It first took me a little while to hammer out the relationship between Skills and Traits, e.g. Craft and Burglary, or Lore and Old Lore, Elven-lore, Rhymes of Lore and Shadow-lore. The Topic Questions On Traits neatly addressed the implications of the automatic successes for Traits.

Automatic Success on the Simple Stuff
On the one hand, Traits -- especially the Calling-specialities that TOR's rules-as-written limit to one per character, and only for the appropriate Calling -- give you an area of a certain minimum competence. You have a trait which lets you automatically succeed on the simple Tasks and Tests so you won't be embarrassed by failing at the trivial stuff.
But the more important stuff does still require a skill roll, regardless of your Speciality. Don't take Burglary and then be rubbish at Craft (lockpicking) and Stealth (pilfering), as you'll only be able to do the trivial, undramatic stuff and will fail every time at the genuinely challenging things where your Companions may be relying on you...
That said, roleplaying the process of a character discovering and growing into a hidden talent is perfectly valid (as long as you have the tolerance of your group for not bringing an optimised character to the Company). That would parallel the development of a certain B. Baggins, Esq., after all!

No Effect on the Important Stuff (!)
On the other hand, what I had difficulty grokking was that for the big dramatic moments, the Speciality trait is irrelevant. E.g. picking an important or difficult lock requires a Craft roll which Burglary does not help; being the guy with Craft and Burglary doesn't give you any advantage over the guy with Craft but no Burglary.

It's all about the Advancement
Actually, for the big stuff, the guy with Burglary should usually expect to have a free pass to an Advancement Point for the effort, which the other guy would be less likely to get. Decent team-playing Companions should generally opt to let the roll be made by the guy who'll get an additional bonus out of doing it. (This sort of consideration was touched on in the Topic "Me too" Skill Rolls)
But that's a rather indirect way of establishing your character's niche within the Company!

So your Calling-speciality trait gives you an area which should be rich in Advancement Points for you -- but only if you're making rolls instead of taking automatic successes. So do take the skills that'll work with your Traits.

Which leads me to the Scholar-calling's Rhymes of Lore.

Rhymes of Lore

Roughly 1/5 of Player-Heroes (!?) and probably 95%+ of Companies will have someone with this Trait. And it seems to be an odd one out, being the only trait to talk about being used in conjunction with skills, and not for getting automatic successes instead of rolling for the skills. But it also doesn't offer any game mechanics for how Rhymes of Lore would help, like giving a bonus on (or modifying the difficulty of) relevant Tasks or whatever...

• Should the wording on p. 99 be disregarded?
• Or does it actually set a precedent for how other skills should also benefit from the influence of Traits?
  By relevant Traits giving a bonus? Or modifying the difficulty of relevant Tasks?

Cheers!
--Os.

It's all about the Advancement Points II

P.S.
Do hobbits with Gardening, dwarves and Bardings with Smith-craft or Stone-craft, and elves and Bardings with Woodwright get to choose an automatic success on the Crafting roll for a Heal Corruption undertaking in Fellowship Phase?

If so, it would definitely pay to play up to the stereotype of your folk, at least for lower skill ratings where yo're not missing anything by taking a free pass. (If you're good enough, you'll eventually prefer to roll: to have a shot at doubling or tripling the benefit with natural 6s.)

There isn't any Trait offering an automatic success on the corresponding Song roll -- unless the LM interprets Story-telling leniently, or can see better than I can why Rhymes of Lore would help with it.

(And should another option exist beyond Craft and Song? Something to do with blissing out with nature in a nice and lovely part of the world, like Radagast is reputedly overkeen on? Would that be on Hunting?)

Cheers,
--Os.

I may allow it if the PC wasn't particularly far along the track to the Shadow and the accompanying narration was suitably appropriate and interesting. There is already a decent opportunity cost involved after all. But if they were on the verge of succumbing to Shadow, then no I wouldn't.

I think this is an extension of "No Effect on the Important Stuff". I don't think you want to come up with hard rules that apply traits as an auto success all the time. They are purposefully kept out of Skills and those subsystems for a reason and that reason is to give you discretion to use them approrpriately.

I was under the impression that when traits don't grant an auto-success they instead decrease the difficulty one step (effectively giving you +2 to the roll).

According to the rules, traits are used to automatically pass an action, to gain an action when there wouldn't be one otherwise (unforseen action) or to increase the chance of gaining an advancement point. However, I'd probably do what you suggest as well, where the trait is relevant but I'm not sure whether I want to give a player an automatic success.

That seems to be a common house rule of people who struggle with the narrative layer traits are designed to provide.

I had a look last night and couldn't find it in the books.

It does provide a nice middle ground between auto-success and no-help-at-all though.

Not really. Traits don't grant auto success as of right. They grant it in certain situations i.e. when the GM deems that the consequences of success are not dramatically significant. As such, they don't operate as a bonus but more as a narrative tool to assist speed up play by highlighting those cool narrative parts of the PC. Making them a bonus effectively makes them a subset of Skills and removes this narrative gameplay. The designer even posted here that in playtesting moving to a bonus an impact in players taking different Traits. Instead of odd, unusual and interesting traits, players went for useful traits and taking some flavour from the PCs that may otherwise have been there.

So, no not really a middle ground. More new ground leading to an old destination

Bit of thread necromancy here, but I don't think anyone ever answered Os' questions regarding Rhymes of Lore.

How are you guys using/adjudicating it?

Anyone? Bueller?

I don't really see the wording for Rhymes of Lore changing anything. It's a bit of a stretch to take that one ambiguous turn of phrase to mean that the more clearly spelled out rules be disregarded.

That's why I thought it was a good question. It's such a strangely worded trait. I'm curious if other LMs just disregard the stuff about Custom skills or what?

But Osric wasn't focused on the Custom Skill part. He was implying that the "in conjunction with" part of the phrase implied some other use of Traits that is never listed.

As far as Custom Skills (which sounds a lot like skills you make up) and Rhymes of Lore, I don't see why RoL can't apply to them (or any skill really) depending on the situation.