New Advanced Skills

[Inspector Zero]

The GM Handbook introduced a range of new Advanced Skills but didn't provide any link back to professions and backgrounds as to how these might be retrofitted into existing published material.

Some of them, like Seduction and Commerce are profession specific and are therefore quite easy to assign. Others though are more general in tone; Culture, Fast Draw and Insight for example.

Arguably Culture (Native) should be available to all in the same way Language (Native) is.

If the game designers have chosen to (re)define Perception as being solely about detecting physical stimuli rather than emotional or attitudinal ones then I think that Insight should be a Basic skill and not an Advanced Skill. Everyone reading this for example (unless mad or autistic) is perfectly capable of reading moods and gauging "motives and state of mind". You might be rubbish at it but you do have a natural ability at it.

I would also imagine that to a large extent the skill is species specific. A human might be able to interpret the mood of another human but what about a troll or a dragonewt?

Aside from these two skills what of the others? Which backgrounds and so on should get them as starting options?

 

[kintire]

If the game designers have chosen to (re)define Perception as being solely about detecting physical stimuli rather than emotional or attitudinal ones then I think that Insight should be a Basic skill and not an Advanced Skill.

I think this is absolutely true. I have thought quite hard about Courtesy as well, at least for your own culture.

 

[Deleriad]

I have made Insight and Culture (Native) into basic skills for precisely the reasons the OP came up with. Mind you I have also turned Disguise into a basic skill and used it to refer to any kind of attempt at covering up truth.

I often find that Insight vs Disguise is a common opposed contest to see if someone is telling the truth.

I made room to do this by following Newt's suggestion in SimpleQuest and replacing the four basic lores with one basic lore Lore (natural world). I also, essentially, replaced Lore (Own Region) with Culture (Native) For me this all makes a certain sense because you end up with:

Culture (Native)
Language (Native)
Lore (Natural World)

If someone wants to know anything about the history or peoples of their area then they use Culture (Native). If they want to know something about the weather, landscape, flora and fauna then they use lore (natural world) and get a penalty in foreign areas.

It's not too difficult to retrofit because you can replace lore (regional) with culture (native) and can simply put any percentiles in a lore into lore (natural world) or treat it as advanced skill that lets you do more.

 

[Loz]

I think some very fair and good points have been made here.

In hindsight (which is always 20/20), then yep, I'd have amended the professions/cultures to include the new skills. And there are some very good arguments to be made for including Perception and Insight as Basic Skills.

All I can say is, watch this space.

 

[Inspector Zero]

Its good to hear from HMV on this as you wrote the thing in the first place. I'll keep on watching this space as you suggest, although you seem to have more than enough on your plate.