Branching

[Synthesis]

Technically speaking, when languages and the 'ride' skill appear on your skills list, they haven't branched.

In order for a skill to qualify as 'branched' it must appear in the skill list only after some other skill has reached a certain point.

I can't think of -any- skill that will 'branch' at zero hours.  I know of one that will branch within a day, but it's not a terribly useful or dangerous skill.

How fast you branch depends on many factors, but the most commonly branched skills will branch at 3-4 days if you use the parent skill often, and around 7-10 days if you only use that skill infrequently.  Keep in mind however that the more useful or dangerous the skill, the more difficult it will be to branch (generally speaking).

If you've never branched a skill, it's probably because you're either paranoid about being labeled as a powergamer, or you simply enjoy the social scene more than training.  

And yes, there is a random factor involved, but the randomness follows a certain distribution (more than likely a normal distribution), and most characters will branch somewhere in the middle range.  Exceptional cases may occur, but given the substantial number of incremental advances to a skill that are required to get it to branch, I'd imagine that these cases would be exceedingly rare...it would be like rolling a natural 20 ten times in a row, or something  along those lines.

So, simply stated:  all of the zero-karma classes have skills that will branch under 10 days if you bother to use them.  If you're not using them, you have nobody to blame but yourself, really.