There are six primary skills, and in each of them, and everything else, you are assigned one of these ranks.
| Rank: | Abysmal | Terrible | Poor | Fair | Good | Great | Superb | Spectacular | Legendary | Mythical |
These ranks are inspired by the Fudge system, and for the most part it is pretty easy to understand them. But in general, what do they mean?
- Abysmal: When dealing with an ability narratively, you cannot attempt this without failing utterly. You simply cannot succeed at this activity without help. It is given a number, but it is so bad, you can’t expect to succeed without help.
- Terrible: you are literally terrible in this area: incompetent and completely unskilled. Not quite completely disabled in this area, but no far off it. PCs can only be as bad as this through modifiers.
- Poor: You can do this as well as people who have no training. Often, people can do things (like climb trees, or notice their surroundings) without any particular skill. This doesn’t mean you are bad at something, it just means you don’t have any formal experience with it.
- Fair: You have some skill, training, or ability – but not much. For things that you need skill to use, you are the equivalent of a journeyman or apprentice. This is the beginning of real skill, but is considerably more capable than having no training at all.
- Good: You are the equivalent of an adequate professional – you can pursue a career in this skill. You aren’t in any way exceptional, but you are competent.
- Great: The equivalent of an expert professional, someone capable of teaching a class in this subject – you could be a college professor. If in a small group of people like an office, you would be regarded as the group’s expert.
- Superb: A talented expert – you don’t get this good just by spending time on a subject, you must have some innate talent and spend a lot of time on it. You’d stand out even in a conference of expert professionals. You might be regarded as among the best in a city, or similar large group. You’d be in the running for being the best in a nation, and could compete in a national team.
- Spectacular: Like Superb but even more talented. You would be regarded as one of the best in the world, and might be a household name.
- Legendary: You cannot achieve this rank, because with it, you’d be regarded as among the best in history or maybe the best persona alive.
- Mythical: This rank represents either the best who ever lived, or the ability to achieve supernatural feats with the ability. You generally cannot fail at all without some special circumstances.
The ranks of Poor to Spectacular are the ones that might be had by PCs so the rest can be largely ignored.
While the top end of these ranks represent fantastical levels of skill, characters can be rated at best Spectacular. It is possible that characters can temporarily achieve those higher ranks for special and limited reasons.
Numerical Ratings, and Rolls
| Rank: | Abysmal | Terrible | Poor | Fair | Good | Great | Superb | Spectacular | Legendary | Mythical |
| Rating: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Fail | 81% | 64% | 49% | 36% | 25% | 16% | 9% | 4% | 1% | 0% |
| Victory | 1% | 4% | 9% | 16% | 25% | 36% | 49% | 64% | 81% | 100% |
| Success | 19% | 36% | 51% | 64% | 75% | 84% | 91% | 96% | 99% | 100% |
Using the stand 2d10 roll system, your rank has a numerical rating, Roll two d10, and count how many are equal to or less than your rating. If you get 1, it is a Contested or Indecisive Success; if you get two, it’s a very decisive success, a Victory, and if both dice are higher than your rank, it’s a Miss or total failure.
Some things are apparent from the chart above: at Poor skill, you get any level of success less than half the time, and a Victory only around 10% of the time. You need a Fair or better rank to get any level of success more than half the time, and Great is the earliest rank where the chance of as Decisive Victory is greater than a complete failure.
Skill Modifier
If these ratings are too generous or too harsh, feel free to pick a skill modifier from +2 to -2, and apply that to numerical rating for each rank. Any rating below 1 is treated as 1, and ratings above 10 are treated as 10. They matter only for modifiers.
Peak Skill
This is where character ability is really defined. Standard characters have a Peak skill of Great, but it could be as low as Fair or as higher as Spectacular. Characters gain 1 skill at that rank, and one fo every rank below it, down to Fair, and all extra skills are Poor.
So with the standard Peak Skill of Great, you start with 1 Great, 1 Good, and 1 Fair, and since there are 6 skills, you also have 3 at Poor.
With a Peak of Spectacular, you’d have 1 skill at each rank from Poor to Spectacular.
Gaining Experience
When advances give you extra skill, take the lowest rank and assign it to the new rank, set by your advance. So with a Peak skill of Great you have three Poors. With your first 3 advances, you’d remove them and gain a new Fair, Good, and Great skill. When you gain a Superb advance, you have no Poors so you take a Fair slot to become a Superb skill slot.
Final Comments
The changes here allow GMs to tweak the game’s power level to fit their desired game. You now have a lot more flexibility.
