underside dev diary #9: statless in seattle pt.4

first of all, sorry for the lack of updates this last couple weeks! one of my girlfriends was visiting and it's surprisingly hard to write patreon posts with a puppygirl clinging to your leg. i'm back now, though, and ready to talk about the final part of underside's tripartite attribute system, skills. 

internally, we've taken to calling the core dicepool resolution system that underside functions on the A/V system, for ADJECTIVE/VERB. you describe something your character is doing, then add dice for the relevant Adjective (your Approach, whether you're doing it Deviously or Bravely or Ruthlessly) and for the relevant Verb (your Angle or Skill, whether you're hurting someone with a power or stitching someone's wounds without one)

the adjective part of that equation is to do with who your character is. an approach represents some fundamental constant of their personality, how their mind conceptualizes and solves problems, so it's constant across different types of rolls. but one of the big themes in underside is the divide between your costumed self and your secret identity, the question of which one is your 'real' self, and so there are two possible sets of verbs to pull from when building a dicepool--angles, which we've already talked about, represent things you can do with your power -- skills represent things you can do without it. 

there are eighteen skills in underside, split into three categories: the COMBAT skills (Brawl, Barrage, Withstand, Dodge, Strategize, and Improvise) and SOCIAL skills (Menace, Manipulate, Brush Off, Deflect, Gauge, and Savvy) are the ones most likely to come up during the action-packed Cape Phase, dealing with fighting know-how and social maneuvering respectively. the MISCELLANEOUS skills (Investigate, Prowl, Engineer, Treat, Conspire, and Subsidize) are more lowkey, practical life skills, more likely to come up during the relative lulls and downtime of the Lair Phase. 

the fact that there's as many social skills as there are combat skills should point to how highly underside prioritizes its social conflicts and power plays -- it's just as important a part of the game as the cape fights, because the kind of superhero media underside is based on is the type where a tense conversation in a penthouse can have the same or even higher stakes as an all-out superpowered fight to the death. it also means that no matter what kind of character you're playing, you should find yourself able to invest in some part of the social game -- the big, lumbering muscle of the group who might not get a word in edgewise in games that need a more traditional face can still take a few points in Menace or Brush Off, interjecting with a well-placed threatening gesture or dismissive grunt to help their team in a Standoff. 

another interesting dynamic in underside is that, since power and skill rolls use different and mutually incompatible dice pools, the more combat-oriented your power is the less likely you are to want to put a bunch of points into COMBAT skills. this helps drive home the feeling of vulnerability at play in underside, the fact that even though you might be able to shoot lasers, you're still a squishy bag of meat -- you get no special endurance or martial arts abilities just because you can set fires with your mind! 

the next few diaries will go into more detail on each category of skill in turn, but one last mechanic relating to them i want to go over first is talents -- just having a number go up can be kind of boring as progression goes, and the very tight dice math of underside means that there's only so many times numbers even can go up. as a result, a lot of the advancement you'll be doing in the skills you pick is taking talents, small micro-abilities that give you broad narrative advantages or narrow and specific mechanical legs up. as well as helping you characterize your PC (are their points in Treat because they're a medical student or because they're practicing, ahem, amateur pharmacology?), this injects some of the fun of build-crafting back into a game that has a pretty stripped-down and narrative superpower system. 

that's one of the fun things about skills, though--they stem from who your character is as a person, not as a cape, as an individual, as the person with a life and history outside of their costume -- it hammers home that distinction while at the same time being something you have to bring to bear in costume anyway. the skill/angle demarcation both highlights and crosses the demarcation between cape and individual, and that kind of blurring is what underside is all about.