Sorry for double posting, but I moved my previous post to the House Rule forum since this forum is more appropiate for it.

After a few games I am not very convinced that the game provides with enough player diversity by allowing starting characters to have all the basic skills since, for example, now any character with a decent Ag score can pick up a lock. I still don't like (and I find it difficult to justify) that starting characters get all the basic skills. So I am going to rescue the idea of the 1st and 2nd editions of the game, where characters started only with a few of the basic skills.

In that way, basic skills will have an extra box (4 in total). The first one will be checked when the basic skill is acquired, and the three others remain for the expertise dice as usual. Similar to the 1st and 2nd editions, when a character will attempt a skill test covered by a basic skill he does not posses, the difficulty of the test is increased by one <P> (that is roughly decreasing the success chance by 15%).

I am going to use the nice idea of Liber Fanatica 1 to distribute starting characters into different backgrounds: military, rural, merchant, academics etc. The background and the initial career will determine which basic skills the characters start with.

Something like the following, the character will start with 3 basic skills determined by the background of the character plus the ones listed on the career sheet . The rest of the basic skills must be acquired in the same way as advanced skills before they can be used without the difficulty penalty of one extra <P>, and before they can be trained.