In attempting various courses of action, different skills or fields of knowledge may come into play. In such cases, success or failure will generally depend on a combination of stats and skills. There are four fundamental skill sets: action skills, combat skills, crafting skills, and magic skills. You may see your character's existing skills with the command SKILLS, or view all available skills by typing SKILLS ALL.

Related to skills are abilities. Abilities are actions you can attempt whose success or failure are influenced by the skill(s) associated with them. For instance, TRACK is an ability that is influenced by skill in Outdoorsmanship. You can view all of the abilities you currently possess with the ABILITIES command.

Skills

Learning Skills

Each character begins with a number of skill points that can be assigned in character generation. Skills start at a minimum of 0 (no formal training or ability in the skill) to 10 (near-perfect mastery of the skill). Everyone receives a base number of skill points to spend, modified by the character's age. This represents the greater life experience of older characters and the longer opportunity they have had to develop a variety of skills.

In order to learn skills after character generation, you first need to earn some experience through roleplaying. You can then spend those experience points to learn skills in one of three different ways: learning from a teacher (PC or NPC), practicing or training, or actively using the skill. The experience cost needed to raise a given skill will increase with each skill level. Once a character has invested a certain number of overall skill points, an xp tax will also be applied to each additional skill point bought; this tax will rise along with total invested skill points.

To see how much experience it will cost to raise a given skill by one point, you can type LEARN CHECK <SKILL>. To commit the xp to learn a skill, enter LEARN <SKILL>. Once you have invested the xp, you will then be able to raise the skill through classes or by practicing or using the skill.

Innate Skills

In addition to assigning points in character generation, a character can choose three skills to be considered innate. These skills represent things that a character has an especially strong affinity or natural talent for. Once chosen, innate skills cannot ever be changed.

Innate skills cost 10% less xp to raise per point than do regular skills, representing the comparative ease with which a character picks them up. Innates can also be learned beyond the ordinary 10-point skill cap, granting ever more powerful rolls and, sometimes, access to potent specialized abilities. The experience cost for the skill rises steadily for each point beyond the cap, so developing innate skills to such a degree represents a significant investment in a particular path.

Associated Stats

Sometimes, a stat will be often associated with a certain skill in mechanical dice rolls. This is not always the case, however, and all skills are often tied with many different stats depending on what ability is being attempted. While this guide lists primary associated stats with some skills, the true measure of which stat a skill-related ability depends on can be found when checking the ability via the ABILITY command.

Action Skills

Combat Skills

Crafting Skills

Magic Skills

Magic skills are unavailable to characters in character generation, and will be unlocked primarily through pursuing in-character stories for now.

Abilities

Basic Abilities

Everyone gets a set of basic abilities initially, which is common to all new characters. While each basic ability is governed by a particular skill, you don't actually need to have points invested in that skill in order to use the ability. Having a high Outdoorsmanship skill will definitely improve your ability to find and interpret tracks, but you can use the tracking ability on a basic level even without a single point invested in the skill. Depending on your roll you might discover a few tracks or you might find nothing at all, but you are at least able to try!

Special Abilities

Besides such basic abilities, there are a large number of other abilities that can only be unlocked by investing points in a particular skill. You will not be able to FIND GAMETRAIL in the wilderness without Hunting skill, for instance. Every skill will have its own unlockable abilities at different levels of skill gain, up to 10. While most abilities will be in the form of actions that you can perform, some will be passive traits that you have gained through your skill and require no performance or activation.

In addition, there are still more special unlockable abilities that can only be gained through combinations of skills, stats, organization membership, heritage, and story development. A hypothetical example of this is that maybe you come from a tribe that has perfected an unarmed combat move called the grapplekick, but it is only taught to the strongest members of the tribe. In this situation, a combination of tribal heritage, Unarmed skill, and the Strength stat will lead to your unlocking the ability to grapplekick. Perhaps it's further gated behind story development, in which case you'd need to set up a story arc about learning the grapplekick and a tribal NPC would teach you. Then you would have the ability.