DE: Skills and abilities

[yakalskovich]

1.) What are your characters' most important skills and abilities? Where and at what age did they learn them?

2.) Now it gets interactive:  among other people's answers to 1.), find skills & abilities that your characters would be interested in, and ask about them -- either services or lessons. A good swordsman, for example, could either go and fight for your cause, or teach you how to fight with a sword.

Comments

[sunbaked_baker]

Sunshine: Baking, vegetarian cooking, Sunlight-elemental magic.
(Young, 10-year-old Sunshine: embroidery, storytelling)

Yrael: Music (singing, keyboard instruments, guitar, composition, etc.), creative violence

[camwyn]

Gordon is good with man-portable firearms, small explosives, bludgeoning weaponry, vent crawls, infiltration, various forms of guerrilla warfare, driving cars (automatic and manual transmission both), high speed bicycling, theoretical physics, changing diapers, first aid, making baby food from scratch, basic parliamentary procedure, and handling high energy research machinery. While he had basic instruction in the use of firearms and the throwing of grenades as part of Black Mesa's employee self-defense program, most of that is personal inborn aptitude plus immersion experience, and a little bit of Milliways training. The bicycling was something he practiced and learned in the years between MIT and Black Mesa, and is my personal excuse for why Skinny McNerdenfest was capable of dealing with pipe balancing and ledge walks hundreds of feet above canyon floors in his canon. The vent crawls were canonically practiced at Black Mesa as races to retrieve people's keys that had been locked in their offices. The baby stuff comes of being a father of toddlers.

Shephard has the skill sets acquired in the United States Marine Corps' Scout Sniper program, specifically the Quantico training courses, and the skills required for HECU membership, which I headcanon as being identical to those the members of the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force are trained with. He is also a hunter- primarily rifles and longbows- and an outdoorsman with survival specialization in temperate forest and mountain environments, the result of being taken along with his hunter/fisher uncles since he was six years old. He knows his way around gasoline engines as a result of teenage years spent rebuilding and repairing a used motorcycle. He can play drums, and he can swear in sixteen languages, although outside of swearing his only fluency is in English (he has moderate capability in Mexican Spanish and in one particular version of the Satere-Mawe language). He has also been studying his ass off at every available opportunity to make up for a lack of official training in how to be captain of a nuclear-powered icebreaker.

Ellen was raised with a generalist indoor American education until she turned sixteen, at which point she was slotted into three years' worth of chaplain training. This means that she has the skills and religious education of a nondenominational American Protestant minister, including a solid background in counseling and dispute resolution as well as theology. She also has significant small firearms skill thanks to her father starting her with a BB gun for her tenth birthday, otherwise she would never have survived her escape from Vault 101. She has since had a combination of Milliways training, Brotherhood of Steel training, and plain old Wasteland not-dying that has given her considerable proficiency with small firearms, basic plasma weapons, heavy energy weapons, grenades, bladed weapons, unexploded ordnance defusing, power armor operation, emergency first aid, radiation response, small group combat, lockpicking, basic computer operation (nothing past the green text on black screen terminal stage), wilderness (scrub desert) survival, scavenging, weapon repair, armor repair, clothing and shoe maintenance, robot maintenance, basic gardening under restricted water conditions, large animal agriculture, large animal obstetrics (oh how she wishes she didn't know that), and not hiding under the table and having panic attacks despite the size of the sky.

[leeshajoy]

Ellen was raised with a generalist indoor American education

Now I kinda wanna see someone in the Wasteland who refers to Vault natives as "indoor-Americans."

[camwyn]

I figured that a general American education as we know it probably includes things that aren't necessary for a Vault population. Stuff like 'these things are called clouds, and this is what they do' or 'during certain times of year there is more daylight and warmer temperatures, and during others there is less daylight and it is cold' comes to mind. (Admittedly the clouds one might be covered by watching old vids where people lived on the surface, but people don't always draw the right conclusions from movies.) Or, hell, 'this is what happens to your skin if you are in sunlight too long'; someone who had lived in a Vault their entire life would have no reason to know what sunburn was and would probably think they were developing radiation poisoning. So- an indoor education.

[bjornwilde]

Briareus: Small and large caliber firearms, military and police tactics, and anti-terrorist urban tactics. He hasn't really had a life beyond these.

Sam Wilson: All the training involved with the Air Force's Pararescue Squadron, PTSD counseling (with a combat focus, especially adapting to civilian life), cooking, and soul music.

Ahsoka: Fencing (though I don't know that this would work well with a weapon that has actual weight), basic high tech repair (or whatever we want to hand wave the basics of SW tech is), spaceship piloting, space attack ship piloting, droid repair (again SW specific), multi-ecological survival, unarmed combat, and gymnastics.

Selina: Picking pockets, how to fence stolen goods, parkour and free running, how to break out of holds (anti-wrestling?)

Rollo: Drinking, fighting with sword, shield, or axe, medieval nautical navigation, medieval military tactics, and how to sail a Viking longship. Viking law maybe.

Hank: Science!, piloting (likely no so good with combat flying however), biochemistry, engineering, anything else if you give him a day or so to do some reading.

Izana: Garde piloting? That's about it, I think.

