I'm watching the pilot episode of "White Collar" again. Both Neil Caffrey and his FBI agent minder clearly have some learned ability to notice when documents or papers are forged.
Neil Caffrey can do it via his Forgery Skill, which is obviously very high. But his minder probably didn't spent a lot of time at the FBI Academy learning to forge documents himself, although he may have spent a little time on it, since that's one of his specialties (he's not a typical FBI agent, a Law and/or Accounting major).
Likewise, in the first "Die Hard" movie, McClane, a smart but not brilliant police officer, can evaluate how well the terrorist's forged ID cards are crafted. And he definitely never learned active Forgery.
Sagatafl's Skills work similarly to in Ars Magica, in that you're entitled to a free +1 specialization for any Skill you've learned to level 1.
This specialization is any reasonable subset of the full breadth of the Skill, but supposedly limited to no more than 1/3 of "expected average uses" (which in practice tends to mean "expected average adventuring uses"), and preferably less than 1/4. This means that you can't Specialize your Sword: Broadsword in Attacking, nor is Forging Money Notes, Forging Coins or Forging Documents valid for Forgery Skill.
But you can specialize your Shortarm: Pistol in Target Range Shooting, your Longarm: Rifle in Biathlon or your Archery: Longbow in Fruits On Heads.
Likewise, Spot Forgery is valid. So a character could have Forgery (Spot) 3, meaning he forges anything with a skill roll of 3d12, but when he uses the Skill to notice a forgery, it's instead 4d12.
The problem with that is that it doesn't create more than a modest difference between the character's ability to actively forge and ´his ability to notice that someone else has made a forgery. That's fine for some characters (Caffrey), tolerable for others (FBI dude) and not really simulatively tolerable fo others again (McClane) - it gives them capabilities they should have and furthermore shouldn't have to pay so high a cost for.
There are two ways around that.
One is the Complementary Skill Roll. Using a CSR should almost always take more time than just rolling for one Skill straight up, but gives a bonus of +1 to effective Skill if you succeed at the CSR (or a fairly painful penalty if you Fumble at the CSR). You can't get several +1 bonuses from several different CSRs (not unless you're born with certain Genius Traits, anyway), rather you get to pick one Complementary Skill to roll for.
Now we're up to a +2 difference, e.g. effective active Forgery Skill 4, Journeyman, vs Spot Forgery Skill 6, Master.
The other thing is Double Specialization, possibly even Triple specialization.
Some other RPG systems allow this, but in my experience it tends to get overcomplicated, because players might want to buy a lot of those, getting specific competences for cheap. That clutters an already busy character sheet, due to there not being a good shorthand notation method (one that is easily readable).
Sagatafl's solution to that is a "soft cap" based Stunt system, where you can buy various binary Skills that are "controlled" by these caps, and to raise the cap ceiling (increase your number of Stunt Slots) you need to pay an escalating amount of Skill Points. Mostly it's for combat-enhancing binary skills (so as to force both characters and players to make hard choices - even on an absurdly large budget you won't be able to buy all the binary skills on the menu, you have to choose), to characterize different fighting styles (e.g. make Karate functionally different from Tae-Kwon-Do from Savate from Thai Boxing, or make Norse Swordfighting different from Keltic Swordfighting from Arab Swordfighting), but there are also some binary skills for Mental Training.
Many player characters and major NPCs will have a small amount of Mental Training "Stunts", and they're not wildly unusual in the general population either, although I'm fairly sure I don't have any (learning anything but the most basic mnemotechniques counts as Mental Training, so that's quite common among the Kelts in my Ärth setting. Learning to read a complicated alphabet, certainly something like the Chinese, counts as Mental Training too).
One such form of Mental Training is Double Specialization, valid only in explicitly noted cases, such as the one with Spot Forgery, doubling the bonus to +2, or even tripling it to +3 at a huge cost in Stunt Slots.
So assuming McClane doesn't have the Triple (the FBI agent from "White Collar" might, though) he could have Forger (+Spot) 2, the + before the Specialization denoting a Double Specialization, and if he makes a CSR (e.g. from Profession: Cop) then his effective Skill at Spotting Forgery is 5. Journeyman+. That qualifies him to have an opinion on how well done those forged IDs are.
