Skills and Growing Through Use
Skills are the things you've learned — Swordsmanship, Piloting, Persuasion, Lockpicking, Surgery, Brawling, whatever your world teaches. Each one is scored 1–10 on the same scale as your stats. A skill is how a stat gets pointed at a real problem.
Where skills come from
You choose your starting skills when you make the character, and you can pick up new ones whenever the story gives you a reason — a season apprenticed to a smith, a month crewing a freighter, a scar earned in a back-alley fight. Learning a new skill means adding it to your sheet at 1, and working up from the bottom.
Skills are completely freeform — anything you meaningfully practice can become one. But do not create a skill simply because something happened once. Skills represent repeated experience. Broad skills are allowed when appropriate, but never as loopholes that make a character good at everything.
Skills rise through use
Your skills don't go up from experience points, levels, or payouts. They go up from using them — and the GM decides when they rise.
There's no counter ticking in the background. The rule is a conversation between what you do and what the story rewards. Improvement should happen slowly enough that it matters:
| Current score | How it grows |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | Fast early improvement is possible. |
| 4–6 | Requires meaningful practice and repeated use. |
| 7–8 | Requires serious dedication. |
| 9 | Improvement becomes extremely rare. |
| 10 | Extraordinary mastery — requires extraordinary circumstances. |
If you've been carrying a gun through every firefight for months and Firearms is still a 4, that's a story too — maybe you're not learning, or maybe you're coasting. If you push, the growth follows.
Who grows
Characters marked grows through use develop dynamically during the campaign. This normally includes:
- you (the player character)
- permanent companions and close allies
- lovers and rivals strongly tied to your story
- important recurring NPCs whose lives the story is changing
Ordinary background NPCs don't grow mechanically — they're what they are, and they stay what they are. That's what makes your growth meaningful: the world doesn't level up alongside you. The people in your orbit can grow with you; everyone else stands still.
The GM's call is the rule
Your sheet is a record the GM reads and writes. If you want a skill to rise, use it — and use it where it matters. The GM decides when the moment is earned. Argue for your growth by doing, not by asking.