96th Additional Skills

❄️ 96TH HUNGER GAMES SPECIAL MECHANIC ❄️

Welcome to the 96th Annual Hunger Games! Taking inspiration from the Gamemakers of the 93rd, we will be bringing back the Additional Skills mechanic. The intention of this is to help you all further characterize your tributes, and make their interactions with the arena more compelling and individual. This will mainly be used to have an influence on the way that Random Events happen in the arena, and the ways tributes are able to interact with them.

The mechanic boils down to what is essentially a point buy system. There will be four special skills: Brains, Confidence, Fight, and Constitution. Each tribute will be allocated 20 points. These points are meant to be spread across the four skills, none of which can be allocated more than 10 points, and none may be allocated less than 1. Building into different skills will give tributes different advantages in the arena, as tributes have the potential to trigger Random Events that will require [1-20] rolls that align with one of the four special skills.

Brains, are about a tribute's wits, and how well they use them to understand or manipulate their surroundings. Puzzle solving, clue finding, and more are important parts of this skill. That being said, street smarts are also important, and one’s simple common sense might be strong enough to justify having a higher brains skill.

Constitution, all about how well a tribute can take a punch, and keep their food down at the same time. These tributes are good against poison, and will be able to hold their stomachs when the game gets rough.

Fight, is all about agility and strength. A matter of balance, and physical prowess. They have solid reflexes and you don’t want to get into a battle with them. Acrobats and athletes alike have high fight scores.

Confidence, which is most importantly about a tribute's social skills. Are they especially persuasive, or intimidating? Performers, liars, those who move through the world by making it see their perspective — those are the tributes who should have high ‘confidence’ skills.

Tributes who do not want to participate will simply be allocated 5 points to each skill and given no buffs/banes to tailor their arena experience. 5's across the board will mean a +/-0 for each skill. For those that do want to use the system, skills closer to ten will provide buffs, but closer to one will make it harder for success.

Here is the specific table for what each level will give you buff-wise, and I will provide an example build below.

1-2	-2
3-4	-1
5	0
6-7	+1
8-9	+2
10	+3

EXAMPLE:
Say Carly Volkov is reaped in the 96th, and wants to decide how to allocate her skills points. Again, she has twenty points to start, and 5 is the average. Carly is very sociable and intelligent, and as such I want her confidence and brains score to be on the higher side. Alternatively, I think her fight and constitution scores would be on the lower side of the scale. I would most likely spread her points like this:

Brains: 7
Fight: 2
Constitution: 3
Confidence: 8

With this distribution, in the arena Carly would receive a +2 bonus to any Confidence roll she triggers, and a +1 to any Brains roll. Conversely, she will receive a -2 penalty to any Fight roll, and -1 to any Constitution roll she might trigger. There is of course no guarantee she’ll need these, but in the event of a relevant RE, she’ll be able to interact differently than another tribute would be. 

❄️

Parroting the intentions of the 93rd Gamemakers: this mechanic is designed to further individualize each of the tributes, and as such we want to encourage all of you to build your skills truly based on who you think your tribute is, rather than what you think you might be needed in the arena. There will be potential for everyone to need any of the skills, and we're excited to see this mechanic in use again. We will put up a form for tributes to complete post-reaping.

Please PM myself (d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris), hesper hart 🐺 d9f, or d7m fraser birk ♚ frankel if you have questions.

Happy skill building!