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Skill (role-playing Games)




During Character Creation , A Player Character 's skills are generally chosen from a long list of such skills. A character may have a fixed number of starting skills, or they may be paid for using Character Point s. In contrast to Attributes , very few games fix a player's skills at the start of the game, instead allowing players to increase them by spending Experience Point s or during Levelling Up . Since some skills are likely to be more useful than others, different skills often have different costs.

Skills usually influence a character's chance to succeed by adding to the relevant attribute. In some games (such as GURPS ), each skill has a specific base attribute to which it is always added; in others (such as Ars Magica ), a skill can be added to different attributes depending on what's most relevant at the time. Some games (such as Feng Shui ) add the base attribute to the skill at character creation time; after that, it is independent of the attribute and is used instead of the attribute rather than adding to it. Most games have a fixed penalty for attempting a task without a relevant skill; Shadowrun gives a complex network of penalties for using similar skills.