Likewise, the FBI agent might have Forger (++Spot) 3, meaning his effective Skill at Spotting is 7 if he makes his CSR from Profession: FBI Agent (or he might well have another easier-to-learn Skill to make a better CSR from). Master+. It's basically a large part of his job, so that makes all kinds of sense, without him being good enough to actually go off on his own to do some white collar stuff, although he could assist Caffrey by making CSRs for him, in an emergency where Caffrey can't find a more Skilled assistant...
But is that the best way of doing it? I don't mind having this tightly controlled rule for Double/Triple Specialization, but I'd like to hear about other ideas, from other RPG systems, or alternatives to the above solution, of how to empower characters to be good at this fairly specific thing without having to pay for the whole shebang of being a master Forger when that doesn't fit the character concept.
Also, what other Skills might warrant this Double or even Triple Specialization? I came up with the mechanic last year, contemplating the Forgery problem, and so far I haven't come up with any other cases where more than the usual Specialization is reasonable, at least in adventuring.
I suppose Law, Medicine and the physical sciences are good examples of real-world people specializing deeply in a very narrow subject. Likewise, a showman archer might well specialize in shooting apples off her boyfriend's head. But that's not adventuring. An adventuring archer might well be good at the apple thing (the Ärth NPC Kolku of Ulster is) but he'll also be good at shooting at all kinds of other types of targets, including actively dodging hostiles (Kolku is that, too). Likewise an adventuring lawyer is broadly skilled in Law, not an expert in a narrow field, and an adventuring physician is usually as good at diagnosing and treating rare tropical viral diseases as he is at autopsying alien corpses or calming and treating a dog with a broken leg ("he's just a largely non-verbal patient. Nothing unsual about that... that's a good boy, thanks for not biting me, here have this treat...").
If relevant (usually adventuring-worthy) cases do come up, those can be added later, even on player requests (if approved) as long as the underlying mechanic has been created, but it's always good to think ahead and notice stuff before it gets up close.
Neil Caffrey can do it via his Forgery Skill, which is obviously very high. But his minder probably didn't spent a lot of time at the FBI Academy learning to forge documents himself, although he may have spent a little time on it, since that's one of his specialties (he's not a typical FBI agent, a Law and/or Accounting major).
Likewise, in the first "Die Hard" movie, McClane, a smart but not brilliant police officer, can evaluate how well the terrorist's forged ID cards are crafted. And he definitely never learned active Forgery.
Sagatafl's Skills work similarly to in Ars Magica, in that you're entitled to a free +1 specialization for any Skill you've learned to level 1.
This specialization is any reasonable subset of the full breadth of the Skill, but supposedly limited to no more than 1/3 of "expected average uses" (which in practice tends to mean "expected average adventuring uses"), and preferably less than 1/4. This means that you can't Specialize your Sword: Broadsword in Attacking, nor is Forging Money Notes, Forging Coins or Forging Documents valid for Forgery Skill.
But you can specialize your Shortarm: Pistol in Target Range Shooting, your Longarm: Rifle in Biathlon or your Archery: Longbow in Fruits On Heads.
Likewise, Spot Forgery is valid. So a character could have Forgery (Spot) 3, meaning he forges anything with a skill roll of 3d12, but when he uses the Skill to notice a forgery, it's instead 4d12.
The problem with that is that it doesn't create more than a modest difference between the character's ability to actively forge and ´his ability to notice that someone else has made a forgery. That's fine for some characters (Caffrey), tolerable for others (FBI dude) and not really simulatively tolerable fo others again (McClane) - it gives them capabilities they should have and furthermore shouldn't have to pay so high a cost for.
There are two ways around that.
One is the Complementary Skill Roll. Using a CSR should almost always take more time than just rolling for one Skill straight up, but gives a bonus of +1 to effective Skill if you succeed at the CSR (or a fairly painful penalty if you Fumble at the CSR). You can't get several +1 bonuses from several different CSRs (not unless you're born with certain Genius Traits, anyway), rather you get to pick one Complementary Skill to roll for.
