TurboPulp: Skills and Skill Rolls

The Core Skills

You have 6 Core Skills, and each is used for different kind of tests.

Skill	Description
Audacity	Your bravery, stubbornness, willpower, and intensity. This is primarily a reactive ability, but use it when under pressure or threatened.
Daring	Physical coordination, speed, and agility. Use this whenever you went to bypass an obstacle, or avoid or survive a threat like a rock rolling towards you.
Ferocity	How fierce you are, and how willing you are to hurt others to get your way. Use this for all kinds of fighting you are competent with, and whenever your goal is to inflict injury on others.
Flair	Your style and charisma. Don’t use this skill to be subtle and unseen, use this to show off, get all eyes on you, and persuade someone of something they really shouldn’t do.
Shenanigans	How subtle, sneaky, and devious you are. Use this when trying to perform actions you don’t want others to see or be able to react to. It’s the perfect skill for hiding or picking pockets.
Tinkering	Your intelligence, perception, and problem solving. Use this skill when trying to figure things out or get something working (or figure out how to stop it working!).

In every setting, you also have one or more extra ratings that look like abilities, which vary with the setting. In Starscape, it is Psionics, and in The Carrington Event it is Eldritch Power. In our example, modern day supernatural game, it is Occult, the ability to harness and channel occult power when given the opportunity. This can be regarded as a 7th skill and is normally something you only get to use a limited number of times per adventure. It can be regarded as the weakest skill – most of the time. If the starting LifePaths do not involve direct experience of certain secrets about the setting, it cannot start above Poor (but it can be increased in play – see Advancement).

If your setting doesn’t have anything unusual or magical, worthy of the 7th skill, that 7th skill probably still exists – just call it Drudgery: your ability to live a normal life, be a normal person. It doesn’t natter that this skill will almost never be used – there probably will be occasions at times that players find a use for it, and the system demands that 7th skill.

Skill Ranks

Starting Skill Ranks

You typically start with one skill each at Great, Good, and Fair, with all extra skills in the setting at Poor. Assign the skills to match your concept, LifePaths, and personal desires. These skills will rise in play and you’ll raise more (see Advancement), and sometimes skills can drop (technically swapping rank with another).

You have an ability rank which starts at Poor, and progresses through Fair, Good, Great, Superb and Spectacular. With each one, you overwrite your lowest skill rank with a skill of that rank. With Fair experience, you start with an extra Fair skill. With Good experience, add a Good and a Fair skill. With Great experience, add a Fair, Good, and Great skill. Since there are only 6 real skills, your Superb and Spectacular ranks each overwrite Fair skills leading to extremely competent characters.

With the GM’s approval, you (or the campaign) might start with a higher Ability Experience Rank, and those have more skills above Poor.

Skill Rolls

Only the player rolls for Skills. Their ability is what matters, primarily. The player describes what their character is doing, and the GM says what NPCs are doing and what is happening in the world, and if these statements are ever opposed by anyone, someone can declare a roll to overcome what has just been said.

If you want to make a roll, you must be able to do what you declare.

• GM: “A storm washes over the city.”
• PC: “I roll to stop the storm.”
• GM: “How do you do that?”
• PC: “Um, I don’t have any way to do that.”
• GM: “Okay, lets ignore that. A storm washes over the city, and then…”

When making a roll, roll two d10 and compare your Score against them.

• If the score beats or exceeds both dice, it is a Complete success, a Strong Success – you achieve your goal with no drawback. You’ll usually get some kind of benefit, like +1 Forward (add +1 on your next roll).
• If your score loses against both dice, it is a Complete Failure, a Miss. Exactly what this means depends on the situation – see Threat and the GM.
• If the score equals or exceeds only one die, it is a Weak Hit and often a Contested Success. Exactly what that means depends on the situation and the roll. It is usually a weak success, one that usually has some blow-back (for instance, you hit an opponent who hits you back), but it is a success.

Successes aren’t that hard to get, so don’t allow players to roll unless there is a reasonable chance of success.

Skill Rolls and Modifiers

Modifiers are rarely applied to skills rolls (but see Threat in a coming post). It’s reasonable to say, “this is a wide chasm, so the player has a penalty to leap it” or “the evil baron is a skilled swordsman so you have a penalty when facing him,” but we don’t do that in this system. If the player leaps the chasm easily, it turns out it’s not as wide as thought or the character is a better jumper, and if the player defeats the evil swordsman handily, they are just showing their ability. It’s a matter of perspective.

A player can sometimes use Traits to get a bonus, and they may suffer a permanent penalty to some skills – see Health and Conditions.

Questionable Situations and LifePaths

The skills are very broad, so situations will come up that don’t seem to make sense. “He’s infected with a alien organism, I’ll use my Tinkering skill to operate this medical scanner to analyze its biology.”

However, remember you are in an adventure. These aren’t normal situations. Very rarely does the player-character need to conduct a long-term scientific project, they just need to get enough of a success for this task. So, it’s usually fine to allow a roll with these broad skills – just remember to frame their actions appropriately, and remember a success is always a success.

Complex Rolls and Multiple Successes

Some tests (rolls) will be defined as harder than usual, and will take multiple successes. Before the first roll is made, the player should be told how many successes it will take.

Each success should achieve something – every roll matters. The player should achieve something with each roll.

Harmful Rolls and GM Moves

Some rolls are more likely than others to inflict harm. For these, see Threat and the GM.