Like stats, skills cost character points and the higher the skill, the more it costs. This represents the amount of time dedicated to mastering that talent.

Skills come from two sources; career skills, which a character gets from the job the do; and pick up skills, which a character learns as they pass through life (hobbies, etc).

You have 40 points to spend on the ten skills under your character's career. You can choose not to take some skills if you wish.

Example: Drake is a government agent and has the following skill choices:

Command, criminology, facilities (type), interrogation, interview, melee (type) / unarmed combat, perception, pistol, psychology, writing.

The slash between melee and unarmed combat indicates that I must choose one of those two skills for Drake. I choose unarmed combat for him.

Where it says facilities (type), it means that there are different topics, or areas, covered by that skills. Facilities is a skill dealing with obtaining things through legal channels (mostly). I pick facilities (info), so Drake can find out what's going on.

These are skills that your character has learned through hobbies, school or just picked up along the way.

Not everyone gets the same breaks in life, so there are different social backgrounds to choose from. They are: corporate kid, normal, streetkid, clansman, highrider and military.

There is also a section marked universal, which all characters can choose from. The education section is only open to those backgrounds with the education option. However, for extra points, you can get skills that are listed in another social group's options.

Corporate kids are people sent off to private schools, home education networks or even educated by their parents. They don't tend to be worldly wise due to their sheltered upbringing.

Normal kids are often anything but, perhaps a better word would be typical, or common. They include the middle class and smarter lower income kids. Not all tenant children are wise ass street trash.

Streetkids run riot on the street as homeless or in crap housing projects. The world is not always a kind place and many die young. Those that don't might make it, a bit longer anyway.

Clansmen are the mobile crusties, they drift from sprawl to sprawl looking for work. Some even abandon society to join extended families; moving to self-sufficiency or sponging off the state. Romantic it certainly isn't.

Highriders are people who lived in low earth orbit. In space, ignorance can kill you.

The Miliary still has it's own schools, jobs for life and places to live. Some people never see civilian life until they get injured and ditched; or just ditched.

For more information, see the skill listing later on.

The cost of a skill depends on its rating.

The total cost is how many character points that skill rating costs you. The exp cost is how many experience points are required to improve by a level.

Example: I want Kat to have Stealth +5 (as she is to be a cat burglar). That will cost 7 CP.

This is covered in much greater detail under game mechanics.

However, put simply a skill test is made against a total of your character's skill, the relative skill base and a ten sided die. Skill bases are detailed below.

You compare this total to a task rating determined by the referee. Easy rolls require a total over 10; average rolls over 15; difficult rolls over 20 and so on.

Note that you can have a skill of +0. That shows that you are not a total notice, but neither do you have any expertise. It's entirely pot luck if you manage to do anything worthwhile.

Characters can choose from having one language at +8, or have two languages at +6 and +4.

Example: Milton is an corporate administrator, he had a straight college education and speaks excellent english (+8).

Kat went to the school of hard knocks instead; she speaks english at +6 and gutter +4 (gutter being the european slang).

You might want your character to know another language. If so the skill costs you only half the character points it would do normally (round all fractions up).

The proliferation of american media and the Net, have made english the common language. That is not to say that other languages are dying. Spanish and German are very common, the latter often heard in LEO. French is still going strong along with Chinese and Urdu.

There is a big difference between the language taught to us and our common parlance. Using slang, like gutter or jive (american), will allow you to communicate at a basic level, but is not as good as an official language. Most video broadcasts are in main stream languages; ie: english, spanish or german.

Street talk varies from sprawl to sprawl and changes frequently, with words coming and going like all fashions. In areas with a strong corporate presence, you are unlikely to hear street talk, as there are not the people there to speak it.