Skills

This page lists all the skills in Fallout : New York

Effects of Skills
Skills can be largely thought of as either "combat" or "non-combat": "combat" meaning skills that influence the effectiveness of weapons (also which skills Good Natured penalizes). Combat skills would be Energy Weapons, Explosives, Guns, and Melee Weapons.

Combat skills
For all combat skills, having a higher score helps meet minimum weapon requirements (some weapons also have a Strength requirement). Not meeting the requirements for ranged weapons drastically penalizes your V.A.T.S accuracy and increases weapon wobble. For melee/unarmed, you instead have a slower rate of attack.

Whenever an attack is made, it gains +1 damage for every 10 points that character is in the related skill. An attack with a Shotgun made by a character with 50 points in Gun would gain +5 bonus damage.

Non-combat skills
Non-combat skills have varying specific uses. See individual skill pages for more details. In addition to their normal uses, however, many non-combat skills tend to be used as skill checks during dialogue (the main purpose of Speech in fact). Combat skills do occasionally get used in dialogue skill checks, though not nearly as frequently.

Moreover, similar to Fallout: New Vegas, New York uses the idea of uncontested rolls; that is, instead of a probability of success based on your skill score and the difficulty of the check, there is a minimum threshold to meet, which results in either an uncontestable success or failure.

Formula
The initial value of each skill is a base value of two, plus an amount depending on a character's value in the relevant attribute, plus a bonus determined by their Luck attribute, rounded up.

2 + (2 x Stat) + [Luck/2]

Example: A starting Strength of five and a starting Luck of five will give you an initial Melee skill of 15.

2 + (2 x 5) + [5/2] = 15

Later changes to the SPECIAL stat have a similar influence on the respective skill.

During character creation, the player can "tag" three skills, which instantly increase them by 15. When leveling up, the character distributes 10 + half Intelligence skill points. (For odd intelligence scores, the "extra" skill point is given on even levels, so a character with 1 intelligence will gain 11 skill points at level 2, then 10 at level 3, etc.)