[Basic] Skill of the week: Artist

[johndallman]

The skill of doing visual art: drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery, scene design, illusion, etc. Requires specialisation in a medium, with defaults between many media. Optional specialisations within forms are common.

A couple of specialisations that exist on the real world aren't covered in Basic.

Computer Art would be the skill of working with drawing and painting software, which would start at TL8 and seems to fall into the same group for defaults as Calligraphy, Drawing, Illumination, and Painting and has a perquisite of Computer Operation.

Technical Drawing would be creating engineering and architectural drawings, which was something that a lot of people did as a full-time trade at TL5-7, before CAD. They generally worked from outlines and sketches done by actual engineers, who had some technical drawing training, but were a lot less practiced than professional draftsmen. This doesn't seem to be the same skill as ordinary Artist (Drawing), since it's very possible to be good at one and terrible at the other. Technical Drawing is always done to scale, and every line is measured. Again, it probably falls into the same default group as Calligraphy, Drawing, Illumination, and Painting and has a perquisite of Mathematics (Applied). (Preparing CAD blueprints seems to be Engineering skill)

Biological and medical illustration, which is still very worthwhile in an era of photography, might be done with either Technical Drawing or Drawing.

Professional artists are likely to have one or more Artist specialisations at high levels; they may well learn the skill well past 12 or so, if they're ambitious, or have competition. Business and social skills are also important for making a living. Drawing skill is useful to support other Artist specialisations, for many other "arty" professions, like architecture or fashion design, and for anyone who needs to record visual information at low tech levels, or where photography would flood the viewer with extraneous detail.

As compared to Design/Build/Use triads, Artist skills seem to fall into Doing and Appreciating skills, which are almost always Connoisseur specialisations.

Versatile is a really good-value advantage for artists, usually giving +1. Talent is always worthwhile. Colour Blindness and Hidebound are a bad idea.

Artist skills can be useful for enchanters (Fantasy), and Low-Tech has some applications of these skills for adventurers. Low-Tech Companion 1 & 3 add more. High-Tech and Ultra-Tech have equipment for artists and some high-tech specialisations. Magic has several applications for making a good job of magic.

Horror has a template for a professional artist and Hot Spots: Renaissance Florence has examples of artists' relationships with the rich and powerful.

What have you done with Artist skills in a game? Can they be more interesting to play than "Roll Artist" or "Bob has a great Artistic idea, it's, um, hard to describe"?

[RogerBW]

It seems to be a common "colour" skill on PCs in my games; several in my archives have a point in (Drawing) or (Painting) even though it rarely comes up in play. (I tend to run fairly high-tech, so generally cameras are available for the "what did the monster/criminal look like" situation.)

(Video Production) has come in as a job skill a few times, though I don't think it's been rolled in play either.

Where (Drawing) has been very useful is when information has been acquired by non-visual means: in Age of Aquarius, the remote viewer could get an image of something face (or be shown something by the telepath) and then draw it so that it could be shown to other people. In John's Laundry campaign, this was a useful corollary to Visions of the Past.

I'd probably claim a point in (3D Modelling) for myself, or at least a Dabbler; most people who do it at all are much better at it than I am.

[Mailanka]

Artist (Calligraphy) was very useful in my chambara game. Anytime anyone wanted to write a poem, or where the beauty of writing mattered (which came up surprisingly often), I required an Artist (Calligraphy) check. Most characters came out of the box with a point or two, but players would actually invest a few points more.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The skill of doing visual art: drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery, scene design, illusion, etc. Requires specialisation in a medium, with defaults between many media. Optional specialisations within forms are common.

A couple of specialisations that exist on the real world aren't covered in Basic.

Computer Art
Technical Drawing

I think these are both Drawing. The skill doesn't change just because you are drawing something technical. In a sense it's the same difference as between other Artist and craft skills. If you don't need a separate skill for the difference between art ceramics and pots, you don't need one for the difference between art drawing and technical drawing.

And many skills change the tools used with TL without becoming new skills. Drawing with a mouse isn't that much more change than going from chalk on slate to mechanical pencil on paper, going to fingertip on touchscreen is less.

I think the reason why most art skills are so useless for adventuring is that like crafts they take a long time. Drawing is the most valuable of them in part because it can be fast - a good artist can produce a recognizable drawing in minutes rather than hours or days. Calligraphy is probably the second most useful and likewise fast. There aren't all that many others - origami/papercutting perhaps. It's a lot harder to work something that is going to require everybody but the skill user to do nothing for a day into a game.

[Not another shrubbery]

Drawing has seen some use for the purpose of identification, but Artist generally is just another color skill in our games.

[Kromm]

In my secret-agents campaign, various Artist specialties have been good for:

• communicating visually with people who share no common language (I let it fully replace a sign language on a successful roll per concept)
• decorating a fake office to make it look more legitimate (complementary to Acting and Fast-Talk)
• doing detail work on forgeries (complementary to Forgery)
• illustrating after-action reports (complementary to Writing)
• illustrating propaganda (complementary to Propaganda)
• painting fake decals and livery for vehicles (not counterfeits, but totally made-up designs for fake companies)
• setting up decoy scenery (a form of set design)
• sketching parties of interest from verbal descriptions (forensic art)
• tattooing people temporarily (complementary to Disguise)

[whswhs]

My strongest inclination with skills such as Artist is to make them the basis for creating magical effects. An enchanted object must be a work of art or craft; a spell must be a work of poetry or song, and so on. So, for example, in the campaign I start tomorrow, one of the characters is a trollwife shaman/surgeon who can confer powers by doing elaborate, time-consuming tattoos with Body Art.

I don't think I've had a PC take Artist just as a decorative or characterization skill. But I'd have to go back through the records of multiple campaigns to be sure. I did have a PC in my Barrayaran campaign take skill with textile arts, but that was run in Big Eyes Small Mouth. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[Anders]

What do you use for stone-carving, like runestones (like this).

[DavidSev]

I would say Technical Drawing (and Technical Writing) should be their own skills, brought specialised to the subject matter. There is a massive difference between between being able to draw a pretty picture, and being able to draw a useable schematic of a circuit board. IMO Technical Drawing should be IQ/Very Hard, and default to whatever it's specialised in (Eg Architecture, one of the Engineer's, etc). There's a lot more technical than drawing.

For computer art, I'd say using a graphics tablet would just be a familiarity of Drawing. Doing vector art with a mouse is completely different and should be it's own speciality.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by DavidSev

I would say Technical Drawing (and Technical Writing) should be their own skills, brought specialised to the subject matter. There is a massive difference between between being able to draw a pretty picture, and being able to draw a useable schematic of a circuit board. IMO Technical Drawing should be IQ/Very Hard, and default to whatever it's specialised in (Eg Architecture, one of the Engineer's, etc). There's a lot more technical than drawing.

I would probably say "you can't have higher skill than the lower of e.g. Architecture and Technical Drawing.