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Using Skills

This article explains how to use skills in the game and by doing so, shows you how to play the game.

It does this by providing examples of some actions your character might do, and then demonstrates how these actions are tasked in the StrikerMechanica.

Stealth & Perception​

The Stealth skill represents your ability to hide. It often this means your ability to physically conceal yourself, or moving silently and in shadows. To begin this discussion we'll focus on this meaning, but be aware that there are many, many other meanings that we'll explore later.

If your character wishes to hide themselves amongst the m-batts in the engineering area, they set a Perception Challenge (PC) by adding their Modifier in their Stealth skill to a d20 roll. The action and roll is represented in StrikerMechanica with:

hide(main-act,B) -> set(PC)= d20 + M(Stealth)

Expressions like the above are used everywhere in the StrikerMechanica, to give a quick, consistent summary of a skilled action. As a result of reading the above, you know what you have to do. The parts of the expression are:

  1. hide is the action name or key, in the parentheses are:
  2. main-act is the most common action duration, your character gets 1 main-act in a round in which they can choose to do something with.
  3. B is the body autoaspect, we'll go into these later, but for now, this signals that we are using Stealth physically
  4. set this is a common action roll type. The most common is the check (chk) which simply means that in rolling the check you are trying to overcome a challenge.
  5. PC stands for Perception Challenge, there are other challenge types, including the Target Challenge (TC), which represents how hard to target you are.
  6. d20 indicating that the roll is done with a d20 die.
  7. M(Stealth) saying that you add the Modifier (M) in your Stealth skill (which might be negative) to the d20 roll.

Notice also that the representation is in parts:

action              effect
                    action roll type          action roll formula
hide(main-act,B) -> set(PC)=                  d20 + M(Stealth)

When we write these expressions down, you will often see the action roll formula shortened a bit to something like:

hide(main-act,B) -> set(PC)= +M

The reason we do this is:

  • we always task (be it by set, chk, sv, psv and so on) with a d20, so it's a bit superfluous putting it in there; and
  • when we present the expression its nearly always in reference to the skill we are tasking, in other words, we've just talked about it or its in the heading immediately above the expression.