Knowledge & Aptitudes

Having an Aptitude or Knowledge in something can increase or decrease the Effect of an outcome.

Forged in the Dark

About the only thing that Playbooks truly did in FitD was give you unique ‘Fine’ equipment. Here, we have no concept of ‘Fine’ equipment, or playbooks, so instead you pick specific things your character can do skillfully. And you can do it regardless of equipment.

Giving PC better equipment based on stats was an odd choice to start with. Why could others not have that? What happened if they lost it during a mission, do they somehow have infinite fine equipment but no one else can?

You can only increase the effect by one, even if multiple Aptitudes or characters would apply.

Once you have increased the effect, another player cannot use a setup or assist to increase the Effect, unless the assisting player also has something that increases their Effect. Essentially, if you are an expert in something, an non-expert is hardly going to be able to help on top of that.

Aptitude

Aptitudes are for general use with any Action, they are specific objects or types or things that you are very skilled at doing that come up a lot in the game. You have to pick them and pay for them at  character creation or leveling up, you have a specific amount.

These will increase the Effect of one Outcome that they can logically apply to.

If you have an idea of one that isn’t listed, talk to the GM. For example, if the game has people Forging Art a lot, that might be a reasonable aptitude to add.

You generally start with two Aptitudes, including any in a Guise.

Guise Aptitude

Instead of picking one of the Aptitudes, you can instead create a guise or ‘character’ for Grifting. It can be a fully fleshed-out alias, or a stock characterization like ‘stoic bodyguard’ or ‘hippie’ or ‘nerdy scientist’. You can change these during downtime if you find yourself not using the ones you have.

You get increased Effect in Outcome that requires you fitting into the role, which doesn’t necessarily have to be grifting.

For example, if the Guise is a ‘stoic bodyguard who fights with his hands’, you can get increased Effect in Hand-to-Hand combat, exactly as if you had picked an aptitude in Hand-to-Hand combat instead of that Guise. But you can only do that when you’re in-character as that Guise.

The GM reserves the right to limit players from picking the Guise of ‘Batman’ or other absurdly over-skilled guises. If there needs to be a rule, roughly one extra Aptitude should work in each Guise. After all, you could have just gotten a real Aptitude in instead of the Guise.

Game Master

Although sometimes it’s funny to allow extremely competent Guises that are awkward to actually walk around as, especially if they are ‘real identities’. A character has an aptitude in Climbing and Tight Spaces but only when he’s famous spelunker Dietrich Werner, who was the first person to map past the dangerous Narrow Down of the Hölloch cave system back in ‘09, don’t you know who he is?

Knowledge

Knowledges only apply to Gathering Information. It is a topic that you have information about. You have a broad background in that topic, so you are not starting from normal basic knowledge that everyone is assume to have.

You cannot use Knowledge for other Actions. Sometimes with Knowledge, the GM might just choose to not require a roll for gathering information, or just give the information that a standard Effect success would have given. The character doesn’t even need to gather it, because they already know it.

Unlike Aptitudes, you can’t get new Knowledge via leveling up, and also don’t have any limit. The GM is encouraged to just let players have Knowledge that seem interesting and appropriate to their backstory, or make up new ones. Possibly no one even realized it should be written down as ‘Knowledge’ until you say ‘Wait, in my character backstory, I spent years stealing cars, surely I’m good at identifying cars from video’, the GM agrees, and now you have ‘Car identification’ as a knowledge.

You can even treat past episodes in this way. If the team spent a bunch of time dealing with a specific obscure industry, and happen to run across that again a year later…that would certainly be usable as existing Knowledge if they needed information. However, at some point there’s not really any purpose at writing it down, because the base knowledge level of all the character is just higher and the GM should just know that.

Talk to the GM about Knowledge you want to start with.

Game Master

No, seriously, just let them have the knowledge. You likely were already doing this, taking into account that their character would know that sort of things and giving them more information, all this does is formalize it by writing it on their character sheet so people remember that.

(The character sheet can be found here. You will want to save your own copy.)