Now we're up to a +2 difference, e.g. effective active Forgery Skill 4, Journeyman, vs Spot Forgery Skill 6, Master.
The other thing is Double Specialization, possibly even Triple specialization.
Some other RPG systems allow this, but in my experience it tends to get overcomplicated, because players might want to buy a lot of those, getting specific competences for cheap. That clutters an already busy character sheet, due to there not being a good shorthand notation method (one that is easily readable).
Sagatafl's solution to that is a "soft cap" based Stunt system, where you can buy various binary Skills that are "controlled" by these caps, and to raise the cap ceiling (increase your number of Stunt Slots) you need to pay an escalating amount of Skill Points. Mostly it's for combat-enhancing binary skills (so as to force both characters and players to make hard choices - even on an absurdly large budget you won't be able to buy all the binary skills on the menu, you have to choose), to characterize different fighting styles (e.g. make Karate functionally different from Tae-Kwon-Do from Savate from Thai Boxing, or make Norse Swordfighting different from Keltic Swordfighting from Arab Swordfighting), but there are also some binary skills for Mental Training.
Many player characters and major NPCs will have a small amount of Mental Training "Stunts", and they're not wildly unusual in the general population either, although I'm fairly sure I don't have any (learning anything but the most basic mnemotechniques counts as Mental Training, so that's quite common among the Kelts in my Ärth setting. Learning to read a complicated alphabet, certainly something like the Chinese, counts as Mental Training too).
One such form of Mental Training is Double Specialization, valid only in explicitly noted cases, such as the one with Spot Forgery, doubling the bonus to +2, or even tripling it to +3 at a huge cost in Stunt Slots.
So assuming McClane doesn't have the Triple (the FBI agent from "White Collar" might, though) he could have Forger (+Spot) 2, the + before the Specialization denoting a Double Specialization, and if he makes a CSR (e.g. from Profession: Cop) then his effective Skill at Spotting Forgery is 5. Journeyman+. That qualifies him to have an opinion on how well done those forged IDs are.
Likewise, the FBI agent might have Forger (++Spot) 3, meaning his effective Skill at Spotting is 7 if he makes his CSR from Profession: FBI Agent (or he might well have another easier-to-learn Skill to make a better CSR from). Master+. It's basically a large part of his job, so that makes all kinds of sense, without him being good enough to actually go off on his own to do some white collar stuff, although he could assist Caffrey by making CSRs for him, in an emergency where Caffrey can't find a more Skilled assistant...
But is that the best way of doing it? I don't mind having this tightly controlled rule for Double/Triple Specialization, but I'd like to hear about other ideas, from other RPG systems, or alternatives to the above solution, of how to empower characters to be good at this fairly specific thing without having to pay for the whole shebang of being a master Forger when that doesn't fit the character concept.
Also, what other Skills might warrant this Double or even Triple Specialization? I came up with the mechanic last year, contemplating the Forgery problem, and so far I haven't come up with any other cases where more than the usual Specialization is reasonable, at least in adventuring.
I suppose Law, Medicine and the physical sciences are good examples of real-world people specializing deeply in a very narrow subject. Likewise, a showman archer might well specialize in shooting apples off her boyfriend's head. But that's not adventuring. An adventuring archer might well be good at the apple thing (the Ärth NPC Kolku of Ulster is) but he'll also be good at shooting at all kinds of other types of targets, including actively dodging hostiles (Kolku is that, too). Likewise an adventuring lawyer is broadly skilled in Law, not an expert in a narrow field, and an adventuring physician is usually as good at diagnosing and treating rare tropical viral diseases as he is at autopsying alien corpses or calming and treating a dog with a broken leg ("he's just a largely non-verbal patient. Nothing unsual about that... that's a good boy, thanks for not biting me, here have this treat...").
If relevant (usually adventuring-worthy) cases do come up, those can be added later, even on player requests (if approved) as long as the underlying mechanic has been created, but it's always good to think ahead and notice stuff before it gets up close.
What Skill do characters have if they are good at spotting forgeries?
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