Devlog #2 - The one about mixing skills

At the end of my previous devlog post, I proposed an idea to create two types of skills, giving greater flexibility with a lower number of skills. The categories could use different approaches for action, like topic skills (stealth, survival, fight, etc.) and activity skills (movement, observation, etc.). I didn't test this idea because I saw a problem when I tried to balance this solution. But let's start from the beginning.

Number of skills

Let's assume we want to have 2 categories of skills. Let them be topic and activities. For a moment, let's assume we created these skills in a way that each combination makes sense. How many skills do we need? In Fate Core we have 18 skills, so we should aim for the number of topics times number of activities to be similar to this number. Suitable options would be: 3×6, 4×4 or 4×5. 

The outcome

I've checked many combinations, but the outcomes were still similar. When you add values of skills from two categories, the results have a different score structure than when we have one long list of skills in a form of pyramid. Furthermore, to support the maximum skill score to be +4 the scores of skills in categories will be very low and, in fact, most of them will be 0. You can see an example in the table below. A solution would be to double the scores, allowing the final score to be up to +8. This would make a lot of mess in Fate rules and won't make any change in the skill scores, again most scores will be in the +1 — +2 equivalent range.

Base on this table we have: 1×+4, 2×+3, 6×+2, 5×+1,4×+0 (in Fate Core: 1×+4, 2×+3, 3×+2, 4×+3, 8×+0).

Conclusion

This way would also be too invasive to use, changing largely the power level of characters and leaving many skills at +0, which isn't very satisfying for players. I need to go back to using the original Fate Core skills, maybe with a small retouch to better spread out the range of each skill.