Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Game Mechanics: Skills
Most games these days have skills. If no points are put into buying a skill then that skill stays at zero, or at some mininum or default level. Skills can be bought up from this level with points.

SKILL BREADTH

A problem with skill systems is that the areas of expertise represented by skills can be of varying breadth. Take engineering, for instance. In some games engineering is a single skill. In others it is considered too broad to be a single skill and there are several skills within that subject area. It is possible to keep subdividing skills into narrower and narrower specialisations.

In terms of buying skills with points, this means that in order to have a 'fair' character creation system, all skills must be equally broad. If some skills cover broad subject areas and others very narrow specialisations, but these all cost the same number of points, then it means that you get a lot more actual ability for the same investment of points if you buy the broad skills.

MINIMUM LEVEL SKILLS

In a lot of games, most characters have some skills at the minimum level. Often this includes skills that most normal people have some basic grasp of. Presumably then, as these sets of numbers are supposed to represent realistic people, a minimum level stat represents someone having normal average basic ability.

In reality there is no such thing as an average person who has normal average basic ability in everything. In fact different people have different levels of ability in normal everyday things in which they're not specialists. Thus where characters have skills with no points put into them, they should really have randomly varying low skill levels, not a fixed low skill level.

How do you represent someone who's worse than average at something? See the Pool Test

SKILL AMBIGUITY

Most games with skills have official lists of skills. These have descriptions saying what each skill covers. Unfortunately in most games due to shortage of space or incompetence in writing, it is often unclear what each skill covers. Also, if there is no listed skill for doing a certain action, the GM is faced with the choice of deciding that that action is governed by an existing skill, or inventing a new skill. This could happen in character creation (when a player says 'My character's a medic - what skills does he need to be good at medicine?') or during gameplay (when a player says 'I need to defuse this bomb - what skill do I use?').

If the GM rules that doing a certain action requires a certain existing skill which is in a related area but, until now, has not been seen as covering that particular action, then players may quite reasonably object 'Well my character should be able to do that given his background, but I haven't got that skill because I didn't know you needed it for that.' Conversely, players may suddenly find that their characters can do something they didn't know they could do before.

If the GM invents a new skill in character creation to cover something a player wants his character to be able to do, and doesn't tell other players about it, then other characters will certainly not have it.

Different GMs have different interpretations of what skills are used for what actions, so if a character moves from one GM's game to another's, he may find that the character has lost some abilities and gained new ones though his stats remain the same.

RELATED SKILLS

Many games have finely divided narrow skills in some areas, and although in reality a person knowing one would have insight into others, in the game system they are entirely unrelated. Combat skills are a common example. In some games there will be a separate skill for every single type of weapon listed in the rules. In others, there will be a number of broad classes of weapon skill, eg. Sword, Club, Unarmed, Spear. However, in reality al hand to hand combat uses similar body movements. Presumably hitting someone with a two foot long iron bar would use the Club skill whereas hitting someone with a two foot long edged (ie. non-stabbing) sword would use the Sword skill, yet the main difference between these is that one is sharp and the other blunt; the action of hitting is the same for both. And in fact most of the body's movements in using a sword or club are similar to those used in unarmed combat. So, if someone is good at one, he should be good at the others. If the skills system of the gme does not represent this then it is silly.