Science Skill in Trinity

[wyrdhamster]

Observation - Trinity Continuum do not have proper Occult Skill. However, by multisetting's various S-F generes - it's filled with unexplained and strange - 'supernatural events' so to speak. On last game session I went with interpretation that those 'strange events' would go under Science Skill rolls in Trinity. Do you think I assessed correctly? 🤔

[wyrdhamster]

Interesting comment from Trinity FB group - 'I mean, some of them sure go under Science, but for the most part, Myths and Superstitions fall under Culture, not Science. Culture is generally the skill to know what a phenomenon is. Science is the skill to use when disproving that whatever you find is "mystical" in origin, and is, in fact, a repeatable explainable phenomenon.
Or, to use Ghostbusters as an Example, Ray is all about Culture, and Egon is all about Science. Without Egon, all you got is enthusiastic belief.'

[Shepherdboi]

Someone with little to no experience with weird phenomena would default to whichever Skill is most reasonable in the situation. Culture, Enigmas, Humanities, and Science are likely to apply, but Skills like Close Combat, Medicine, or Survival could be used to learn things about exotic wounds on a body.

Without any background dealing with such phenomena, the amount of information they get may be limited to what can be deduced from direct observation and fundamental principals, because there is no publicly available information for the characters to draw upon. You may consider adding a Complication to the roll; if they fail to buy it off you give them an additional plausible but contradictory answer for each remaining point of Complication.

[Example: They roll Skill + Attribute with Difficulty 3 and Complication 2. They get 4 successes, thereby gaining one useful piece of information (from meeting Difficulty 3) and one faulty conjecture (from only buying off half the Complication).]

With experience (xp) they can buy appropriate Specialties (folk lore, mythology, religion, psychic phenomenon, weird science, etc.) and possibly an Edge like Library (fortean events) or a custom Occultist Edge. With an appropriate Path, they could use a Contact to gain info.

[Mateus Luz]

Agree with Shepherdboi and I would like to expand it.

Two different characters may use two different skills to solve the same situation, and it would result in different difficulties and different complications. Thinking on my engineer world, a person may use Enigmas to calculate or deduce formulae needed to a project, or may use their Science knowledge to a more refined calculation, or may use Technology with the all sliced formula all engineers know. The first will have a higher difficulty with little complications, the second a lower difficulty with a minor complication related to a detail, and the third would be easy, but with some complications related to the specifics of the project.

Same applies to all forms of knowledge. A Magus will deal with the occult as part of a scientific system, so enigmas, science and tech would apply better, with a witch doctor will use Medicine, Culture and Humanities as it’s part of the culture and traditions. The difficulties and complications of the test may change as different points of view applies or different methods are used to solve the problem.

[TwoDSix]

By my understanding Trinity has no Occult skill simply because it has no such thing as the supernatural. Events might be strange and apparently anonymous, but they can be explained with enough research. However it also runs on Science!, so events don't have to be particularly plausible either.

Others have answered pretty well with how to decide what skill to roll. Which is use whatever's appropriate to the actual action, which could be anything from punching it to studying it to bottling and selling as much of it as a miracle cure as you possibly can before somebody figures out what it actually does. Each of which would require a different skill, although the last might overlap with the ones needed to date the scientific anomaly.

[GM Janus]

An option I was considering for a campaign where I want to evoke some feelings of Fringe and X-Files; Occult Knowledge is an Edge.

I like this because of many of the ideas outlined here that 'Occult' means many things to many people, but there is definitely a certain level of dedication and specialized mindset that comes with it in a modern world context. Since there is no mainstream training for Occult in how the world of Trinity is presented it makes sense then that you do not have a full dedicated skill that becomes a variable for how you distribute skill points and even how it would fit into the various paths.

So... understanding the role of occult belief and patterns that emerge between various cultural influences, and separating the 'truth' from fictional exaggerations becomes a Mental Edge. Using the Edges "Lightning Calculator" & "Speed Reading" as a template it might look like this:

Occult Understanding (**)
Prerequisite: Humanities *** or Science ***
Your character can understand when they are facing legitimate evidence of a practitioner of occult rituals or parapsychological phenomena, and when they have found evidence of someone that has a pigeon understanding based on pop culture. Gain 2 enhancement to any roll that applies to deciphering information that is legitimately supernatural or made to look supernatural.

I like this path because it also doesn't apply the inference that the supernatural is easy to explain, define, or categorize, and it also allows for stories to go a bit Scooby Doo where the wailing ghosts were actually superscience holoprojections to scare off the locals from Dr. Vizock's secret lab.