Skills that synergize with each other

[Cosgar]

Is there a guide on skills that compliment each other like perception + visual calculus or composure + drama? I'm trying to get some build ideas.

[Du-Vu]

Some of the best advice I've heard for build ideas is to think about a detective from a show or book or another game you like, and try and pick your skills based on what you think they'd have.

[Cosgar]

That's what I'm trying to do, make Nick Sax from Happy! at least the comic book version.
I just wanted to see if there's some type of mechanic where certain Psyche skills work together with others. I wasted a bunch of skill points and got stuck doing objectives out of order that hurt my last character's progression.

[Du-Vu]

High Empathy and Suggestion to represent Happy. High Physique skills in general -- Electrochemistry, Pain Threshold, Physical Instrument, Half-Light, but low Endurance for the ongoing heart problems, so you might actually want to start with it low and bump up your caps later through thoughts. Hand-Eye Coordination and Reaction Speed are also good in a fight, and Rhetoric and Authority will help piss people off.

The way to think about synergizing skills is that they're basically characters, they're like your companions in any other RPG. And the number of points you have in them are sort of like your influence with them, in addition to how effective they are. Which will make them more likely to chime in passively. So they'll have a stronger reaction if they're either very high or very low. A high Empathy and Authority would probably come into conflict, I imagine. Haven't actually tried that yet.

[Cosgar]

So there's nothing else that's really a requirement to another skill like perception and visual calculus?

[Du-Vu]

The way it's built, it's actually probably more interesting how one works without the other, like a character who can reconstruct a scene in their head mathematically but will still miss finer details, or one who picks up on smells and stains and stray threads but can't necessarily distinguish shoe sizes at a glance. Sherlock Holmes might have both Visual Calculus and Perception, but they don't actually necessarily overlap as much more than other skills as you might think. Micro vs macro, you can make do with one or the other (or neither). Hell, Reaction Speed is another one you'd probably want for your Sherlock, and Composure and Logic, too. It's a very granular system, everything that would be Investigation/Perception in another game (or even Spot/Search/Listen in D&D) is spread out here, but without any of them feeling shortchanged.

Any skills that are reasonably high can synergize, basically. But none of them are necessarily more optimal than the others in the way they might be in a 'normal' game.