The Utinni talent, for those of you not near book, is:

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"Remove [] per rank of Utinni! from checks to find or scavenge items or gear. Such checks take half the time."

The question that came up last weekend was - so just what is the 'scavenge for stuff' skill? Now, on the surface one might think you'd use negotiate - the look for an item of X Rarity skill. But the argument against that is that the Outlaw Tech doesn't get negotiate as one of their career skills, so the odds of having ranks in them are low(er). So that says - to me at least - that negotiate isn't the skill to use.

Streetwise? Maybe - but that skill doesn't seem to say "I'm digging through mountains of garbage a junkyard to find a Sonic Oscillator" to me. To find the junkyard? Sure - but find the parts in it? Not so much.

If Skill Monkey has taught us anything , its that any task could be tackled by a number of skills if approached with the right mindset. So while I think all those could work, a strong argument could be made Mechanics as the digging through a mountain of crap to find a nugget of gold. It's something that someone who has Utinni is likely to have, it's relevant to quickly assessing if a carburetor is junk or not, and it make the most sense.

But as I have a horse in this race, I'm clearly I'm biased. So I wanted to find out what other folks thought? What skill should you use Utinni with?

My first thought would be Perception.

or maybe Mechanics if you look at a junkyard or starship graveyard for usable things.

Mechanics, Perception or Survival, depending on the circumstances.

Perception, maybe Survival, if you're searching an area, Rey style.

Streetwise if you're looking for that one shop stall in the giant bustling underground market.

Yip, I think perception or survival too. I personally wouldn't use streetwise, just because if you're in a town you're not really scavenging by definition.

To me scavenging involves being out away from "civilization" and being able to find something you need.

Mechanics if you are stripping from other tech.

I'd say mechanics, since you have to be able to identify what is usable, and what is just scrap.

Now I want to run a group of scavengers - a bulky Wookie who's a genius doctor when not overcome with rage, a super-smart and charismatic human wearing tricked-out armor with rocket boots, an Aqualish ex-assassin who grew a conscience, a human Warrior with Unleash and a vibro-maul, a patriotic Clone who for some reason has stopped aging and uses a Kyuzo war shield.

Their battle cry will be "Scavengers assemble!"

In the past I've had my players roll both Perception and Mechanics checks to find/scavenge gear. Personally I'd allow Utinni! to apply to any skill at all, so long as it was used for the stated purpose. It's a fairly limited talent, so I'm inclined to interpret it broadly.

By right of having the best named talent ever it deserves to apply to any and all rolls on any and all skills.

"Hey i'm gonna fire my blaster into that pile of junk and see if anything cool falls out" Utinni!

"Hey i'm gonna negotiate with the Hutt to see if he has any nice junk he doesnt want" Utinni!

"Hey i'm gonna see if i can astrogate into the nirvana of ship grave yards" Utinni!

"Hey i'm gonna preform surgery to heal our friend here, and while i'm in there check and see if any of the shrapnel is reusable" Utinni!

6 hours ago, Krieger22 said:

It's a fairly limited talent, so I'm inclined to interpret it broadly.

Actually that's a strong point - it really hasn't come up until now, and I've been playing my engineer for a long, long while now.

Anyway, this should give me something to point at for the future. Thanks guys!

Could even be Computers when scanning wreckage.

"... to find or scavenge..."

To find might use Perception, or Streetwise, or Survival. Which one would depend on the setting or the method used in the search.

To scavenge might use Mechanics, or Computers, or Skulduggery to retrieve some specific bit or gain usefulness from junk.

"... items or gear..."

One could argue the intention here is not to find parts , but to turn non-useful stuff into a useful item or gear . A player may need a comlink, for example, and may want to apply her Utinni! to her attempt to scavenge a working comlink out of a mess of electronic junk.

If you look in Beyond the Rim, it specifically calls out survival and perception for scavenging for items in a junkyard planet.

Yeah, I'd go with what others have said, in that it depends on the situation. For usual scavenging I would say Perception or Survival as others have said, I'd also allow Mechanics for when trying to scavenge parts from a specific piece of other tech, frex you have crash landed on a planet and want to scavenge parts from one engine in order to fix the other.

There are two problems with using Survival for Utinni. One is that most, if not all, of the career/specs that have Utinni in their tree do not have Survival as a career skill. This is either a FFG developer oversight or the devs didn't really intend for Survival to be used for such a purpose. Which segues to the other problem: Survival is about scavenging for food and water and fire-making and shelter-making materials. Scavenging for usable high-tech parts is totally different. About the only thing they have in common, besides being called "scavenging", is that both require having a sharp eye ... which is a completely different skill: Perception.

BtR may have specifically called out Survival for scavenging in the junkyard, but this wouldn't be the first time that there was something in one of the adventures (or splatbooks) that was poorly thought out.

