Skills represent natural talent, training, or experience. If you can describe it as a verb, it's a good candidate for a skill. Most skill lists for Cortex games consist of verbs.
Using Skills
The following Skills are used in this game.
Craft: Crafting things, includes building, assembling, or creating stuff.
Deceive: Tricking or conning somebody, sleight of hand, spinning events to control the narrative.
Drive: Land and surface vehicles, including cars, boats, and trucks.
Fence: Buying, selling, or trading in less-than-legal goods, whether contraband or merely stolen.
Fight: All kinds of close combat, including weapons or fists.
Fix: Repairing things.
Hack: Making things do stuff their designers didn't mean for them to do. Includes Macgyvering and computer hacking.
Influence: Making others do, think, act, or feel the way you want them to.
Know: General knowledge and recall. Use specialties to cover specific areas: Business, Navigation, Religion, Animals, Fine Arts, etc. Know always includes a free specialty of the player’s choice.
Labor: Carrying out tasks of manual labor, lifting, pushing, digging, pulling, hauling.
Network: Connect with people in a social milieu, whether a scientific conference or the criminal underworld. Use this to find information or individuals.
Move: Running, jumping, swimming, climbing trees.
Notice: Spotting, sensing, or hearing things.
Operate: Using things like computers, gadgets, and devices.
Perform: Acting, putting on a show.
Pilot: Piloting air vehicles or spacecraft.
Shoot: Guns, big rocket launchers, things that you point and shoot.
Sneak: Sneaking around. Sneakily.
Survive: Surviving in the outdoors or wherever.
Throw: Throwing things.
Treat: Taking care of people. Treating and healing injuries, but also counseling.
Rating Skills
Every PC has at least a in each skill, which represents being untrained. Proficiency and expertise are represented by ratings between and . PCs should start with a number of points equal to roughly two thirds the number of skills in the list, which they can put into skills' die ratings. One point earns one step in a skill's die rating. Depending on the method of character creation, some or all of these points may be predetermined.
Untrained: You have no idea what you're doing, and you're likely to create trouble when you try it, but who knows.
Competent: Sufficient training to get by. You're comfortable doing this.
Expert: Able to do this for a living. This is second nature to you
Master: One of the best in the field. Likely known to others who possess the skill.
Grandmaster: One of the best in the world. Known even to those outside the field.
Specialties
A Specialty is a narrow area of concentration or focus within a Skill. Specialties confer a bonus to any test or contest that falls into that narrow area and involves the skill they're attached to. When the PC uses that skill and their specialty also applies, they use both dice in their pool.
There's no fixed list of Specialties. Instead, players are encouraged to work with their GM to think about what specialty might be attached to the skill they want to specialize in.
Example pairings of Abilities and Skills
Some Skills will typically be used with the same Ability over and over again. For example, Shoot is commonly paired with Athletic. Some Skills and Abilities, however, frequently change their pairing based on the context and character's goal.
Use Academic ability with Know (Warp Drive) to figure out why your ship won't make the jump to hyperspace. Use Technical ability with Know (Warp Drive) to fix it.
Use Academic ability with the Network skill when you want to ask around on campus about the missing professor. Use the Interpersonal ability with Network to blend in at a high society function.
Use Technical ability with Treat when trying to heal your crewmate with an autodoc. Use Interpersonal with Treat when you want to help them regain their confidence.