Width vs depth, IQ vs DX skills

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by wellspring

To the other good points here, I think it's worth adding that while we've discussed skill overlap in the past, it feels like it comes up more often with academic skills. My go-to example is economics, finance, market analysis.

Oh, no, those are clearly distinct skills with almost no overlap.

Economics is primarily a theoretical science. If you got a job doing it you would be working as a teacher or researcher; or perhaps as an advisor to a large business on the likely economic situation several years hence, or to a government agency on the likely outcomes of a new regulatory policy or law, in which case you would most likely be giving bonuses to Merchant, Finance, Law, Politics, or Administration rolls with a complementary skill roll.

Finance is an applied science. Its main focus is on raising funds for large projects; secondarily it looks at investing funds well to gain a good return. It's largely strategic in application. There actually seem to be two subbranches: in business you would be getting funds from investors; in government you would be taking them in through taxes—and you might consult an economist about the social impact of those taxes, a politician about whether they could be enacted, a lawyer about whether the courts would strike them down, or even a philosopher about whether they were just; a Finance roll would tell you whether they were collectible and how much revenue they would raise. But none of that is the main focus of economics.

Market Analysis is a very specialized applied science: It guides you in playing the high-stakes game of buying and selling, particularly of commodities and commodities futures, but more generally in any market where investments turn over regularly and you need to bet on the right ones. This has very little to do with finance, and it's not clear that economics is a big help in it; I don't think being an economist will train you to do it right. This is the one of those three skills that I think could most readily have been cut, as it's rarely a thing PCs will do other than as a boring job, PCs who do it aren't likely to have time for adventuring, and I'm not really seeing much interesting game mechanics for it.

Those are a lot more distinct than Knife, Shortsword, Broadsword, Two-Handed Sword, Force Sword, Rapier, Smallsword, and Main-Gauche.