Skills

Overview
Skills define your characters exceptional competencies in a variety of fields, such as Athletics, Fight, or Decieve, but not for mundane tasks like climbing a latter or pouring a glass of milk. Any action that challenges your character (again, not pouring a glass of milk) should test a skill.

See the SRD for more details on the skills. Below are an overview of the skills used in Floraverse.

Skills can be tested in one of the following four ways,

Overcome [O]
You tackle some manner of challenge, engaging task, or hindrance that tests your competency. These are tested against a passive challenge, without specific proactive resistance.

Create an Advantage [C]
You discover something that already exists in an opponent or in the situation itself that lets you succeed. You can use this to create free invocations, giving yourself and your allies boosts.

Attack [A]
You actively attempt to harm someone in a conflict: physical, mental, emotional, social.

Defend [D]
You try to keep someone attacking you from harming you, or stop them from creating an advantage against you.

Skill List (Alphabetical)
For FloraFate, Artistry, Magic, and Mechanics replaces the Crafts, Shoot, and Drive skills of Fate Core. Ranged attacks are considered a flavor of Fight, and Crafts/Drive can be replicated with mechanics.

Artistry [O, C]*
Artistry is a skill used in both ephemeral or perminent artistsic pursuits, either for practical or purely aesthetic purposes. Artistry can also be used in order to infuse items or certain actions with special powers, though that requires specific training.

Athletics [O, C, D]
The Athletics skill represents your character’s general level of physical fitness, whether through training, natural gifts, or genre-specific means (like magic or genetic alteration). It’s how good you are at moving your body- running, jumping, climbing trees.

Burglary [O, C]
The Burglary skill covers your character’s aptitude for stealing things and getting into places that are off-limits.

Contacts [O, C, D]
Contacts is the skill of knowing and making connections with people. It presumes proficiency with all means of networking available in the setting.

Deceive [O, C, D]
Deceive is the skill about lying to and misdirecting people.

Empathy [O, C, D]
Empathy involves knowing and being able to spot changes in a person’s mood or bearing. It’s basically the emotional Notice skill.

Fight [O, C, A, D]
The Fight skill covers all forms of physical conflict. In the context of Flora, Fight includes physical combat bare-handed, with melee weapons or with ranged weapons- the exact nature of Fight is dependent on the flavor of the character.

For ranged attacks, against targets in distant zones, the character must have some way to perform the attack- again, this is a flavor spin on a character, whether it is a sling, or bow and arrow, or an acid split. The GM is given final say whether it will be possible to used the ranged attack in context.

Investigate [O, C]
Investigate is the skill you use to find things out. It’s a counterpart to Notice—whereasNotice revolves around situational alertness and surface observation, Investigate revolves around concentrated effort and in-depth scrutiny.

Lore [O, C]
The Lore skill is about knowledge and education. As with some other skills, we called it Lore because that fits the particular flavor of our examples—other games might call it Scholarship, or Academics, or something like that.

Magic [O, C] *
The Magic skill is all about controlling reality- or so you like to tell yourself. In pactice, Magic can be seen as an extention of one's affinity,

Similarly to Artistry, students of magic can train to use Magic offensively or defensively.

Mechanics [O, C] *
The Mechanics skill is about maintaining and operating mechanical constructs. If a character is mechanical in nature themselves, this skill would be tested in personal maintenance the use of special functions, but not, say, in Athletics or Physique, or any social skill.

Notice [O, C, A, D]
The Notice skill involves just that—noticing things. It’s a counterpart to Investigate, representing a character’s overall perception, ability to pick out details at a glance, and other powers of observation. Usually, when you use Notice, it’s very quick compared to Investigate, so the kinds of details you get from it are more superficial, but you also don’t have to expend as much effort to find them.

Physique [O, C, A, D]
The Physique skill is a counterpart to Athletics, representing the character’s natural physical aptitudes, such as raw strength and endurance.

Provoke [O, C, A, D]
Provoke is the skill about getting someone’s dander up and eliciting negative emotional response from them—fear, anger, shame, etc. It’s the “being a jerk” skill.

To use Provoke, you need some kind of justification. That could come entirely from situation, or because you have an aspect that’s appropriate, or because you’ve created an advantage with another skill (like Rapport or Deceive), or because you’ve assessed your target’s aspects (see Empathy).

This skill requires that your target can feel emotions—robots and zombies typically can’t be provoked.

Rapport [O, C, A, D]
The Rapport skill is all about making positive connections to people and eliciting positive emotion. It’s the skill of being liked and trusted.

Resources [O, C, A, D]
Resources describes your character’s general level of material wealth in the game world and ability to apply it. This might not always reflect cash on hand, given the different ways you can represent wealth in a particular setting—in a medieval game, it might be tied to land or vassals as much as gold; in the modern day, it might mean a number of good lines of credit.

Stealth [O, C, A, D]
The Stealth skill allows you to avoid detection, both when hiding in place and trying to move about unseen.

Will [O, C, A, D]
The Will skill represents your character’s general level of mental fortitude, the same way that Physique represents your physical fortitude.