@DaveHiggins does himself a disservice. He’s managed to get his Chandler skill up from B2 to B5 over our game, and that’s through excellent uses.
I’ve seen it used as Get a Job in a couple of games (one game had a travelling chandler-priest, making devotional candles to scrape a living), and there was some excellent hard work around acquiring bees wax, and then having to turn that into much-needed income (weirdly, in hindsight, one of the tensest rolls of that session).
However, the fun stuff’s been when, for instance, you’re constructing a devotional offering candle for a ritual, or shaping/cutting down a candle to act as a timed fuse.
In other odd-skills delightfully applied category, we’ve had someone masquerading as a poet (a central character conceit) without the skill slowly building it up to B5.
Notable uses included a publicly declared love poem where he accidentally compared his love to bacon (lovely consequence of failure from the player, there), poetry-slams, and writing catchy subversive poetry.
In longer running games, I’m also conscious of how much characters grow and develop.
In the early days, leveraging these “niche” skills in creative ways seem to happen a lot more when you’re a group of gutter-level would-be traders trying to get by, rather than, like last session, when these same characters are going toe-to-toe with a vampire’s army backed by their own for of halfling townsfolk (and going toe-to-toe with the vampire themselves).
In our current game, I can see that the characters have around 40-something open skills (one is now up to 64 skills!), with about 20-odd in the process of being opened.
I’ve found that this tends to mean that you’ve got a “normal” skill to use, rather than necessarily getting very creative with a more limited palette.
It’s always such a joy to me to see a player get that gleam in their eye and go hog-wild on a specific “edge” skill (Chandler, Poetry, Accounting, etc.), and especially satisfying when that’s what ends up in the discussion for MVP / Embodiment at the end of the session.