In this article I’m going to pick up on the concept of ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’ which I touched on briefly last month.

• Hard skills are the player’s skills. In most larps, walking is a hard skill.
• Soft skills are the character’s skills. In most larps, the ability to use supernatural powers (assuming the larp has them) is a soft skill.

However, there are many more complexities than a simple binary split. For instance, one type of skill may be a prerequisite for another.

• Hard skills, as a prerequisite for soft skills. E.g. a fantasy larp might allow a player to play a character with bard skills, but only if the player has a real musical skill. The ‘being short’ hard skill might be a prerequisite to play a dwarf.
• Soft skills, as a prerequisite for hard skills. e.g. a player might only be allowed to use a certain type of weapon if their character has the soft skill that says they can.

Bear in mind that characters will normally have less hard skills than the players. (e.g. knowledge of languages or technology that the character would not know). When defining the setting it can be important to be clear what facts are common knowledge in the setting e.g. the rulebook may list all the details of different spells, but how much of that knowledge is actually known to characters?

Focusing just on hard skills, there are variations on how they can be included:

• Low level hard skill may be used in place of high level hard skill. For example, a player playing a military code-breaker character is unlikely to have the hard skills to fully portray this character. However if the code they are trying to break is represented by a much more simple code than it actually is, then the player can still attempt to break it with their hard skills. This might be a reason for a soft skill prerequisite, since otherwise most players will be able to break it rather than relying of the specialist – they may assume the coded document is literally what it is, not a prop to represent a harder code. The same principle can apply to other ‘high level’ professional and technical skills.
• One hard skill used in place of another. Some early larps used the game of threading a circle of metal wire around a course without touching the central wire (which completed the circuit and set off an alarm) as a way to represent lock picking. In the same way, a particular task might involve doing a different task entirely.
• Another way to include hard skills can be through equipment. In Dragonbane the villagers had comfortable footwear that was impractical for marching through the forest. This made journeys beyond the village much more formidable. In contrast the adventuring culture of dragon-tamers had appropriately practical boots to support their heroic exploits.
• As an example of combining these ideas, hard skill medicine can be implemented by the medic wrapping a bandage around the ‘wound.’ The better the bandage is tied and stays in place, the better the treatment is considered to be. Running out of bandages represented running out of medical supplies.

Looking at issues around soft skills:

• How do you assign soft skills to characters? Do you use a points-buy system, or simply allocate skills that seem to fit the character concept? Do you have skills levels, and if so what do those levels mean?
• If partway through play, logic suggests that a character should have a skill that they don’t have, do you assume they have it or not? For example, a 1920’s Cthulhu character with a good school education should have some grasp of Latin, because it was taught as a standard subject in school. If the character doesn’t actually have Latin recorded as a skill, would you as an organiser decide they know no Latin at all (possibly breaking setting consistency) or that they know it (retroactively changing the original skill allocation)? Would the player’s hard skill ability to read Latin or lack of it influence your decision at all?
• If you are running a campaign, can soft skills improve or change with time? Does doing so require a teacher, or passage of time, or a more abstract mechanic such as xp, or a combination of these things? Do skills require any form of ongoing training to maintain existing soft skills?
• Soft skills can also a supported by assigning equipment. For example, a rule that only medic characters may start with medical supplies makes it clear other characters cannot attempt medical actions unless they acquire these somehow. The character sheet ‘soft skills’ can actually be reduced to ‘starting equipment’ in some cases – whether this is a good thing or not is debatable.

There are different ways in which hard and soft skills can interact. Here are some examples:

• Consider boffer combat. This inherently involves hard skills, but most skills determine the effects of each blow landed.
• The larp Gall Saga included a hard skill system of wizard duelling based on verbal shape-shifting contests. (Eg. ‘ I am a wolf’ ‘I am a hunter that hunts the wolf’ ‘I am a wall that keeps out the hunter.’) However, it also included a supporting soft skill; each level in the duelling skill allowed a character to pass once during a duel.
• A magical ritual might involve the hard skill of performing it correctly; reciting the spoken lines, inscribing the symbols, and so on. It might also have to be designed correctly using the hard skills of the ritual-using player characters, in accordance with the metaphysics of the setting (for example, invoking elemental rather than divine powers while trying to perform a necromantic banishment might result in automatic failure). In addition the soft skill levels of the participants may be factored in to determine the result.
• One use for soft skills is to fast track over tasks that might not be ‘interesting.’ Searching a gangster’s financial ledger for evidence of tax evasion might be regarded as a long and ‘boring’ process. Having a character with soft skill ‘accountancy’ allows this to be quickly resolved ‘off-camera’ without recourse to GM Fiat to rule whether they succeed or not. Soft skills can also be used in campaign larps to resolve downtime actions in a way hard skills normally can’t. This might also apply to actions that can’t be carried out for logistical reasons at an event.
• Consider the act of repelling a vampire with a cross. This could be played out with a soft skill mechanic (perhaps even an opposed contest of levels, as in MET V:tM) and an off-game call (‘Repel!’). It could also be resolved purely by hard skill – presenting the cross confidently with conviction and quoting biblical verse loudly (‘We have faith in the Lord, and are strong in his might!’ recited over and over again), at which point the player of the vampire recognises what is happening and ‘plays along,’ responding appropriately. If the character with the cross panics then it fails. It might also be possible to brief the player of the vampire with guidelines unknown to the other players. For example, they could be briefed that if the player with the cross maintains their guard with a melee weapon as well as holding a cross then the cross has no effect – it shows the character lacks faith in God to protect them.

Bear in mind that this issue of how to handle skills becomes less important if skills and task resolution are less important. If your larp is about competitive challenges and achieving goal states (‘gamist’ in GNS terms) then how you handle skills is crucial. If your larp is about dramatic tension then skills are less important. Playing out a character having an argument with their teenage daughter or undergoing a crisis of faith is unlikely to involve ‘skills’ in the conventional sense – what they feel and say is far more important than what they can do.

Use of hard skills generally makes for a more immersive experience, but may place limitations on what a player is able to play. Making this trade off is an important design consideration when creating a larp.