Bang Skills

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Which, by the way, dragging things back on topic, is why any kind of Medical Stuff! bang skill tends to be a very bad deal. The points that will get you that at reasonable levels will get you Physician at insane levels, and all the defaults therefrom.

That's true if you treat Medic! or whatever you call it as "I have the following N skills at level X." But I don't think that's a useful way to approach them. This doesn't seem to have made it clearly into 4/e—at least, I can't find it in either the Basic Set or Power-Ups 7—but my recollection is that ! skills in 3/e had penumbras of skills that weren't named explicitly. On one hand, if you were a Medic!, you could roll against it for skills that weren't normally part of being a doctor, but that would help you be a doctor in a particular case: Electronics Repair (Medical) if your diagnostic equipment had stopped working, or Animal Handling if you had to treat a sick animal and needed to calm it down so you could examine it. On the other, if it could be said that you were using your medical knowledge and skills to help you accomplish some normally nonmedical task, you could roll against Medic! for that too: Erotic Art if you were using your knowledge of physiology to gratify a lover, or Finance if you were trying to convince a bank that you were a good risk for a loan to start your practice. Of course this calls for a lot of judgment calls. But if you allow free interpretation like that, the ! skills become better deals.