Blue Rose- Skills Question

[Nisarg]

Hello all,

I have the BR book, and kudos again to Green Ronin for their fine work on it.

However, I have a question which is troubling me: skills.

There are favoured skills, favoured known skills, normal skills, and untrained skills. It gets a bit confusing.

If I understand correctly you pick a number of favoured skills for your class, and then pick a number of known skills, which apparently can be favoured or not favoured. Favoured known skills are at Lv+3 ranks, known skills that aren't favoured are at (lv+3)/2 ranks.

My question is: Why would anyone ever end up picking a known skill that isn't from your favoured list? Just a moment earlier you would have picked all your favoured skills, and every single class in BR gets to choose all its own favoured list (there's no pre-determined skills that must be on the list), so if you've only just chosen your favoured skills, why on the Great Sky Pixie's green earth would you choose a skill to be known that wasn't one of your favoureds?

Finally, there are several places in the book where they refer to "all favoured skills" as having lv+3 value; which I can only assume was meant to be "all known skills". Otherwise, what is the difference between favoured and known skills?

Nisarg

 

[Belen]

Is it out in print already!? My FLGS ordered three copies and haven't received any.

 

[BSF]

It is available as a PDF on RPGNow.

 

[Benben]

My question is: Why would anyone ever end up picking a known skill that isn't from your favoured list?

The character might have some sort of incredible intelligence bonus and simply has more known skills than favored. A human warrior with an Int bonus of +4 would have 6 Favored skills + Craft (any) and 7 Known skills. The player might not want to take a craft skill so he would have 1 known skill that was not favored.

The DM might also want background reasons for all of the favored skills and might even assign them due to the character's history.

Mostly you're right a character will never have known skills not be favored but the rule text needed to be there to cover the corner cases.

 

[WayneLigon]

The rule is there, I think, because there of the Skill Training Feat, which if you take it enough time you'll get a number of skills that is greater than your number of Favored Skills. You can also blow past it by being a Mixed Role Hero; a Warrior adding a level of Expert gets two known skills

This also answers your question about favored/know skills; the ones that overrun your Favored limit will be at the lower rank.

Also, you don't have to make a known skill a favored skill. It's a flavor/RP thing; I might want a skill I do in fact know but I'm just not all that good at it. Having a favored skill in something you don't yet know is a good way to simulate hidden natural talent.

Example: A 1st level Warrior with a +3 Int gets 5 known skills and 6+Craft Favored skills. A 2nd and 3rd level he takes Skill Training, which would give him 9 known skills but still he would have only 6+Craft favored skills.

 

[Nisarg]

Ok, this is making sense to me now. They still could have done a better job on the wording, as it is fairly confusing the way it is now, in particular they should have just called them "Known" skills, and Favored skills should be "maximum skills" or something like that, wherein all skills past that maximum would be "hobby" skills or something along those lines.

Otherwise most of the rest of the book is pretty straightforward. I've already made a character for my girlfriend, and on Saturday we'll probably be running the first session of "The Gangs of Port Blacksand".

Nisarg