Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
Yes, great story indeed. This is exactly the sort of way in which seemingly innocuous skills can be made awesome.
Alas, I don't have any cool stories with Dancing, and in fact I so far was unable to make even mundane uses of dancing all that relevant to my campaigns, both as a player and GM.
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Some of this has to do with character creation philosophy and sorts of GMing things I do, I think.
I was GM'ing with some stat normalizers on RPoL for whome realistic PCs were at 50-75cp and had very few skills...most things happening on default. Nobody even had the dancing skill or any background skills like that and were discouraged from taking them..."because those would all be at default."
I like going for a realistic feel with PCs at 150+cps. Rather than really high stats and a few really high skills, a encourage reasonable stats with lots of skills. Many of those skills being skills that flesh out the character life. So all PCs in my game, without some sort of good reason why not, are going to have Area Knowledge (Hometown). They will have hobby skills and background skills, etc. So a lot of "pointless" skills...like Dance. And then as a GM, I always to make sure that each adventure session has a situation where one of these skills might be useful in an interesting way.
The character with Hobby Skill: Video Games gets into an epic video game battle with someone in a bar, who turns out to be the daughter of a local planetary governor who becomes an ally.
The character with the Fashion Skill notices an interesting clue based on the clothing worn by the dead body they found.
The character with the Dancing skill gets to use that skill to maneuver away from an assassin at a Ball.
I do the same thing with random advantages and disadvantages.
I want my players to take a lot of these interesting things and when they do I make sure those interesting things will have some chance of doing something.
It also has resulted in great inspiration for plot situations. The ball was a great moment and it happened because I was looking over character sheets and noticing which skills the PCs hadn't used yet. Same as when the Engineer was able to determine that the big name Terran race car driver who was going to attend the ball was actually the assassin by using his Current Events: Sports to recognize some inconsistencies in the race car driver's stories about this exploits thus revealing him to be an imposter.
I think because that is a priority to me...just as much as whatever some big bad might be doing, I have gotten into a habit of challenging myself that way as a GM.