Skills

Your character’s success is driven by their skills. Each skill is tied to one of four suits, each one representing a broad category of actions. In order to use a skill, you must match it to the suit of a card you play, either from your hand or from the top of the deck. This ensures that you won’t always use the same skill.

There’s no rule requiring you to follow any particular classification of skills for each suit; you can tie the suits to any four categories you like, as long as you have some understanding of what each suit represents for you.

That being said, here are the suits as I’ve imagined them:

Hearts: Your body is your home, your vessel, your shelter. Take care of it, and it will take care of you. Maybe you can Climb really well. Maybe your Yearning is so strong it’s physical.
Diamonds: Talents of the mind, or wisdom gleaned from study or experience. You might be very good at Puzzles, or maybe you just Know About Reptiles.
Spades: Tools of the trade, weapons of war, these are the things that you craft or own or have personal relationship to that are outside of yourself, but which are so much a part of you that they are an extension of yourself.
Clubs: Relationships with people and the world around you. You might have skills that address specific kinds of social interaction like Ordering Takeout, or you might have had to develop skills for dealing with specific people, like Officer Spangleburst.

What Makes a Good Skill?

A skill is anything you want your character to be able to do. All skills follow the same rules, so the name you give a skill should serve to remind you of your character’s motivations, where they come from, or where they learned the skill. So you might have a skill called Fight, or Brawl, or Fisticuffs, or Melee, or Martial Arts—what differs between these skills is what they mean to, and say about, your character.

There’s no core list of skills; if you want your character to be able to do something, put it on your list of skills under the suit that feels right to you. If you need ideas, the provided Sample Character Concepts all include suggested skills that you can borrow for your own concept.

I recommend sharing your skills with your group, so as to give other players a chance to clarify the implications of, say, a Piloting Spaceships skill on the group’s shared setting. As long as everyone in the group is on board, though, go for it.

Can I Choose Weaving as a Skill?

If you want your character to be able to call on magic in a more controlled manner than what is described in the Weaving rules, you can add whatever magic you like as a skill. The Weaver’s Dice chapter includes thirteen types of weaving that could also be good candidates for skills.

Note that having a weaving listed as a skill doesn’t give you special advantages when using the Weaving mechanics; if you perform a weaving during an Individual Scene, you still roll a single die and you still risk injury. Using a skill tied to one of the weaving dice is not the same as accepting a weaving die; when you use it as a skill, you’re using your skill at weaving to achieve a specific desired outcome.

How Skills Work

When you use a skill, you roll a number of dice equal to the skill’s rating. So if you have a rating of 3, you roll three dice. Then, look at the highest rolled result:

If it’s a 6, you manage to use your skill to complete your objective in the scene.
If it’s not a 6, you still use your skill to complete your objective (you can’t fail in that regard), but the skill becomes complicated.

A complicated skill means that something happens as a result of your actions that hurts you or someone else in ways you didn’t expect, and until you repair that harm you can’t use the same skill again.

Complicated skills are repaired during group scenes.

Avoiding Complications

You might not want to suffer the complications related to your actions in that scene. You can do this by asking another player to roll a weaving die on your behalf, invoking the power of the world’s memories. More information on that is provided in the Weaving Dice chapter, but briefly, the other player chooses a type of memory for the weaving, and then rolls a single d6 to determine the effects:

On anything other than a 1 or 6, the weaving completes without incident (more or less).
On a 1 or 6, the weaving either does too little or becomes an uncontrolled catastrophe that you then must deal with on your own to stop things from getting even worse. In either case, the suit for the skill you used in that scene becomes injured.

An injured suit means that you have wounded or overexerted yourself in a serious way, and until you take time to recover, you cannot use any skill from that suit.

You can recover an injured suit by playing through the A Moment Alone play mode, which normally takes the place of an individual scene for your character.

Regardless of the result, the skill’s complication is removed.

Improving Your Skills

When you use a skill, if all of your dice are either 1s or 6s, you learn something new about that skill and how you use it. Maybe it’s a moment of inspiration; maybe it’s an…educational mistake.

In either case, the skill’s rating improves by 1.

Learning New Skills

If you want your character to be able to do something that they have no current skills for, you can. First, name the skill and record it in your journal. Then, roll a single d6:

1 (Bend): Give the skill a rating of 1. The skill becomes complicated.
2-3 (Weave): Give the skill a rating of 1.
4-5 (Fray): Give the skill a rating of 2. The skill becomes complicated.
6 (Tear): Give the skill a rating of 2. The skill’s suit becomes injured.

Optional Rule: Universal Truth

As an option, your group can decide that once a skill reaches a rating of 6, the character’s skill becomes a kind of universal truth for the world of the story. Mark the action with a star or something to let you know it’s special. Color it with a highlighter. It’s special now.

A skill that has been marked as a universal truth cannot be further improved.

When someone performs a weaving, they can instead ask you to use your universal truth. Roll a single die:

1 (Bend): They call for your aid, but you are otherwise occupied, unable to lend your assistance. They mark an injury.

2-5 (Weave): They call for your aid and you bring it, solving the challenge in front of you with ease.

6 (Tear): They call for your aid and you bring it, but your overconfidence causes other problems that they must then deal with. They mark an injury.