Wordman/Craft

Eliminate the concept of multiple Craft abilities and use specializations instead.

• back to Wordman.
• back to Abilities/Craft.

Rationale

By official rule, "characters who wish to master multiple crafts must take this ability multiple times." In high action campaigns (like mine), this rule provides a disincentive for players to flush out their characters with more than one Craft skill. For example, for the same training time an experience cost it takes for a character to get three dots in Craft (Painting) and Craft (Stonework), they could have bought (and usually do) three dots in Endurance and Dodge.

Mechanics

Instead, assume there is only one Craft skill, but use specialization rules to cover the various craft flavors. In other words, the base Craft skill is a measure of how artistic and creative you are generally, while the specializations indicate training in specific media in expressing that creativity.

All ability and specialization rules work as normal, with the following exceptions:

1. Making a Craft roll in an area in which you have no specialization increases the difficulty by at least one and reduces your dice pool (see below).
2. Craft specialties start at level zero instead of level one. That is, you can buy specialty that doesn't provide you extra dice, but having that specialty will prevent the penalty mentioned above.
3. Initial purchase of the Craft skill comes with a +0 level specialty for free.
4. The limit of three specialties per ability does not apply to Craft, though no one specialty can be chosen more than four times (i.e. no more than +3 specialty dice).

When making a Craft test in an area where the character has no specialty, the dice pool reduction mentioned above depends on how far removed the specialties she does have are from what she is trying to do. The basic penalty is to remove three dice from the pool, with this number being reduced if a case could be made that existing specialties would help. In very related cases, extra dice from specialties may be used. This is all more of a Storyteller judgment call, and they have the final say. In extreme cases, the difficulty might be increased by more than one.

The roll may be further modified by how narrow the specialization is. Every specialization is considered to cover roughly the same amount of knowledge, with more general specializations covering a broad area, but only shallowly. For example, someone with a Food specialization would know a little bit on how to grow food, a bit about how to prepare food, a bit about how to represent and describe food and a bit about how to use food as decoration. Someone with a Farming specialization, on the other hand, would know a lot about growing food, but not so much about the rest. How well the task fits with the scope of the specialization should also influence the roll. Generally, broad specializations will always be given dice penalties, but allowed to use their specialty dice.

For example, assume Husk has Craft 3, with three levels of Metalwork specialty. Note that this gives her two bonus dice for metal work, not three. She might get:

• Five dice to create a horseshoe. (No penalty; gains specialty dice)
• Four dice to repair a dent in a suit of plate armor, at normal difficulty. (Metalwork is not armoring, so -1 die; gains specialty dice)
• Two dice paint a crest on a shield, at +1 difficulty. (Penalty reduced to just one die because of familiarity with the material being painted; no specialty dice)
• One die to blow glass, at +1 difficulty. (Penalty reduced to two dice because blowing glass uses similar furnace techniques to working metal; no specialty dice)
• One die to represent the appearance of metal in a painting, at +1 difficulty. (Penalty reduced to two dice due to familiarity with how light reflects from metal; no specialty dice)
• Zero dice to paint a portrait, at +1 difficulty. (Full penalty, as there would be little justification to reduce it; no specialty dice)
• Zero dice to craft fate, at +5 difficulty. (Full penalty, no specialty dice, extra difficulty, since Metalwork is so far from astrology)

One advantage of this concept is that it allows more flexible character generation. For example:

• A master chef with almost no creative drive in other areas: Craft 1 (Cooking +3).
• An extremely creative person who doodles a bit, but has no real training: Craft 5 (Drawing +0)
• A sidereal architect, better at building manses than writing destiny: Craft 2 (Manses +3, Fate +0)
• A fae master artist, who can shape reality as well as he can represent it: Craft 4 (Glamour +0, Painting +0, Architecture +0, Poetry +0, Sculpture +0)

Variations

Some Storytellers may wish to allow specialties to "stack". That is, suppose you have a character with Craft 3 (Metalwork +2, Armorer +1). You may wish to allow that character to use 6 dice for metal armor crafting, but only 4 for working with leather or cloth armor.