Skills represent training, practice, and experience. Where Attributes describe a character’s fundamental capabilities, Skills represent what they have learned to do reliably.
Skills are rated from 0 to 50. When a test uses a Skill, add its rating to the relevant Attributes when determining the Success Target.
Each Skill lists the Attribute combination most commonly used with it. These combinations represent the typical approach, not a restriction. When another approach makes more sense, the GM may use different Attributes.
For example, Athletics normally uses Strength + Agility. Holding a heavy security door closed might instead use Strength + Fortitude.
Skills are divided into Core Skills and Expertise Skills.
Core Skills
Core Skills represent broad abilities that anyone can attempt without specialized training. A Core Skill can be used even with a rating of 0.
Static Veil uses the following Core Skills:
- Athletics
- Con
- Dodge
- Driving
- First Aid
- Influence
- Intimidation
- Investigation
- Leadership
- Marksmanship
- Melee
- Navigation
- Stealth
- Survival
- Wit
Core Skill Descriptions
Athletics (Strength + Agility): Climbing, swimming, jumping, sprinting, lifting, and other forms of physical exertion.
Con (Charisma + Instinct): Lying, misdirection, bluffing, and creating or maintaining false impressions.
Dodge (Agility + Instinct): Evading attacks, hazards, and other sudden physical dangers.
Driving (Agility + Instinct): Operating common ground vehicles such as cars, motorcycles, vans, and trucks. Vehicles requiring specialized training use an appropriate Expertise Skill instead.
First Aid (Logic + Instinct): Stabilizing injuries, stopping bleeding, treating immediate trauma, and providing basic emergency care. Advanced diagnosis and treatment require appropriate Expertise.
Influence (Charisma + Logic): Persuasion, negotiation, bargaining, and convincing others through reason, appeal, or compromise.
Intimidation (Charisma + Resolve): Applying pressure through threats, fear, authority, or force of personality. Physical intimidation may use Strength when appropriate.
Investigation (Logic + Instinct): Searching for clues, examining evidence, finding relevant information, and reconstructing events. This includes researching information through ordinary digital sources.
Leadership (Charisma + Resolve): Directing others, maintaining morale, issuing effective orders, and coordinating people under pressure.
Marksmanship (Agility ×2): Using firearms and other ranged weapons that depend primarily on aim and controlled handling.
Melee (Agility + Strength): Fighting at close range with melee weapons, unarmed attacks, and similar forms of hand-to-hand combat.
Navigation (Logic + Instinct): Finding routes, maintaining orientation, reading maps, and navigating unfamiliar environments.
Stealth (Agility + Resolve): Moving unnoticed, hiding, avoiding detection, and maintaining concealment while under pressure.
Survival (Instinct + Fortitude): Enduring hostile environments, finding shelter and resources, tracking, and dealing with wilderness hazards.
Wit (Charisma + Instinct): Provoking, distracting, embarrassing, deflecting, baiting, or verbally wrong-footing someone. Wit changes how someone reacts rather than convincing them that something is true.
Expertise Skills
Expertise Skills represent specialized training, professional knowledge, and technical disciplines that cannot normally be used effectively without instruction or experience.
Unlike Core Skills, an Expertise Skill can only be used if the character possesses it. If a task requires specialized knowledge or technique and the character lacks the appropriate Expertise, they may be unable to attempt it or may need to rely on a less effective alternative.
Each Expertise Skill lists the Attributes most commonly used with it. As with Core Skills, these combinations may change when the character’s approach or circumstances justify it.
Acting (Charisma + Instinct): Portraying characters, maintaining false mannerisms, and performing convincingly for an audience.
Animal Handling (Instinct + Charisma): Training, directing, calming, and caring for animals.
Armorer (Logic + Agility): Building, repairing, maintaining, and modifying weapons and armor.
Bioware (Logic + Agility): Installing, maintaining, diagnosing, and modifying biological augmentations.
Bureaucracy (Logic + Charisma): Navigating institutional procedures, permits, records, corporate administration, and formal organizations.
Chemistry (Logic ×2): Identifying, analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating chemical substances.
Cyberware (Logic + Agility): Installing, maintaining, diagnosing, and modifying cybernetic augmentations.
Demolitions (Logic + Agility): Preparing, placing, disarming, and safely handling explosives and breaching charges.
Disguise (Agility + Instinct): Creating and maintaining physical disguises intended to alter or conceal identity.
Electronics (Logic + Agility): Diagnosing, repairing, modifying, and constructing electronic devices, circuitry, sensors, and communications equipment.
Engineering (Logic ×2): Designing, analyzing, and modifying complex technological or structural systems.
Forensics (Logic + Instinct): Examining physical evidence and extracting technical information from scenes, remains, materials, and traces.
Forgery (Agility + Logic): Creating convincing false documents, credentials, signatures, records, and physical reproductions.
Hacking (Logic + Instinct): Penetrating, manipulating, defending, and compromising digital systems and networks.
Mechanics (Logic + Agility): Repairing, maintaining, modifying, and diagnosing engines, machinery, and mechanical systems.
