Skills

skill is deliberately the thinnest schema in the project: name, category, baseValue, description. Four fields carry the entire Skills chapter — every entry in /Skills/Standard Skills/ and /Skills/Professional Skills/ is one of these files, and every one of them looks the same shape as <@Athletics.skill> or <@Magic.skill>.

The four fields

• name — the skill as written on a character sheet: Athletics, Combat Style, Literacy (Specific Language). Match capitalisation and phrasing exactly, because this is the string a player recognises and the slug a character.skills reference points at.
• category — always exactly "Standard" or "Professional", matching which subfolder the file lives in. Nothing in the schema enforces that pairing mechanically, so keep folder and category in sync by hand: a Professional skill filed under /Skills/Standard Skills/ will look correct on its own page but confuse anyone browsing the folder for the character-creation Standard list.
• baseValue — the characteristic formula exactly as the Player's Handbook states it: "STR+DEX", "INT×2 +40", "POW+CHA". This is a display string, not a computed expression — see the note below on why.
• description — one or two sentences on what the skill covers and when it's rolled, in the voice of a rules glossary entry, not a tutorial. Compare <@Athletics.skill> and <@Magic.skill> for length and tone; neither one explains how the roll-under mechanic works — that's the Player's Handbook's job — they just say what the skill is for.

Why baseValue is text, not a formula

Skill values are meant to be computed once during character creation (see <@Making a Character.md>) and then hand-adjusted with Culture, Career, and bonus points — they are not live-recalculated from Characteristics during play, unlike, say, a character.attributes.damageModifier you might later choose to make a computed field. Because of that, baseValue here is documentation, not data: it tells a builder or a player how the skill's starting number was supposed to be reached, not a value the platform evaluates. Leave it as a plain string.

Adding a new skill

1. Decide Standard or Professional. Standard means every character gets it; if you're not sure, it's Professional.
2. Place the file in the matching subfolder — /Skills/Standard Skills/ or /Skills/Professional Skills/.
3. Pick a baseValue formula consistent with the existing list's grain: two Characteristics added, one Characteristic doubled, optionally with a flat +40 (reserved so far for Customs and Native Tongue — the "everyone starts fluent in their own culture" skills). Don't invent a third kind of formula (multipliers other than ×2, subtraction, etc.) without updating <@How Skills Work.rule> and the handbook's Skills chapter to explain it, since players will hit a formula shape nothing else documents.
4. Write description to match the register of existing entries — what it covers, cross-referencing another rule file by name if the roll has special handling elsewhere (Athletics points to Movement in the Game System section, for instance).
5. If the skill is setting-specific gear-tech (Electronics, Sensors, Astrogation are already here for sci-fi settings), that's fine — Professional skills are explicitly open-ended per campaign.

New Professional skills a character doesn't start with should still get a file here the moment any character or career menu could plausibly grant them — a character.skills reference to a skill that doesn't exist yet has nothing to resolve to.