Combat related stuff

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Plane

Reading 89-95 I'm not entirely sure what that means, so hopefully we can figure it out by examples where we see that perk built into the cost of some templates.

It's a patch on an inherent flaw of a playable skill system - things you can learn to do in reality are almost infinitely divisible and recombinable, but no game wants to deal with millions of different skills.

The intent of a Unique Technique is this is a thing that you actually need to train to do, and which isn't so common that anybody learning skill X would learn it, but it also isn't so separate as to justify an entirely new skill. Once you have learned how to do it at all, it just becomes part of skill X, just like all the thousands of things skill X already allows you to do but which realistically you could learn to do (and improve) without actually knowing skill X.

Incidentally flipside of that, the perks for learning some bit of skill X without the rest of skill X also exist. As Skill Adaptation (when you attach it to another skill), One Task Wonder (when you attach it to an attribute) or Shtick (when you don't attach it to anything, it just works). Or you can call them new skills as the generic undefined skills at each difficulty level (Hobby, Professional or Expert skills).

You need this sort of flexibility because skills aren't "real" - they're convenient clusters of lots of different things that are often learned together, but which can be, and sometimes are, separated. Which is also the issue techniques address at a slightly less separate level really.

Most flexible rules, definitely including all generic modifier and trait design systems, were actually designed to work in one direction - you start with the thing you want to model and use the rules to construct it. Flipping them around and using the rule to decide what is possible is basically the opposite of what they were written for. Sometimes it will give you a reasonable enough result, but it may not.