I’m having some trouble figuring out how to make the character I’ve put together work with the stats.
So I put together sort of a street rat turned spy and chameleon. The way I’m picturing the character, they have little to no academic knowledge, but a high level of intuitive understanding of people. So their way of working would involve sort of reading the room, seeing who’s important, who’s not paying attention, and then watching certain people for clues or for seeing what he can overhear. In a group, this would also cover watching if certain people are getting suspicious or what they think of others, or similar skills. They’re also mostly good at dealing with people; because they rely on observation and deception they’re not so good at surveying territory.
But I feel like I’m running into problems trying to represent that on the sheet. The first half sounds like surveying, the second like studying. But I also feel like the character’s lack of academic knowledge in particular makes the study skill particularly inappropriate for them, and surveying also covers a lot of sort of spatial awareness that doesn’t really fit. I’m aware that I could choose to just not roll for those, but that restricts the character to just not trying. It also feels a bit punitive to me to have to spend essentially double the points to do what feels like part of my character’s main thing, when I then have to ignore most of what the skills represent because it doesn’t fit the character. I’d rather just spend one set of points to get the social “people reading” skills and then actually roll 0 dice on the academic and terrain survey skills. It’s been making gaining experience feel like I’m playing catch-up to the basic character rather than a reward.
So I guess I’m asking, how would you represent a character that’s good at reading the room, good at reading individual motivations, bad at academics, and only ok at spatial stuff? Preferably without investing in being good at academics and then just sort of pretending that’s not on the sheet?