Zero Skills and Specialisation

[phild]

As per core rules, Zero Skills get no specialisation but indicate a core competence. It's always been a handy little thing, and it's great the MGT has increased the number of zero-rateds that PCs can get. However, there are a couple of areas that I would probably house rule the current system:

1. The Athletics skill clearly states that if you don't have the skill, you use your attributes at no penalty. Ie there's no unskilled penalty use, rendering zero-rated skill as worthless. I'd perhaps change this so that with no skill, there's either an unskilled penalty of 1 or there's a penalty of -1 per difficulty level above Average. Just so those poor Athletics-0 do get some benefit!

2. The Trade skill at zero offers very little, indicating that a character "has a general grasp of working, but little experience beyond menial jobs". Which, frankly, most characters will have given 4+ terms of service, regardless of whether they have the Trade skill or not. So, I'm inclined to expand this so that it is the one Zero-rated skill that can take a speciality, in which case it indicates broad knowledge of an industry but no real experience of working it professionally. I used this for a character who was brought up in a Belter community and then went to work Security / Espionage for a Mining Corporation, and there didn't seem to be any other way to reflect his knowledge of the industry.

 

[DCAnsell]

Admittedly, I see both of those skills largely as background color, but here is what I've done with them, or plan to do with them.

For Athletics 0, the only real benefit is that I've imposed a -2 modifier to a person engaged in some sort of athletic contest (ie, say a game of football) without having the skill, thus giving even someone with a very general athletic competence a slight edge in such a contest.

For Trade 0, the competence involves general experience in what a general laborer knows, things like how to stand and walk and work for a full shift, move and lift heavy and/or awkward objects, and even get by in a normal labor environment. Not knowing those things can make even an otherwise fit and active person miserable in a workplace, giving them a -2 when it comes to successfully completing a job of just plain hard work.

 

[rust]

1. The Athletics skill clearly states that if you don't have the skill, you use your attributes at no penalty. Ie there's no unskilled penalty use, rendering zero-rated skill as worthless.

One way we handle this is that an unskilled character does not know the
rules of a sport, while a level-0 character does know the rules.
For example, the unskilled character has the physical ability to play in a
soccer game, but his lack of knowledge of the rules prevents him from
playing in a soccer team.