Engineering

Engineering is the skill of working with or constructing machinery, for good or ill.

It's a General skill, so specializations can provide a way to add extra flavour to your character, usually your signature use will be a specific area of Engineering expertise.

O

Overcome: Engineering allows you to build, break, or fix machinery, presuming you have the time and tools you need. Often, actions with Engineering happen as one component of a more complex situation, making it a popular skill for challenges. For example, if you’re just fixing a broken pump, neither success nor failure is interesting; you should just succeed and move on. Now, if you’re trying to get your car to start while a pack of werewolves is hunting you…

C

Create advantage: You can use Engineering to create aspects representing features of a piece of machinery, pointing out useful features or strengths you can use to your advantage (Armor-Plated, Rugged Construction) or a vulnerability for you to exploit (Flaw in the Cross-Beam, Hasty Work). Creating Engineering advantages can also take the form of quick and dirty sabotage or jury-rigging on mechanical objects in the scene. For example, you might create a Makeshift Pulley to help you get to the platform above you, or throw something into the pillbox that’s firing on you to give it a Jammed Pivoting Joint and make it harder to hit you.

A

Attack: You probably won’t use Engineering to attack in a conflict, unless the conflict is specifically about using machinery, like with siege weaponry. Usually, weapons you craft are likely to be used with other skills to attack—a guy who makes a sword still needs Fight to wield it well!

D

Defend: As with attacking, Engineering doesn’t defend, unless you’re somehow using it as the skill to control a piece of machinery that you block with.

Stunts

• Always Making Useful Things. You don’t ever have to spend a fate point to declare that you have the proper tools for a particular job using Engineering, even in extreme situations (like being imprisoned and separated from all your stuff).
• Better than New! Whenever you succeed with style on an overcome action to repair a piece of machinery or electronics, you can immediately give it a new situation aspect (with a free invoke) reflecting the improvements you’ve made, instead of just a boost.
• Surgical Strikes. When using Engineering in a conflict involving machinery, you can filter out unwanted targets from whole-zone attacks without having to divide up your shifts (normally, you’d need to divide your roll between your targets).