Proficiencies

Proficiencies are the trained competences that sit between raw ability and full class feature. Your class grants you a number of slots — some for weapons, some for the skills of daily life — and you spend them to say what your hero is actually good at beyond swinging a blade or casting a spell.

Weapon proficiencies

When you choose a weapon proficiency, you are saying your hero has learned to fight with that weapon rather than picking it up and hoping. The slots you start with depend on your class — warriors begin with the most (a fighter with four), priests and rogues with two, wizards with one. Spend them on the weapons you mean to use in the field:

• A warrior can put extra slots into a single weapon for specialisation — a bonus to hit and damage and, at the fighter's full mastery, extra attacks. This is how a fighter turns a favourite blade into a legend.
• Everyone else generally spreads slots across a melee weapon and a missile weapon, so they can hurt a foe whether it closes or stays back.
• The Proficiencies compendium records which class group can learn which weapon; wizards, for instance, keep to the staff and dagger.

A second slot in the same weapon is often worth more than two first slots in different weapons. Depth beats breadth in a fight.

Non-weapon proficiencies

These are the skills of living well and working cleverly: riding, swimming, survival in the wastes, animal handling, languages both written and spoken, appraising a gem, tracking, heraldry, singing, tinkering — the whole texture of a person beyond their class. The Proficiencies compendium lists each with its cost in slots, the ability it tests, and a check modifier.

To use one, you make a check against that ability with the listed modifier: roll a d20, add the modifier, and succeed if the result is equal to or under the ability score. A skilled survivalist with a good Wisdom succeeds most of the time; an untrained hero can still attempt many of these things, but the trained one is reliably better.

Your class sets how many non-weapon slots you start with — priests, wizards, and bards with four, warriors and thieves with three. Choose the skills your story and your role call for: the ranger's tracking and survival, the thief's read lips and appraising, the priest's herbalism and ancient history, the bard's musical instrument and entertaining. And take at least one skill for the daily slog of travel — riding or swimming — unless you enjoy rolling to fall off.

Proficiencies grow

You gain more slots as you gain levels, and you may spend experience and downtime to learn new ones — finding a teacher, practicing, paying the cost of time and coin. Much of the long game of a character is the quiet accumulation of these small, real competences: the fighter who learns to read, the thief who picks up a smith's trade, the mage who finally learns to swim.

Proficiency checks, generally

When nothing else covers an action, the referee often calls for a proficiency check instead of a bare ability check. The difference is the character who is trained: they roll with their slot's modifier and their tested ability, and they are simply more likely to succeed — which is exactly what it should feel like to be good at something. Your proficiencies are not a scorecard; they are the list of ways your hero is reliable, and reliability is what a party leans on when the plan falls apart.