When a character without the arcane skill acquires something like Force Missile, how does it work when they use it?
For your combat check, discard this card to roll your Arcane die + stuff--- What is your arcane die if you don't have the arcane skill? Does it default to intelligence, because that's the alternate check to acquire?
This came up tonight and I am spacing out about what it should be. We went with intelligence, but weren't quite sure.
When you don't have an ability such as in this case your die roll is 1D4. So anyone can cast spells. But you must have to skill to try and recharge a spell. So if you don't have the arcane skill the spell will be one use effectivly.
For references, the relevant rule text is:
Even if your character
doesn’t have any of the skills listed for a check, you can still
attempt the check (unless you’re trying to recharge a card; see
Recharge on page 16), but your die is a d4.
Try not to get into the RPG habit of assuming certain skills are a subset of others. Arcane is always Arcane. Some characters have Arcane based on another die, but if your character card doesn't list Arcane and base it on another skill, then your character will use a d4.
For example: if a character has a d10 Strength but doesn't have the Melee skill, then if that character has to make a Melee check, the die to use is a d4.
That should help out a little bit concerning any such issue in the future.
There is one exception: you can't recharge cards with a Skill check if you don't have the associated skill (this only matters for Arcane and Divine recharges since all the others have the basic stat associated pretty much.)