Your character's skills represent a variety of abilities, and you get better at them as you gain experience. At each level, you get skill points that you use to buy skills. Your class and intelligence modifier determine the number of points you receive.
Each class has its own list of preferred skills. If you buy a class skill, you get 1 rank in the skill for each skill point you spend. If you buy a cross-class skill, you get ½ rank per skill point. Your maximum rank in a class skill is your character level + 3. Your maximum rank in a cross-class skill is one-half this number. (In terms of max ranks, multiclass characters treat class skills from any of their classes as class skills.)
In Ground Zero, many of the standard d20 skills have been combined to simplify the system. For instance, Athletics is a combination of Climb, Jump, and Swim, while Awareness combines the Listen and Spot skills. These 'condensed' skills are used for doing everything the original skills did, and usually have several new uses in addition. Each skill is intended to be general enough to see use several times in each adventure, rather than once or twice every four or five adventures.
Since there are fewer skills in Ground Zero (and since each skill is generally more useful), starting characters get 2× the regular number of skill points, not 4× like in other d20 games.
The following tables summarize all skills (along with preferred skills for each class) and describe what areas (in terms of standard d20 skills) are covered by each:
Some changes deserve a bit more explanation:
Craft (General) and Knowledge (General) are 'untrained' versions of those skills, representing the basic crafting and general knowledge skills that all characters possess. You cannot gain ranks in the 'General' skill; you must pick a specialty such as Craft (Mechanical) or Knowledge (Science). Also, in Ground Zero, Perform is treated as a single skill; there are no specialties.
Each rank in Linguistics will allow your character to speak or read/write a new language. Linguistics also acts just like the "Decipher Script" skill, which can actually be very useful to illiterate characters. Common languages in Ground Zero include Unislang, Gutterspeak, and Tribal Dialects; speakers of Ancient (pre-Crash English) are rare but not unknown, and other pre-Crash tongues are completely forgotten. Written Unislang and Ancient use (basically) the same alphabet; there are no written forms of Gutterspeak or Tribal.
Characters in Ground Zero are automatically fluent in their native tongue. For each point of intelligence bonus, they can either speak an additional language or gain literacy in a language of choice. (Tribal Defenders speak their Tribal Dialect as their native tongue. It'll help if someone in the party can read Ancient, but is not required.)
There are some skill limitations for characters from lower tech levels. Skills indicated by italics are unavailable or of limited use to characters from low-tech backgrounds. See the Technology and Tech Levels pages for more information. (For Tribal Defenders, this means that they can't take ranks in Craft (Electronic, Mechanical), Knowledge (Science), and Operate Computer. Some other skills may also be limited in scope.)
(For the Tribal Defenders campaign, I'm also house-ruling that starting characters cannot have ranks in Operate Vehicle or Streetwise. You can pick up these skills later, however.)
(Bah! "Feats" is such a retarded name. And don't you think class talents from d20 Modern are pretty damn indistinguishable from feats? In Ground Zero, I've rolled them both under heading of "talents". Substantial changes have been made, so pay attention to this section.)
A talent is a special feature that gives your character a new ability or improves one he already has. Unlike skills, talents have no ranks - a character either possesses a talent or he doesn't. Also unlike skills, many talents have prerequisites. A character must meet all prerequisites before picking the talent, and you can't use a talent if you've lost a prerequisite.
A character gains talents as he advances in level. Each time he is able to select a new talent (which varies from class to class), he can pick a class talent from the list of talents available to his class, or substitute a general talent instead. Mutant characters are also able to pick talents from the mutant talent list.
The following tables summarize the talents available to Ground Zero characters:
Unlike d20 Modern or D&D, Ground Zero characters don't gain additional talents just for gaining levels - they only receive them from their class(es). Similarly, characters get attribute bonuses from their class or from selecting talents such as "Increased Strength", "Increased Constitution", etc.
Talents indicated by italics may be unavailable or of limited use to characters from low-tech backgrounds. Some talents (like proficiency with Blasters) are simply forbidden to primitive characters. See the Technology page for details.