Skills represent your character’s overall abilities. These take the effect of various mechanics which allow you to interact with the game and other attendees. Skills fall into one of three categories:
- General Skills – These represent your character’s basic capabilities and training as a member of The Equinox Institute. These are summarised below.
- Class Skills – As part of character creation, you must choose a class – representing you character’s general role within Equinox. There are five classes to choose from and each comes with a Class Skill which all characters who select that Class gain the benefit of. This Class Skill represents the broad training or intuition that comes with your character’s experience in the role.
For more information on the different Classes and their accompanying Class Skill, please see here. - Specialisation – This is a Skill which represents your character’s area of expertise. Each Class has a number of Specialisations and your character must select one of these at character creation.
Descriptions of the Specialisations for each Class can be found on the individual Class pages.
General Skills
All characters are able to do the following, but will not start with the required equipment unless your Class, Specialisation, Background or Cell gives you it:
- Fight using a small weapon (up to 12”);
- Perform First Aid;
- Searching (information on which can be found below); and
- Shoot a Firearm (see the “Dealing Damage” in the Combat and Death section here).
Searching Rules
The rules for searching another character are set out below:
- Searching takes an uninterrupted minute of effort on a character who is willing or not capable of resisting you. At no point should you make contact with that character, unless you have both consented to doing so
- After one minute the target character should hand over any items that are not hidden by a skill or specialisation to the person that is searching for them. If the searching character has a Show Me Lammie that states they can find hidden items then those should be handed over as well.
- You do not have to search for items that are held in a players hands (for example a pistol) but you would not be able to find the ammo for it in someone’s pocket without searching them
- OC bags (indicated with a specific lammie available from the event team) must not be opened or moved by anyone but their owner or with their permission. Nothing of IC value or interest may be kept in an OC bag.
- Lammied items can be stolen, a member of the event will facilitate a swap of the lammie from one physrep to another if required. For example, a prop provided by the game would not need the lammie swapping, a player owned prop (please check when you are stealing the item) would require the lammie to be swapped over.
Skills-in-play
You will note we have not set out how each individual Skill works in the body of this document. Our reasoning for this is that, we want our game to remain rules light where and therefore attendees are only required to learn the Universal Mechanics set out here, their Class Skill and their Specialisation.
Our other reason is to ensure our characters feel like Specialists. Only an individual with the appropriate Specialisation knows how it works and, accordingly, this should encourage roleplay between characters to work out how to best put each Skill to use in the context of the story or event.