This is part 3 of a series presenting the various House Rules that have been introduced into the Pulp Campaign that I co-GM.

Today I’m presenting everyman skill rules that were developed for the campaign, and long overdue, too.

Although designed for a Pulp Campaign built with the Hero System, the principles apply to almost any RPG.

Credit where it’s due

As always, Blair Ramage deserves half the credit, and half the blame, for these rules. This article is partially based on discussions between us, but was written by Mike alone. The sections dealing with applying the principles to other RPGs was also Mike’s solo work.

What are everyman skills?

Everyman Skills are a very useful idea introduced a long time ago within the Hero System. These are skills that characters get for free because they are considered to be received simply by living in the society of the campaign setting. For reasons Blair and I don’t understand, and that are not explained in the sourcebook, Everyman Skills were dropped from the Pulp Hero rules. We decided to put them back.

By definition, these are skills that the character gets for free, and that means that for the most part, they should not confer the same level of ability as the character would receive if they had expended character creation points on the skill.

Hero System skills in a nutshell

One character point gets a character 8/- (eight or less) in a skill. That means that a character who rolls eight or less on 3d6 succeeds in a task.

A higher price (usually 3 points, sometimes 2 and sometimes 4) gets a character 9+(STAT/5) in a skill, where the stat is defined for each skill as part of that skill’s description. Fractions are rounded in the character’s favor. A character with a DEX of 14, for example, gets 11.8 or less, which is rounded to 12/-.

Where the skill costs 3 or more character points, and where the full skill level is higher than 11/-, characters can spend one point less than the full price to get an 11/- intermediate skill.

Characters can improve their skill rolls by +1 for additional skill point expenditure, usually 2 points, sometimes 1.

The Everyman Pulp Skills

Now that we’ve established some context, the following are the list of Skills that we have introduced into the Pulp Campaign:

1. Area Knowledge: Home Country 14/-
2. Area Knowledge: New York City 8/-
3. Cultural Familiarity: Home Country 14/-
4. Cultural Familiarity: Past Major Employers 11/-
5. Cultural Familiarity: Adventurer’s Club 8/-
6. Acting 6/-
7. Climbing 6/-
8. Concealment 6/-
9. Conversation 6/-
10. Deduction 6/-
11. Persuasion 6/-
12. Native Language
13. English (if not native language)
14. Professional Skill: Past Occupation 6/-

Definitions & Additional Rules

Some of these skills had additional rules attached, and I assume that anyone not familiar with the Hero System will need some explanation of what the skills do:

1. Area Knowledge – Home Country: Answers questions such as, Where are the major cities? What’s the capital? What are the major geographic features? Which countries does your home country border?
2. Area Knowledge: New York City: Requires 3 weeks or more non-continuous time spent in New York City, which is the location in which the Adventurer’s Club is based. Answers questions such as where the major landmarks are, where are the central railway stations, and so on.
3. Cultural Familiarity: Home Country: What’s the lifestyle that you’re used to? What’s the national drink, the national cuisine, how much do things cost, what’s the currency, who’s in charge, what are the popular sports, who are the national heroes, etc.
4. Cultural Familiarity: Past Major Employers: This covers what the employer does, and their normal procedures for doing it, where the major branches are, who your immediate superiors and subordinates were, and so on.
5. Cultural Familiarity: Adventurer’s Club: Requires 3 weeks or more non-continuous time spent at the Adventurer’s Club at least part of the day. Who works there, what do they do, who’s in charge, what facilities does the club have, how do you arrange to use them, and so on.
6. Acting: bare minimum ability to attempt to pretend to be someone else.
7. Climbing: lets you climb a ladder under favorable conditions without a skill check. Gives you a chance to do something else. Don’t bother trying to climb cliffs or anything else even reasonably difficult.
8. Concealment: bare minimum ability to hide something in the palm of your hand, crouch down behind a curtain or piece of furniture, or put an object somewhere that is not immediately obvious to a casual glance.
9. Conversation: bare minimum ability to steer a conversation in the direction you want it to go, usually very clumsily and obviously.
10. Deduction: bare minimum to put two and two together and get four, metaphorically speaking. Doesn’t extend so far as permitting the character to deduce anything strictly hypothetical or that starts, “just suppose” – you are too busy doing the supposing to figure out what it might mean.
11. Persuasion: bare minimum to talk someone into doing something they are at least somewhat inclined to do anyway. Don’t try and sooth ruffled feathers or troubled waters, you aren’t persuasive enough for that.
12. Native Language: You get to speak this “as a native”.
13. English (if not native language): You get to speak this with a thick accent and without ideograms. For anything better, you’ll need to actually pay for the language.
14. Professional Skill: Past Occupation: Gives you everything you needed to know in order to do that job – to a bare minimum standard of ineptness. Anything more and you should pay points for this.

