Battles with Integrity

Your skill rating serves as a pool of competency which you can use to affect character outcomes. This works in two ways, with investigation skills, and with action skills.

A player will create a character with a number of investigation skill points and a number of action skill points to allocate to the skillset appropriate for the character. The trick is that action skills and investigation skills run on two completely different scales and systems.

For action skills (ex recto here, as I don't have the book in front of me), you'll put anywhere from 8-16 points into a skill for solid competency. When you use the skill, you spend points (temporarily removing those points from your available pool), adding a number equal to the points you spent to your die roll. You can opt to spend more points, and increase your chances of success (theoretically to 100% although Robin notes that in a horror game, he never tells players what the target numbers are), at the cost of uses of the skill later.

Investigative skills get you the base benefit the moment you mention that you want to use the skill. This will give you the barest minimum clue to continue on with the adventure. The clue may have additional information available if you choose to spend one, or possibly more, of your skill points. You never have to roll, and your skill levels will be much lower (3-4 points in Evidence Analysis, for example, is pretty damned high).