16 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

There are two problems with using Survival for Utinni. One is that most, if not all, of the career/specs that have Utinni in their tree do not have Survival as a career skill. This is either a FFG developer oversight or the devs didn't really intend for Survival to be used for such a purpose. Which segues to the other problem: Survival is about scavenging for food and water and fire-making and shelter-making materials. Scavenging for usable high-tech parts is totally different. About the only thing they have in common, besides being called "scavenging", is that both require having a sharp eye ... which is a completely different skill: Perception.

BtR may have specifically called out Survival for scavenging in the junkyard, but this wouldn't be the first time that there was something in one of the adventures (or splatbooks) that was poorly thought out.

This line of thought is based on the "non-career skill =/= unusable skill" reasoning, which is factually incorrect, and discounts the possibility that an Outlaw Tech can gain access to Survival as a career skills. Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's not possible.

You're assuming that's the reasoning behind the argument. Have you considered that for non-career skills most characters will only have an ability score of 2? Creating a talent that requires (or at the least expects) one to use a poor dice pool, or devote valuable XP to improve an ability that doesn't benefit any of that character's career skills (which use other ability scores) just for one talent, doesn't make much sense.

Perception is already a career skill for Technicians, as is Mechanics. These skills make far more sense for Utinni. Using Survival is inefficient at best and ineffective at worst.

24 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

You're assuming that's the reasoning behind the argument. Have you considered that for non-career skills most characters will only have an ability score of 2? Creating a talent that requires (or at the least expects) one to use a poor dice pool, or devote valuable XP to improve an ability that doesn't benefit any of that character's career skills (which use other ability scores) just for one talent, doesn't make much sense.

Perception is already a career skill for Technicians, as is Mechanics. These skills make far more sense for Utinni. Using Survival is inefficient at best and ineffective at worst.

I agree. That's why I would go with both Perception and Survival for scavenging, it gives options and allows for different kinds of scavengers. Perception would be used by the Technician-types while Survival would be used by Explorer-types.

There's still a basic problem with Survival as a tech-scavenging skill, which also exists for Perception: neither skill, nor the abilities that they key off of, address the issue of knowing if a piece of junk is actually useful and/or valuable. That requires Mechanics (or Intellect aka reasoning ability) to assess. Narratively, you'd need to use two skills to scavenge. Perception or Survival to spot something and then Mechanics to assess. In terms of Utinni, though, one must pick a single skill as the scavenging skill. On that basis, the most appropriate skill should be Mechanics.

GMs can, and probably should, require two checks, one to spot and another to assess. In this case, then Utinni should apply to the first check, the check to spot something that might be useful.

Utinni is an odd-duck talent because pretty much every other (non-combat) talent in the Outlaw Tech tree uses Mechanics. Utinni itself leans towards Perception or Survival.

5 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

There's still a basic problem with Survival as a tech-scavenging skill, which also exists for Perception: neither skill, nor the abilities that they key off of, address the issue of knowing if a piece of junk is actually useful and/or valuable. That requires Mechanics (or Intellect aka reasoning ability) to assess. Narratively, you'd need to use two skills to scavenge. Perception or Survival to spot something and then Mechanics to assess. In terms of Utinni, though, one must pick a single skill as the scavenging skill. On that basis, the most appropriate skill should be Mechanics.

GMs can, and probably should, require two checks, one to spot and another to assess. In this case, then Utinni should apply to the first check, the check to spot something that might be useful.

Utinni is an odd-duck talent because pretty much every other (non-combat) talent in the Outlaw Tech tree uses Mechanics. Utinni itself leans towards Perception or Survival.

The two-step scavenging is how I would do too. I'll have to check tonight the precise wording for the talent, but I suspect it may be intended to boost all rolls involved in scavenging (the roll to spot and the roll to assess), which would explain why they don't bother to mention a particular skill since there are at least three that are viable.

14 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

GMs can, and probably should, require two checks, one to spot and another to assess. In this case, then Utinni should apply to the first check, the check to spot something that might be useful.

Which in itself is a little weird, as the engine tends to combine several rolls into one, like finding and then bargaining for an item. With D6, you'd break it down into several rolls but here it's "Do you find it and how much will it cost you" all in one go. Now the GM can break the rolls up, but the default seems to be to minimize the rolls.

Just give a boost die to the roll for having a couple of ranks in the other skill.

Buying items is also a two-step process in FFG, and the RAW actually specifies this. First you make a Negotiation (or Streetwise, if illegal) check to locate the desired item. Then you make a second Negotiate check to set the price (assuming you are haggling, rather than just paying the asking price). The first check is table-based, keyed to rarity. The second is an opposed check.