What's the point of skills? While you're playing the game, situations are bound to arise where you'll need to be able to do something slightly unusual. That's where skills come in. How do we know that you are an accomplished thief, unless you've got a good Pick Pocket skill? If you can't find the key to a door that you have to get through, and you can't bust it down, you could use Pick Lock to open it. When greeting a noble, you'd use Etiquette to know how to adress the Lord, and to figure out just what his rank is. The possibilities are endless. How can you possibly expect to wield that sword you're carrying around, unless you have a skill with it? The way to cast a bigger and better Firebolt spell is by having skills in Creo and Ignis, the runes required to cast it, as well as Conjuration, because that's the kind of spell it is. Almost anything you do can be tied to a skill.
The skill list on your character sheet is seperated into three different types of skills. On the first page are your General Skills. On the second page are the Combat Skills. And, on the fourth page are the Magic Skills. Combat and Magic Skills work differently than General Skills do, so I'll explain them first. Combat and Magic Skills are level based, which means that you build up levels in them. The confusion is in how one improves a level in a skill. To gain a level in a Combat or Magic Skill, you must pay an amount of skill points equal to the level you wish to attain. For example, to get from level 3 to level 4 would require 4 points. However, to get from level 3 to level 5, you would have to pay 9 (4+5) points. Now, as I said, General Skills work differently. General Skills are percentage based, where one skill point is equal to 5%. so, to improve a General Skil from 10% to 15% would require 1 skill point. to go from 10% to 25% would require 3 skill points. Making sense now? With a beginning character, you receive 40 skill points to play around with. Be careful not to lose track of points, and remember that any modifications that you receive from Character Traits, your Race, and your Guilds are applied after you've spent your skill points, and are ignored when improving your skills after gaining a level. To make things easier, you can put the modifiers from everything else in the parenthesis, and your level from skill points in the blank on your character sheet. However, the talent and inability traits DO apply while spending points, because they affect the amount of points you spend, and not the stats themselves.
To use a skill, you must first run into a situation in which your skill would be of use. Again, we'll use the locked door example. Now, if you're a thief (or a slightly less reputable bard), you're bound to have taken the skill Pick Lock. Let's say that you've gotten a fair amount of practice with this, and your skill is 45%. This means that you have a 45% chance of picking a lock. However, before you break out the dice, there's a few things to take into consideration. First, how good are your lockpicks? With all of your practice, you've broken a few in the past, and haven't been able to find anyone who's willing to replace them. That's gonna drop your chances of picking that lock, if you don't have all the tools that you might need. However, this lock is a fairly simple one, so you'd get a bonus to pick it. Let's say that the GM gives you a -5% for missing a few picks, and a +2% for being an easy lock. That makes your actual chances 42%. Still pretty good. Now, you look at the skill list, and notice that Pick Lock is tied to the base skill Theft. This means that you can treat your Theft score as temporary skill points to spend on a skill that it's tied to. So, you could take 1 Theft skill point, and convert it into a bonus 5% for your Pick Lock skill, but only for this attempt. After that, it's gone until you rest up again. The base skills represent your natural talent to do things. But, you can't run off of talent alone. Let's say that you're considering using some of your Theft points to help you out here, when your GM reminds you of something. If you pass a General Skill check without using any of your base skill points, you get a permanent +1% to the skill you passed. This represents you learning from what you did, and figuring something out that you can apply next time. If you just breeze through something using talent, you don't learn much, but if you sit down and work through it with the skills you've already learned, you tend to pick up new stuff. So, you're torn between using some of your Theft skill, or having the chance of getting a permanent bonus to your Pick Lock skill. Finally, you decide that it's more important that you get through this door quickly, and avoid the risk of busting any more of your lockpicks, so you go with the Theft skill. You decide to take 4 points, and make it a +20% bonus, for a total chance of 62%. You roll the dice, and get a 54. It's a good thing you decided to use the Theft points, because you would have wound up failing that one, and possibly breaking another pick. That's just an example of how General Skills can be used. For a description on how Combat skills work, take a look at the page on how combat works. Or, for a description on how Magic Skills are used, look at the page about the rules of how magic works.
