Picking Skills

Like your Primary Stats, the skills of your game represent what the focus of your game is. If your game has a huge number of very specific combat skills, for example, the gameplay will naturally lean towards combat.

Conversely, if you choose to specifically omit some skill, like Rapport, for example, you'll want to make sure that the players won't need that behavior for most of the game. You don't need or want to have every skill possible in the game, but you want to make sure that you've got all the bases covered within the context of the type of content you want the game to support.

Skill Categories

SGS provides a number of Skill Categories to organize your skills into. In typical SGS games, all those categories may come into play in a given session or campaign. On the other hand, if you're designing a really specifically themed game or a one-shot where the behaviors supported are very tightly organized, you might find that you're filling up one category to the exclusion of the others. That's fine as long as you're aware that it's happening. If you find yourself putting a ton of skills into one category without intending it, step back and analyze whether that's the category you want the game to focus on, or whether you should reduce detail there and/or increase detail in the other categories.

Finding Inspiration

An excellent way to think of skills is to pick a few media franchises that represent the themes and style of the game you're building, then break down the scenes and actions in those media to figure out what they're doing and how you'd describe that in an RPG setting.

Picking Primary Stats

Selecting the proper Primary for each skill shouldn't be too difficult. If it's unclear which primary to pick, try going back to your examples or source material and analyzing who used skill and how they were using it. You can also balance out stat importance by erring in favor of stats that don't have as many skills.

If a skill seems like it really should permit more than one stat, consider making multiple similar skills for it, and assigning each a different stat.