Skills for my campaign

My houserules make some small changes to the available skills in Savage Worlds and Sprawlrunners. Below is a complete reference to all the skills, including the ones in core SWADE. It also has some clarifications of which skill applies to some common actions where it’s perhaps not immediately obvious (eg. is a Matrix search Electronics, Hacking, or Research?)

Specialisations for Common Knowledge

Skill specialisations are available for Common Knowledge, but these are a house rule for this campaign and not handled like normal skill specialisations in Savage Worlds. As for other specialisations, they cost 1 skill point per specialisation you take. Unlike other specialisations, they don’t change the roll you make; but on any Common Knowledge check where the specialisation applies, you will get considerably more information on a Success or a Raise than if you didn’t have the specialisation. The narrower the specialisation, the more information you’ll get on a Success. You can purchase as many of these as you want.

Common skills

All characters get a d4 rank in these skills for free, without having to spend any skill points. You can, of course, spend points to improve them further.

Athletics (Agility): Running, climbing, jumping, balancing, throwing (including weapons), catching.
Common Knowledge (Smarts): General knowledge of daily life in the Sixth World.
- See note above for specialisations.
Notice (Smarts): Awareness and perception; the ability to spot trouble coming, find non-obvious clues, or read body language to guess at someone’s emotional state.
Persuasion (Spirit): The ability to convince others to do what you want; via negotiation, orders, or lies. (But not threats; see Intimidation, below, for that.)
Stealth (Agility): The ability to sneak and hide, tail people without being noticed. (But not spot a tail that’s following you - that’s Notice.)

Combat skills

Battle (Smarts): Strategy, tactics, and understanding military operations. Particularly important in the Mass Battles game mechanic.
Fighting (Agility): Skill in armed and unarmed melee combat.
Shooting (Agility): Precision with any type of ranged weapon, including bows (but not thrown weapons).

Vehicle skills

Boating (Agility): Ability to sail or pilot a boat, ship, submarine, or any other watercraft.
Driving (Agility): The ability to control, steer, and operate ground vehicles - whether with wheels, treads, or legs (eg. walker drones).
Piloting (Agility): Skill with maneuvering vehicles that operate in three dimensions, such as airplanes, helicopters, spaceships, etc. Includes ground-effect vehicles like t-birds. Also includes rotordrones and fixed-wing drones.
Riding (Agility): A character’s skill in mounting, controlling, and riding a tamed beast. Probably not very useful in an urban cyberpunk game!

Physical active skills

See also “Athletics” and “Stealth” under common skills, above.

Gambling (Smarts): Skill and familiarity with games of chance.
Healing (Smarts): The ability to treat and heal Wounds and diseases, and decipher forensic evidence. Note that dealing with cyberware systems might also need Electronics and/or Repair, depending on what you’re doing.
Survival (Smarts): How to find food, water, or shelter (including in urban environments).
Thievery (Agility): Sleight of hand, pickpocketing, lockpicking, setting/disabling traps, and other such ethically dubious feats of legerdemain.

See also “Persuasion” under common skills, above.

Etiquette (Smarts): A character’s ability to blend in with the background, dress and carry themselves so they don’t stand out, or talk the right lingo to appear to be part of the crowd.
Intimidation (Spirit): The ability to threaten others into compliance.
Performance (Spirit): Singing, dancing, acting, or other forms of public expression.
Taunt (Smarts): Insulting or belittling another. Can be done during combat to distract opponents.

If using a social skill in a language other than the character’s native tongue, if their language dice is lower than their social skill dice, roll the language dice instead. Sprawlspeak (a pidgin made up of English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, and many others) never counts as a native language for this rule, as it’s somewhat clumsy and not suited to rhetoric. If you’re playing a social manipulator role, strongly consider taking the Linguist edge so you can talk to people in their native language.

Magical skills

Astral (Smarts): The skill to assense living beings’ auras and engage in combat on the Astral Plane.
Magic (Smarts): The spellcasting skill for Arcane Backgrounds that have a Smarts basis.
Magic (Spirit): The spellcasting skill for Arcane Backgrounds that have a Spirit basis.

See also “Arcana” under knowledge skills, below.

Technical skills

Electronics (Smarts): The use of electronic and computerised devices and systems. Their manipulation, repair, and sabotage. Anything involving computer hardware (as opposed to software, which is Hacking.)
Hacking (Smarts): Legal and illegal computer use; coding, programming, and breaking into computer systems. (NB: simple, everyday Matrix actions fall under Common Knowledge and do not require a Hacking roll. Complex Matrix searches fall under Research.)
Repair (Smarts): The ability to fix, build, and modify mechanical and electrical gadgets, including weapons, vehicles, etc. Also used for setting and using explosives and demolitions.

When repairing or modifying electronics, use the lowest of the characters’ Repair and Electronics skills.

Knowledge skills

For reference: what I’ve changed

Added a special skill specialisation rule to Common Knowledge
Added Astral to magic skills and renamed Occult to Arcana.
Reshuffled the boundaries between Hacking, Electronics, and Repair to make them slightly more intuitive (to me, at least.)
Added Etiquette
Added Corps knowledge skill.