Bang Skills

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by maximara

I agree about Science! though Martial Artist! is about as insane. Bang! skills can be too broad for some games.

I don't agree about Science!

In the first place, it's intended to simulate characters in cinematic works and genres. Such characters often ARE skilled at doing research in all of the sciences. See for example Reed Richards, or Brainiac 5, or Mr. Spock, or Data. If you want to simulate cinematic sources I think you need to divide things up the way they do.

In the second place, in terms of how much characters have to do dramatically, "the science guy" (or gal) really does have only about as much to do as the engineer, or the medic, or the witch, or the heroic warrior—or less. You aren't ordinarily going to write a script where the astronomer, and the geologist, and the meteorologist, and the biologist each have an independent and essential contribution to make to the story.

And in the third place, some other games have just one science skill. World of Darkness has Science, for example, and so does Buffy; Savage Worlds has the broad category of Knowledge skills, but has Science as a single focus within Knowledge. So it's far from unheard of for a rules system to collapse all the sciences together.