SUPER HARD SCI-FI

[Mothership] Ranking all the Skills

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Have you had enough of always jury rigging your way out of problems? Winning fights with firearms? You just want to use that degree in sophontology and not have to explain what it means every time? Read on my dear friend and we will make that PhD pay for itself.

Read time: 10 minutes [1 minute if you just read the list!]

TLDR: Scroll to the bottom to find my ranks for all the skills. If you want to know the winner: It is Jury-Rigging, the loser, sadly, is Pharmacology.

Shameless plug: if you enjoy my blog, I'm sure you will enjoy my Mothership module too Beneath Ice and Snow.

Overview

All Hail, The Mothership Skill Tree!

The Mothership skill tree is one of the coolest features of the Mothership character creation. There is just something intrinsically satisfying about filling in a little circle and then seeing what new possibilities branch off from that choice. Nom nom nom, release to me that sweet serotonin and dopamine lizard brain!

The problem with the skill tree though is that not all of the skills get equal representation. Some skills are just incredibly useful in nearly all situations (we're looking at you jury-rigging), while others almost never come up (do you think my art skill helps me recognise the growth patterns of this sentient slime mould?).

Random Thought: You might reasonably think that it is down to the Warden to give opportunities for rare skills, and I totally agree. However, in a one-shot with fresh characters keeping in mind the players skills is pretty tricky. Now if scenarios came with a "recommended skills list" somewhere with suggestions for how they might be used, that would make life soooo much easier!

So, I have decided to take it upon myself to rank all of the skills in Mothership by rough order of how often they come up in my games and how useful they are in general. The goal here isn't just to make skills like Pharmacology feel bad, but to also think about how we may design scenarios or toolkits that make use of the skills that inhabit the wastelands of the skill tree.

Aside: This might not be true for folks who play long standing campaigns, but as someone who just runs one shots and open tables, this argument is definitely true. Unless I'm running the wrong scenarios? Let me know!

For further reading there have been some nice discussions on Mothership skills on the Mothership reddit over the years, such as: Skills are a wishlist, and Games with Mothership Skills but more in depth. There are also lots of people that have made custom skills or character classes that expand the base list such as Walks of Life or this huge compilation of Mothership classes on the Mothership discord. However, I haven't found someone who has made the slightly unhinged choice of reviewing every single base skill, so hopefully everyone finds this useful!

The Rankings

The Skill Princes (Jump 9 Tier)

First up, we have the favourites, the ones we all know and love. These are the skills that are as beloved as Prince the cat from Ypsilon 14. These skills are great because they are both versatile and widely applicable to most Mothership games. These skills are so good I've not given them too much write-up, after all, we all already finding a lot of uses for them.

The Not Quite Best Skills (Jump 5 Tier)

These skills I tend to see my players use quite often and they also tend to turn up in modules that I've run. You would tend to see these used once or twice a session.

The Once in a Moonbase Blues Skills (Jump 1 Tier)

These skills I have seen used maybe once or twice during play. Admittedly, some of these (artificial intelligence/robotics/cybernetics) probably would come up if I'd run a campaign of Gradient Descent, but I haven't and that's on me. So to those skills I apologise, but it is what it is.

The Skills Riding the Gradient Descent to the Bin (Derelict Tier)

Now for the sorry lost souls of the skill tree. Many of these seem very cool in principle but I have never really seen them come up in my games. Scarily this list contains almost half of the 42 skills on the base character sheet. Also unsurprisingly, most of these are Master skills that, by design, are more specialist and so the opportunities to use them are less. As a consequence of this, I often feel bad for my scientists who pick them. I've tried to give some ideas for how to make these more useful both as notes to myself but maybe future module designers too?

Closing Thoughts

After going through all of the skills and these rankings I think it is worth pointing out that how these skills get used at a table is very dependent on the table. For example, many of my games of Mothership are one-shots, where there are new characters created every game. In a longer campaign a Warden could gear things towards making sure players can get something out of any and all of these skills. I should also point out that many of the skills in the bottom tiers I don't think are bad themselves, I just think they need more love to get them used more in the game.

One last word on the skills. It is important to keep in mind that the skill choices also act like Trinkets/Patches in the game, in that even if they are useless they inform the players about who the characters are. And ultimately, it is the characters that we create that makes role-playing games so fun.

Short-List

The Best

The Good

Rare

Bad

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