New Skills

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Writing (11?) - prereq Literacy - ability to write in a clear and concise manner. Useful for researchers, military officers (to write orders), and who else? Combined with Bard, would let you write entertaining fiction.

Who else: Scholars, Mechanicians, and anyone else who wants to communicate effectively and produce books that can easily be learned from. Wizards too - Advanced Wizard has rules for learning and casting magic from written books and scrolls - well, it would naturally be really helpful if they were well-written, as opposed to poorly-written. The given rates of learning and reliable casting for books and scrolls could be for those written by people with the Writing talent (and Calligraphy...?), while those written by someone without could be slower and/or less reliable to learn or cast from.

There could also be a Reading talent (prereq Literacy) which would represent the ability to read and understand more quickly, to comprehend dense texts, and make understanding poorly-written texts easier. Also helps understanding nuance, poetry, subtle hints & clues, etc. Also useful for Scholars, Wizards, Mechanicians, etc. who have access to valuable but dense reading materials. People with Reading talent learning from written sources would do so more quickly (or those without, less quickly), and have less difficulty reading poorly-written texts, bad calligraphy, etc.