[Basic] Skills of the week: Environment Suit and Scuba

[RogerBW]

See "Explosions in Other Environments" box, p. B415.

Gratuitous Plug: I put all the 4e underwater rules together, and filled in most of the gaps, in GURPS Fathom Five in Pyramid #3/26.

I have Scuba skill in real life, and players who've known me for a while tend to find an excuse to put it on their characters as it has a habit of being a useful thing to do in my games.

Kabufu, the risk of uncontrolled ascent (or just loss of balance as your arm or leg floats up at an awkward angle) is indeed a problem with dry suits, but I'd be inclined to call it a familiarity more than anything else.

Battlesuit shows up on some of my Reign of Steel PCs since it's the skill for powered exoskeletons. I haven't played a game in which it's been a major consideration.

Diving Suit also came up in Reign of Steel (investigating a "lost" sub-sea colony, using a hijacked Moray which is really not well designed for human habitation), and I've just noticed one of the Torg PCs has it. I'd better find an excuse for him to use it.

NBC suit is a skill every Reign of Steel character should have, what with nanoburn and Ebola Zaire B floating about the place. In a more ragged campaign than the ones I've played, note that roll to improvise NBC gear!

And Vacc Suit is a survival skill for spacers, and anyone in a spacegoing campaign will have to put a point or two in it eventually.

Rolling against the suit skill itself hasn't happened that often; it usually takes the form of "you have encountered some sort of hazard; do you deal with it calmly and effectively". More commonly encountered is the DX-based skill cap.