Zenbitz: Thoughts on skills

The basic assumption here is that player pays points for skills. To avoid unbalancing, the more "popular" or "useful" skills have to cost more. This was also mentioned in http://parpg.fifengine.de/forums/index.php?topic=6.15 a forum topic

Incredibly Useful (used in basic, day-to-day game play - but most PCs are not good at ALL of these. fighting, survival (including area knowledge), "trauma" medical (i.e, from bandaids to bullet removal), stealth

Moderately Useful: (you might have a few, NPCs might help you out (recruitable or no) communication, barter, tech repair, vehicle, "internal" medicine (disease, pharmacy), crafting, tactics, leadership, farming and agriculture, brewing and distilling, food preservation, animal husbandry

Once in a life time: (0-1 sidequests... NPCs MUST be available for help) Hard sciences (biochemistry, nuclear engineering), air craft mechanic, seamanship, computer programming

Utterly useless (but might get into the game as pure flavor) Game design, mathematics* (possibly could be used as prereq for engineering/sciences), fashion sense, music, history, philosophy, Television trivia, Wiki mastery, sports.

Hmm.... "Utterly useless" perhaps... but what if they represent your characters' INTERESTS. And NPCs would have them too - the game function is simply that they are more likely to be your friend (better reaction roll, "escape valve") if you share interests. It would cool if this was like secret easter egg feature, hidden from Player.