Rely on Your Skills and Training

Using wilderness survival skills to pacify an angry armadillo-bear, invoking courtly etiquette to blend into a Fire Nation noble’s party, creating handholds in a stone wall to infiltrate a compound—any time you use your expertise and knowledge to overcome a significant complication or risk, you’re relying on your skills and training. When you try to do something risky that isn’t covered by any of the other moves and involves your training, one of your backgrounds, or other skills, you use this move. Like

, this catch-all move covers a lot of things but requires more specificity.

To know whether or not you can rely on your skills and training, you need to know what your skills and training are. At the start of the game, the clearest indicators of these are your training (bending, weapons, technology) and your backgrounds. If your character used to work at City Hall in Republic City (using the

and backgrounds), it stands to reason that you can rely on your skills and training to play politics and navigate bureaucracy, know your way around the city, and fit into high society. If you’re an Airbender, you might rely on your airbending to cushion your fall off a rooftop, deflect incoming projectiles with a burst of wind, or even—with enough training—sense danger by air vibrations alone. Your playbook can also point to things that you can rely on, like the Icon’s Burden & Tradition or the Successor’s A Tainted Past.

What’s important is to make note of what these skills and training are as they come up, and to keep in mind what’s outside your areas of expertise. As you play, you’ll gain more skills and learn about what things your character can do with their training. Your character might eventually gain mastery over a wide array of skills and talents but at the start of the game, there’s only so much you can rely on your skills and training to do.

The actual effects of this move cover a lot of ground, as well. First, you can try to overcome obstacles. Most commonly this means physical obstacles, like barriers or hazards, but it can mean social obstacles as well. Your firebending can help you blast the door into ashes, but your upbringing as a servant in the high court of the Fire Nation can help you get into the servants’ quarters of the local manor without any suspicion. You can even “overcome an obstacle” to quickly dispatch low-threat foes, if appropriate—clocking two clueless guards on the back of the head might knock them out with a single rely on your skills and training move, bypassing combat altogether. “Overcome obstacles” is a fairly open-ended idea that almost always means, “solve a problem with your training or skills.”

You can also try to gain new insights. When you rely on your skills and training to do so, you’re using your expertise or specific abilities to look for more specific information than what you might find just by examining a scene or even

. You might use your training to improve or extend your senses—like earthbending to locate a hidden attacker through seismic sense—or give you specialized insights that others without your skills might miss, like a Technologist figuring out how to shut down an experimental device gone haywire.

Your background also determines what kinds of information you can obtain—an

PC can identify and decipher thieves’ signature graffiti, a PC can identify the significance of religious iconography, and so on. Whenever you want to learn something beyond the scope of , you can rely on your skills and training if it’s in your wheelhouse.

Finally, you can try to perform a familiar custom. This aspect of relying on your skills and training is most often about social actions (like fitting in somewhere) but it also covers specific rites, rituals, and practices based on your training or background. A

PC from a noble family can try to infiltrate an illicit auction by knowing the right things to say, while another PC with a reclusive background might need to to blend in. A PC with the background from the Southern Water Tribe could rely on their skills and training to undertake the ice-dodging rite of passage, steering their boat through danger to prove they’ve come of age. If you’re attempting to bypass an obstacle or navigate a situation that you’ve experienced before as part of your background or training, it’s probably a familiar custom.

Because this move covers so many different things, it can be tempting to use it for everything, so make sure you’re not triggering a different move instead. Generally, if any other move fits better, use that one. If you’re generally looking over a besieged area to see what’s useful, what’s in danger, and so on, you’re

even if you have a background as a siege engineer. But if you use that background as a siege engineer to specifically locate structural weak points for demolition (gaining new insight), you’re relying on your skills and training rather than . The GM makes the final call on which move is appropriate.

Options for Relying on Your Skills & Training

Unlike when you

, the consequences for rolling a 7–9 (and even a miss) on this move aren’t as harsh. You have more control over your approach because of your experience, and you’re capable of dealing with complications as they arise. On a 7–9, you accomplish your goal but not quite in the way you wanted or intended—the GM tells you how your action might lead to unexpected consequences. This information is for you, the player, so you can decide if you want to let this happen or not.

If you choose to accept those consequences, your character might know what’s coming or they could be totally caught off-guard. By choosing to mark fatigue instead, your character sees that complication as or just before it happens and manages to straighten themselves out before it makes things worse. When you mark fatigue, describe how you compensate for your less-than-perfect attempt or otherwise push through.