Luidaeg: Go away kid, you bother me.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: Being sweetness and light incarnate. He was basically always that. Also, not quite omnipotence or omniscience but it's scarily close sometimes.

Henry: Hmm. Currently not really any, except a knack for seeing the heart of things.

Evelyn: Currently, the early stages of basic ice, fire, and lightning attacks (she doesn't enjoy the latter). She doesn't have much else yet. Check back with her in... what, eight years in her timeline, I think?

Lois: black belt in unspecified martial art form, some firearms training (handgun at least), writing (journalism flavor), finding trouble, instinct for the truth, bad karaoke, general knack for logistics, ability not to get herself killed, Snark, dealing with superheroes and supervillains without going insane, drinking heavily (except champagne, which she gets drunk on really fast), having a lot of advice be it practical or bad or good-disguised-as-bad.
The writing and the Strangeness Dealing were developed as an adult, and the drinking as a teen. The rest just kind of happened over her whole life.

Anakin: fencing (lightsaber style), general knack for combat both armed and unarmed (and ship), piloting (regular and combat both), Star Wars-style tech and droid repair and droid construction, multi-ecological survival, a surprising amount of skill with the Force, excellent sense of tactics but less so of strategy, and making the absolute worst life choices available. (yes I swear that's a cultivated skill)
Everything either natural and/or taught/trained as a child/teen by Obi-wan.

Tavi: armed combat (specialties in sword and sling); unarmed combat; furycrafting aka elemental magic in wind, earth, water, fire, wood, metal (both combat and non-combat applications, which covers anything from healing to a particularly sharp sword to meddling with forces of nature); military tactics, strategy, and history; military (and civilian) command; learning foreign languages, mostly Canish for him and potentially some Latin; espionage, intelligence analysis, and assassination; archaeology; mathematics of a flavor I am still working on, but he's great at proofs; engineering and weapons innovation, within the limits of his world's capacity; ability to look at other people's ideas and adapt them for his use; chess (well, its equivalent); some tracking; comparative magical theory; comparative governmental theory; logistics on a large scale; international diplomacy; politics; mild, occasional, not-on-demand, and highly unreliable preternatural intuition (precognitive/insight); a terrifyingly steep learning curve; sheep-herding; people-herding.
The tracking, sling, and sheep-herding were all taught to him as a child by his uncle Bernard in Calderon Valley.
Almost everything else was either natural inclination that only blossomed when he had something to do with it, or else potential and talent cultivated while in Alera Imperia between 15 and 20, some through teaching, some through watching Gaius Sextus.
International diplomacy and command he mostly learned on the fly as needed to avoid being killed.
The intuition is in-born and cannot be trained. The furycrafting is in-born but only significantly trained at 23. The steep learning curve is in-born and terrifying.

[ceitfianna]

Will: armed and unarmed combat, knowledge of swords, knives, archery-focus on English longbow, forest survival skills, running of a medieval manor, pickpocketing, guerilla tactics in a forest setting

Charles: knowledge commiserate with a PHD in genetics from the 1960s, education from Oxford, psychology and some therapy techniques, creation of mental shields, New York City and Oxford of the 1960s including appreciation of food and wine and clothes

Quentin: etiquette of the Fae courts, sword fighting, some knowledge of how modern tech works with Faerie magic, magical illusions, blood magic, detective work, unarmed fighting, French, how to care for a knight with little self preservation, cat care

William: Cowboy skills: horseback riding, roping, breeding and managing cattle and horses, range cooking, desert survival, use of rifle and pistol, unarmed combat-boxing based, how to care for someone with TB and adjusting to a prosthesis, knowledge of the American Civil War

Sameth: Charter magic with a focus on building, repair, offensive and defensive spells, illusions, expected knowledge from a posh boarding school in a place equivalent to 1920s England, mechanics, forge work, what it takes to keep a castle functioning and understanding of running a small kingdom, horseback riding, swordfighting, cricket, rugby, unarmed combat-not as strong as armed, boating, outdoor survival

Moist: forgery, misdirection, lying, escape routes, thievery ranging from pickpocketing to complex embezzlement schemes, horseback riding, how to raise dogs to be guard dogs, languages of Discworld including how to copy an accent

Jane: Skills of a well educated lady of her time including French, Latin, Greek, horseback riding, housekeeping, embroidery, sewing, dancing, finer points of etiquette and society

Ivan: Military education from Barrayar, knowledge of the complexities of High Vor culture and politics with a focus on the pitfalls of society, armed and unarmed combat, driving a groundcar and flying a lightflyer, basic survival skills, knowledge of the politics of his universe

Demeter: Farming techniques through the centuries with a focus on the Greek and French climates, parenting, wine and whatever else she feels like knowing

Tumnus: History of Narnia, baking, knitting, Narnian court, panpipe flute playing

I'm probably missing details for all of them, but I think this covers their main ones.

[rudderless]

Clementine: Beauty and coffiture (as a teenager), Gymnastics (as a youth), weapons training (at the academy).

Dixie: She was born with that voice but the sisters trained her up - as did the dance halls she attended.

Juliet: The academy in her twenties.

Pinkie: Started party planning as a young filly, and started baking thanks to her grammy Pie even younger.

Eponine: Pickpocketing and street survival from the age of around fourteen on.