jack1974 wrote:While Anima is in charge of doing the battle rules, I am in charge of the non-combat skills
Now about the real question, I want to narrow the skills into 8 non-combat skills. Doing more would be too much, since even in this list there are already some skills that could be similar for certain situation (like lockpicking, could be either sabotage or science even if this last one would involve more hacking than lockpicking). I have this list:
1.Physical (jumping high, resisting impact, etc)
2.Survival (like finding food in a inhospitable environment, scouting, etc)
3. ??? (was Psionics, but I'm looking for another skill)
4.Charisma (leadership abilities, convince others of your ideas)
5.Science (hacking a terminal, fixing a device, etc)
6.Medicine (healing someone, human/alien anatomy knowledge, etc)
7.Sabotage (both using explosives, or stealth to infiltrate)
8.ESP (empathy, sixth sense)
Hm.
The 'skill boost' could be an aspect of leadership - getting the most out of your team, basically. Have stress be part of the stats (PTSD or similar), which would also be a good reason to leave some troops in the base at times, and make using the skill boost add to a team member's stress. (In another post you mentioned wanting to differentiate between members in team and out of team, this could be an aspect of that.).
Physical. This sounds a bit odd to me - physical isn't a skill, athletics is a skill.
Survival, Sabotage, Science, Medicine. This is a bit muddled, I think. Survival skills include first aid, normally. But that's also medicine. Sneaky is in both survival and sabotage. Bomb disposal or bomb manufacture would easily fit in science even when sabotage is the specific skill for it. I can't help think this could do with a bit of rephrasing or redefining. I also feel mechanic is missing.
Psychic, ESP, Charisma. Psychic has allready been discussed, but in some RPG's the skill 'Insight' is used, as a sort of 'how good you are at reading people' skill combined with social awareness. ESP and Charisma.. those works fine.
About survival, if you want to make it less vague, another term you could use could be Fieldcraft. It would help a bit on separating it from sabotage and medicine, if that is an advantage.
About sabotage, tradecraft could be an alternative. (A catch-all for all sorts of covert, spyish stuff including encryption, lockpicking etc, but it is a bit Tom Clancy.
(Doing things subtly while seen = tradecraft, not being seen = fieldcraft, for a distinction on which wold be used for what sort of stealthy bits).
I would consider doing away with science, psychic/lore and ESP and turn it into Academics (The theoretical aspects of science + lore), Mechanics (The mechanical aspects of science + the parts of sabotage and survival that would be applicable), and Insight or Empathy (ESP + 'people reading' + social awareness).
I do not mean that you should take all these suggestions to heart and scrap what you have - that would be rather presumptous of me, because what you have works, and you've probably given it more thought than I. If you did, the skill list would be like this:
Athletics
Fieldcraft
Tradecraft
Academic
Mechanic
Empathy (Or insight)
Charisma
Medicine
I feel like the boundaries between the skills are clearer with this set, but I do not know if you then suddenly end up with skill checks you want to do that has no applicable skill anymore.
Another thing that would heavily influence this division is the amount of skill checks there would be on each skill. If you suddenly end up using science for 1/3 of the skill checks in the game, it really needs splitting up, for instance. May be interesting to run a bit of statistics on that and see if anything pops up suspiciously often or rarely, because that would probably be a good indication that a little restructuring might be necessary.
Regards,
Me