Gieden, Chapter Three: Character Creation (Skills)

If you look on the Gieden Character Sheet, just under Statistics, you will see three columns of Skills. They are divided by Physical, Social, and Mental, just like the stats. Here is what they mean:

The Physical Skills

Acrobatics: This covers tumbling, tightrope walking, and very active sports, as well as your ability to pull off crazy physical stunts without injury.
Bow: Your ability to maintain, aim, and fire a bow, crossbow, sling, or other missile weapon.
Climbing:one dot can scramble up a pole, five can scale a cliff-face or a ruined skyscraper.
Dance: One dot means you have a dance or two memorized and can perform them passably. At five dots, you know all the popular dances of the area and your grace and skill always impress.
Dodge: Your instinct and ability for getting out of the way.
Fistfight: Intuitive or learned knowledge of how to use your fists.
Melee: Your innate or learned skill with normal, low-tech, hand-held weapons. This includes bats, axes, and swords, but not guns, bows, or crossbows.
Reflexes: This is a measure of your reaction time and your intuitive ability to move in the correct direction.
Stealth: How silently you move, as well as your ability to bypass security.
Swimming: One dot allows you to avoid drowning in still water; five dots will allow you to swim for miles in rough ocean.

The Social Skills

Art: Your ability to convey emotion, move an audience, and demonstrate skill with your chosen art. Players should make a small notation above this Skill denoting the medium through which they work. Dance and the use of musical instruments are not included in this skill.
Cooking: The ability to create a nice meal. One dot can cook a passable dish, given the proper ingredients. Five dots means your character can create a wonderful feast in the wilderness.
Culture: Your knowledge of the local laws and customs. One dot may mean a cursory knowledge of the local laws, and five means that you can quote even laws from distant areas extensively. The use and usefulness of this Skill will depend on the setting of your campaign.
Delving: A measure of how well you locate information, as well as how well you can make that information work for you.
Etiquette: Your understanding of social niceties across a range of cultures.
Fire building: Your ability to find the correct materials, spark a flame, and create fire. One dot must start with a fire starting tool of some sort; five dots can make a fire starting tool easily, from a variety of things that might be found in the area.
Hunt/Gather: With one dot, you may be able to take down and field-dress a deer or recognize an edible plant or two. With five dots, you can find food (both plant and animal) anywhere.
Instrument: One dot means you have learned one or two short tunes. At five dots, even your off-hand improvisations are startlingly beautiful.
Intimidation: This is a measure of how well you can scare others into doing what you want.
Leadership: Represents your natural ability to lead and other’s desire to follow you.
Work Animal: This is your ability to work with animals; it defines how well animals take to you as well as your ability to manipulate them.

The Mental Skills

Agriculture: This is a measure of how well a person can nurture seeds into fully grown plants, as well as the person’s knowledge concerning soil types, watering needs of certain plants, and plant disease.
Animal Training: : One dot means the character can teach a domesticated animal a simple trick, as in teaching a dog to sit. Five dots means the character can tame a wild creature, even some Nuameii, and teach them a complicated series of commands, such as teaching a Dragon to be ridden.
Cartography: At one dot, you can follow a well-drawn map. At five dots, you can create a map that even a moron could follow.
Herbalism (Cure): One dot means that given the proper herbs, the character can create a healing salve that will ease a person’s pain. Five dots means that the character recognizes and knows how to locate herbs that can be used to create powerful pain-relieving and healing balms.
Herbalism (Harm): One dot means that given the proper herbs, the character can brew a mild poison. Five dots means that a character recognizes and knows how to locate the proper herbs to make deadly, even fatal, poisons.
Intuition: Your instincts. Someone with a high talent for Intuition may get regular ‘hunches’, by way of hints from the Game Master.
Linguistics: Linguistics has two possibilities: it can represent the number of languages a character knows, or it can represent their knowledge of the language in general, such as basic understanding, word relationships, word history, or reading and writing. The setting of the campaign will define this Skill, but in general, it is recommended that for each dot in this Skill, the player should make a notation denoting what they have learned, be it a second language or the ability to read.
Lost Tech: one dot, you may be able to determine the use of something such as a gun or recognize one or two basic types of artifacts, i.e, cars and trucks. At five dots, you recognize or can figure out most artifacts and can use them proficiently, if they are restored.
Nuameii: One dot means you know what ‘pulled-through’ means and a few other tidbits of knowledge. Five dots means you rarely come across a Nuameii you haven’t studied in great detail.
Street Knowledge: This shows how good of a ‘feel’ you have for cities. It may help you find people of a ‘rough’ sort, or it may help you find what used to be a community center in a destroyed town.
Trade Skill: This represents your knowledge of a specific trade, such as blacksmithing, tailoring, jewelry making, or carpentry. The player should make a notation above this Skill telling which trade they have studied. It can also be split up; a player with 4 dots in this Skill could jot ‘Carpentry, 2/Blacksmithing, 2’ above the Skill. One dot is passing knowledge of the trade, five dots means mastery.


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How Skills are used:

To use a Skill, you will add the number of dots you have in that Skill to the number you have in a corresponding Stat. You may either choose to be highly specialized, meaning that you are careful to align your Skills and Stats, or to balance your character, making sure that no matter what the task, you have dice to roll.

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Assigning dots in Skills:

Decide which skill set is most important to your character, and divide 10 dots among those skills. Then decide which skills are of secondary importance, and divide 7 dots among them. Last, decide which skill set is the least important to your character, and put 3 dots into those skills. Keep in mind that no Skill can be raised above three dots until bonus points are spent.