Medicine (Logic + Instinct): Diagnosing illness and injury, providing advanced treatment, prescribing drugs, and managing ongoing medical care.
Piloting (Agility + Instinct): Operating aircraft, VTOLs, and other vehicles requiring specialized flight training.
Coding (Logic ×2): Creating, modifying, debugging, and analyzing software.
Singing (Charisma + Resolve): Performing vocally with trained control, technique, and expression.
Tactics (Logic + Instinct): Analyzing combat situations, planning operations, anticipating enemy actions, and coordinating tactical approaches.
Thievery (Agility + Instinct): Picking locks, sleight of hand, pickpocketing, and bypassing mundane physical security.
This list is not exhaustive. Other professions, technical disciplines, arts, and specialized fields may be represented by additional Expertise Skills where appropriate. Performance disciplines such as dance or individual musical instruments are normally separate Expertise Skills.
Languages
Languages are recorded separately from Skills. Each known language has a Proficiency that describes how well the character can understand, speak, read, and write it.
Language Proficiency is not rolled directly. Instead, it determines what forms of communication are possible and may modify tests where precise understanding or expression matters.
| Proficiency | Capability |
|---|---|
| Rudimentary | Recognize common words, signs, numbers, greetings, and a few memorized phrases. You cannot hold a meaningful conversation. |
| Basic | Communicate simple needs and understand straightforward statements about familiar subjects. Complex or rapid conversation remains difficult. |
| Conversational | Hold ordinary conversations and understand normal speech and writing. Nuance, specialized vocabulary, and subtle expression may still cause difficulty. |
| Fluent | Speak, understand, read, and write comfortably in almost any ordinary situation, including complex conversation. |
| Native | Full command of idiom, slang, dialect, cultural references, and subtle linguistic cues expected of someone raised with the language. |
Language and Tests
When language matters to a test, use the normal Skill or Attribute Check. Language Proficiency determines whether the action is possible and whether a penalty applies.
- Rudimentary: Only very simple communication is normally possible. Actions requiring meaningful conversation, detailed reading, or precise expression cannot usually be attempted.
- Basic: Complex communication can be attempted, but tests that depend significantly on language normally suffer −20.
- Conversational: Ordinary communication requires no penalty. Tests relying heavily on nuance, precise wording, specialized vocabulary, wordplay, or subtle interpretation normally suffer −10.
- Fluent: No language penalty applies under normal circumstances.
- Native: Functions as Fluent, but also provides full familiarity with ordinary slang, idioms, accents, and other linguistic cues. Native proficiency does not provide a general bonus to tests.
Knowing a language does not provide specialized knowledge. Understanding legal terminology, medical vocabulary, magical notation, technical documentation, or other professional material may still require an appropriate Expertise Skill or Memory check.
Unless a rule states otherwise, Language Proficiency includes speaking, understanding, reading, and writing the language.
Attribute Checks
Some actions depend primarily on a character’s natural capabilities rather than learned training. When no Skill appropriately applies, make an Attribute Check.
Choose the two Attributes most relevant to the action, add them together, then multiply the result by 2:
Success Target = (Attribute + Attribute) × 2
If a single Attribute clearly governs the action, use that Attribute twice.
The following Attribute Checks are commonly used in play.
Perception (Resolve + Instinct): Noticing details, spotting movement, hearing unusual sounds, and remaining aware of the surrounding environment.
Insight (Logic + Instinct): Reading intentions, recognizing deception, interpreting behavior, and understanding another person’s motives.
Composure (Charisma + Resolve): Maintaining emotional control, concealing visible reactions, and remaining outwardly composed under social or psychological pressure.
Memory (Logic + Resolve): Recalling academic, professional, technical, or formally learned information.
Streetwise (Instinct + Resolve): Recalling rumors, local knowledge, cultural familiarity, routes, criminal knowledge, personal experience, and other information learned informally.
Vigor (Fortitude + Resolve): Resisting exhaustion, pain, illness, physical strain, and other pressures on the body.
Willpower (Resolve + Instinct): Resisting fear, coercion, mental intrusion, and other effects that attempt to overcome the character’s will.
Grip (Strength + Resolve): Holding onto an object or person, maintaining a secure grip, and resisting disarm attempts or forced movement.
The GM may call for other Attribute combinations when an action does not fit one of these common checks. The Attributes used should reflect what the character is actually relying on to overcome the challenge.
Knowledge
Static Veil does not require characters to record every subject they might know about. Most ordinary knowledge is determined by the character’s background, profession, experiences, and what makes sense in the fiction.
When the exact limits of that knowledge are uncertain, the GM may call for a Memory or Streetwise Attribute Check.
Use Memory for information learned through formal education, professional training, research, or structured study.
Use Streetwise for information learned through lived experience, local familiarity, rumor, subcultures, criminal circles, informal networks, and everyday exposure.
The GM sets the difficulty according to how obscure, technical, specific, or distant the information is. Common knowledge does not normally require a test.
Some subjects require specialized training. Knowing that a topic exists is not the same as understanding it professionally. Detailed medical, technical, magical, legal, scientific, or similar knowledge may require an appropriate Expertise Skill rather than a Memory or Streetwise check.