FATE: Skills vs. Abilities
Alright, y’all, I need some help here. After my rant the other week about the skill bloat, I started looking at Strands of FATE and the way they do things. As of right now, I’m really torn between skills and abilities.
Why Skills?
Skills are really nice because each is good at exactly what it should be. If you’re a sneaky person, you have a high Stealth. Very good shot? High Guns. Also, it’s what we’re used to. Up until now, all FATE games have had skills (that I am aware of).
Another nice thing is that you can flavor your character how you want with skills. A high Weapons skill can be flavoured as brute strength just as easily as an agile dervish. Indeed, skill lists can be customized to model your specific setting.
Why Abilities?
First off, abilities are cut-and-pastable. Especially with Strands of FATE’s abilities, the same set can work for most settings. All characters from most games can understand the need for Perception, Knowledge, and Empathy.
With a smaller list of abilities, it’s easier to stat up NPCs on the fly. Give ‘em a 2 in everything (2 is average in Strands), and beef up what they would be good at.
Downsides of Skills
For all the good that skills do, they do have their fair share of headaches. Since each skill is self-contained, you need to buy-up many skills that seem to go together. For example, Presence and Rapport are very similar in effect, but are seen as different enough to warrant two different skills.
Same thing with Alertness and Investigation. GM calls for Alertness, while players say “I’m rolling Investigation.” Are passive and active really that different? Also, many people group Weapons/Fists/Melee and Might. Stronger people hit harder.
Because of this, we run into the skill bloat that I talked about last time.
Downsides of Abilities
Abilities have their drawbacks, too. When you scale back, many things start getting thrown together. When this happens, you get the “Dex is God” problem. Many skills can be logically grouped together where you get one Must Have ability, like Agility for Physical, or Knowledge for Mental.
This also has the unfortunate problem of throwing things that really don’t belong in any of the abilities into the lest crazy ability. For example, how do you hack a computer? Is it your Knowledge of computers, your ability to Reason through the process, or your Crafty computer skills?
Closing Remarks
So there are benefits and drawbacks to both skills and abilities. They both have good qualities, too. What do you think, interwebs? Please help me decide!
