Factional Redesign of The Gift

[Davin]

I think making the skills cover a wide range of abilities, helps to limit the number of skills that there are in the game.

Why should we need to limit the number of skills in the game?  Typical peasants of our Middle Ages generally never got good at more than one thing in their lives, and it was usually of a very narrow scope (passed down through families or by apprenticeship).

Make a skill really mean something, and then only important ones will be available and most training (outside of clans) will be in a single skill.  (For instance, I don't expect astronomy to have an impact on daily life and nobody will know about it [except perhaps for some few priests trying to predict eclipses].  Some few may believe in astrology, but it may still not have much of a daily effect either.)

I don't expect many skills to have a game effect and we probably won't even bother with them.  For instance, some peasant women are taught to weave, and each probably has their own family patterns passed down.  But I can't see clans and cities bothering with that sort of thing.