What Are Your Top Ten Defaults?

[Bathawk]

Oftentimes I'll be in an adventure and something unexpected will come up. A character will need to pick a pair of handcuffs with a paperclip, bluff his way past a guard, or figure out if those berries were poisonous.

Unfortunately the character doesn't have Lockpicking, Fast Talk, or Naturalist and will need to use a default skill roll...so I drag out the Basic book, flip to the skills section and look up the appropriate default....all while the game grinds to a halt

(yes I know the better thing to do is to assume a a default of -4 or -5 and get on withe game, but bear with me....)

So what skills do you consider the most important to your game, is not "universal" on your players character sheets, and worth keeping on a "cheat sheet" behind your GM screen?

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Bathawk

So what skills do you consider the most important to your game, is not "universal" on your players character sheets, and worth keeping on a "cheat sheet" behind your GM screen?

All of them? Like, I just keep a cheat sheet which is basically the Skill List from Basic (with some skills removed*), rearranged and printed on two pages in my House Rules and Charts "Game Bible".

What is more important (to me) is what I always put on the Character Sheets. I always include the Influence skills, and the following on all PC sheets as defaults if they didn't spend points in them, because you will need to know them at some point: Acrobatics, Climbing, Escape, Hiking, Genre Specific Skills*, Jumping†, Lifting†, Observation, Running, Search, Scrounging, Stealth, Survival, Swimming, Travel*.

* Genre specific skills and "travel" skills would things like Soldier, Strategy, Tactics, and weapon skills in a military game, Driving or Piloting in games with those vehicles featuring, Riding in westerns or medieval fantasy, etc.

† I decided that Jumping and Lifting have defaults. I've seen too many people wipe out trying to jump small obstacles because they weren't really athletic, and people lift stuff all day but they can't default Lifting? Meanwhile everyone can Parachute at DX-4 despite it taking lots of training to actually know how to parachute safely (let alone know how to pack a chute when different styles are packed differently)?

[whswhs]

Cheat sheet? I've never used one. I currently run both my campaigns on my desktop, via Zoom, and I have pdfs of the Basic Set there; I can find skills in less than half a minute, and for trickier things the pdfs are searchable.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Bathawk

Oftentimes I'll be in an adventure and something unexpected will come up. A character will need to pick a pair of handcuffs with a paperclip, bluff his way past a guard, or figure out if those berries were poisonous.

Unfortunately the character doesn't have Lockpicking, Fast Talk, or Naturalist and will need to use a default skill roll...so I drag out the Basic book, flip to the skills section and look up the appropriate default....all while the game grinds to a halt

(yes I know the better thing to do is to assume a a default of -4 or -5 and get on withe game, but bear with me....)

So what skills do you consider the most important to your game, is not "universal" on your players character sheets, and worth keeping on a "cheat sheet" behind your GM screen?

I ran into legibility problems with some of my players, so it was fairly standard for me to write up all the character sheets and print them out, usually two copies each, one for the player and one for me as GM. One consequence was that I never considered a character sheet to be just a repository for items the player had bought, but a key reference source for the player. In other words, if I thought it at all likely that a character might need to make a roll vs. skill rather than vs. attribute, the default for that skill was on the character sheet at [0] cost. Consequently, I rarely needed a "cheat sheet."

As an aside, listing every skill's default did tend to bloat the sheet into a 2-page listing, so I usually trimmed the player's copy down to only 1 page of skills while I kept the full listing on my copy.

[Culture20]

Unless the default in question is critical at the moment, I often relegate looking up rules to one of the players. Since several have a book, pdf, or a character building program open, it's pretty fast.

[johndallman]

I find it easier to remember if a skill is Easy, Average, Hard or Very Hard than to remember specific defaults. That information is also available on other players' character sheets.

Then the default is -4 for Easy, -5 for Average, and so on, for almost all skills.

[Donny Brook]

I think the OP question is about inter-skill defaults. The most common I encounter for those are weapon, vehicle, operations, and repair skills.

[Pursuivant]

I'm very generous about allowing defaults between skills if I, or a player, can make a valid connection between them. E.g., IQ-based Broadsword defaults to Connoisseur (Weapons) to recognize the work of a well-known sword-maker.

Where skills reasonably allow defaults, I use the -4, -5, -6, -7 defaults mentioned above. For example, the default to Connoisseur (an Easy skill) would be IQ-based Broadsword-4.