Skills In General

Skills can generally be said to fall into one of two categories: Knowing things, or doing things. Knowing things usually implies any foundation knowledge to at least the same extent as the knowledge skill – i.e. engineering includes knowledge of maths and basic material properties.

Applying the concept to other systems

When I was creating the House Rules for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, I very deliberately wanted to incorporate the concept of Everyman Skills. The approach was a little different to that above in that what I was giving players was a subset of a skill that was relevant to their character’s personal experience. I’m not going to go into too much detail, I’ll save that for another article some other time (it’s way too big), but will offer an example.

A Dwarf might not have the slightest clue about the architecture of other races, or even the general principles of architecture, but he would still know the basics of Dwarfish construction. I’m not an architect and haven’t studied the subject, but I still know the basics of typical Australian construction: a load-bearing frame, usually of wood or steel, anchored by a foundation, usually of concrete, medium-angle roofs (say, 30° to 45°). Until the 70s, roofs were usually made of galvanized iron, these days terracotta tile roofs are more common. Windows tend to be large and plentiful to encourage air circulation because of the heat of the Australian Summer. Most are built about a foot off the ground to permit circulation beneath the home for additional cooling, more in the tropical regions. Walls used to be predominantly fibro or brick; sheds and outbuildings often had galvanized iron walls, but these can get very hot. These days, brick is the material of choice, but concrete is becoming more popular.

I didn’t need to be educated to know these things, I just had to grow up here. Simple observation did the rest. At first, I didn’t know the reasons for these building choices; slowly (by looking at the construction of homes elsewhere) I began to grasp the relationship between climatic conditions and practical design.

I doubt there are any U.S. Citizens who don’t know that Washington D.C. is their nation’s capital, even if some of them unfortunately have trouble finding it on a map. They are also likely to recognize the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, Hollywood Sign, and Capital Building without drama. They know where to buy coffee, newspapers, fresh bread, etc, in their local regions, and will have some idea (for the most part) how much they cost. In fact, politicians not knowing the price of milk and eggs has become synonymous with being out-of-touch with the ordinary person – the implicit assumption being that everyone should know these things.

I know basic things about Australian Society and the Australian Economy and how to find a Doctor and so on, just from having lived here all my life. I might not know where every train station is on the suburban network, but I know where the major ones are and which rail lines they connect to. I know we drive on the left-hand side of the road, and that we have a dollar of 100 cents, and so on.

Quantifying is defining levels of ignorance

By specifying that characters have a certain level of skill in these sub-fields, even if they haven’t bought the full skill (and the understanding, experience, and expertise that comes with it), I not only defined what characters knew, I explicitly defined what they did not know without having studied the subject.

The Concordance Principle

All that is need to make this approach really useful is a concordance principle. How similar is Dwarven Architecture from that of Gnomes, or of Halflings, of Humans, of Elves? Defining the degree of difference between these in terms of a skill modifier and cross-listing against the basic DC of the task or question gives a modifier to the DC describing how relevant the character’s basic knowledge is to the question at hand. Some basic principles will remain essentially the same, so this modifier would be +0 DC for very simple questions, but the more advanced the question, the less relevant that basic expertise will be.

Being a dwarf won’t help very much when it comes to understanding Elven Lintels. Knowing what the most common Gnomish recipes are won’t help much when attempting to identify Elvish Honey-cakes, let alone whether or not the milk had turned before they were cooked, or Human Oxtail Soup. If you see “Bear Claws” on a menu, are they a pastry item or is the name meant literally? If you’ve never heard of “Meso” before, how do you know it’s even edible?

In this year’s Masterchef, one of the cooks made the mistake of using tomato flowers as a garnish on his dish because they looked pretty, not realizing that tomatoes are part of the Deadly Nightshade family and the flowers are quite poisonous. Plants don’t grow fruit for our benefit, they do so to distribute their seeds and make more of themselves. Using that fruit on a mass scale for our own nutritional and culinary benefit is down to our own ingenuity. (Actually, many cases involve the fruit being deliberately enticing for consumption, so that animals will eat the fruit (swallowing the seeds in the process and excreting them some distance from the original source). Other species use the edible component as a nutritional head-start for the developing young – the egg approach.

Everyman Wrap-up

Everyman skills give characters the game mechanics to describe and quantify the things that any reasonable GM would consider that a character already had. Some might stem from innate instinct or ability, some from divine gift, some from the culture, and some from practical experience. Defining everyman skills and determining why that skill is an everyman skill for the race, class, and society to which the character belongs defines and quantifies the building blocks of both the character and those world elements that have created them. Your campaign background and game world stop being just words on a page and start making a quantifiable difference to the characters, and hence to the players.

Everyman skills bring the game environment to life. Everybody wins from doing that successfully.