activity in addition to what you set out to do.

Consequences for tests made with intrigue skills include getting caught in the act or failing to notice a detail that places you in danger, such as triggering a trap or walking into an ambush.

Intrigue Skills Table

Lore Skills

Skills from the lore skill group are used to research and recall specific information. They are especially useful during rests and downtime.

Rewards for tests made with lore skills typically include learning an extra piece of useful information.

Consequences for tests made with lore skills typically include learning an incorrect piece of information that seems useful, but which actually works against your interests or wastes time. (It's fun to roleplay these kinds of moments, so lean in!) Alternatively, the Director can make medium and hard tests with lore group skills for each hero in secret, then let the players know the narrative outcome without revealing the outcome of the power roll (see the Optional Rule: Secret Reactive Tests sidebar earlier in this chapter).

Lore Skills Table

For the Director: Make Your Own Skills

Directors should feel free to make their own skills that they feel are relevant and useful to their campaigns and adventures. For instance, the game doesn't have a Brewing skill for brewing ale or a Painting skill for making art because those aren't tasks that typically come up in a game about fighting monsters and saving the world. However, a Director could decide that their campaign involves poisoned barrels of ale and large amounts of counterfeit art, and that adding these two new skills to the game would make it more fun for the players. The Director simply needs to pick a group for these new skills—in this case, crafting makes sense. They then let the players know that they can swap out any crafting skill they have for these new skills.