Skill

Skills are one of the primary characteristics that determine the abilities of the player character. Skill levels provide no restrictions on what equipment can be used by a character, but some determine how effectively a character can use various types of equipment. There are six skills, each with eight techniques, which focus mainly on combat, while some skills improve the effectiveness of Thaumaturgy.

The skill trees are:


 * Close Combat
 * Ranged Weapons
 * Shields
 * Armour
 * Insight
 * Concentration

Prior to Exanima, the Light and Heavy Weapons skills were merged into Close Combat, while Meditation was merged with Insight and Concentration later in Exanima's development.

Depending on the number of learned techniques, a given skill's level of expertise can be considered as:


 * Inept
 * Aspirant
 * Novice
 * Adept
 * Expert
 * Master

There are also a number of secondary skills planned that are learned separate from the primary skills. These skills are most likely all non-combat and involve interaction with the environment and/or objects.

The following may contain inaccuracies:


 * Alchemy
 * Armorer/Weaponsmith (Players will be able to enhance their equipment, but it is not yet known if secondary skills will play a role in this.)
 * Cartography
 * Musicianship

Advancement
Characters gain experience through various action such as exploration, reading, inspection, and combat. All acquired experience goes to training a selected technique. A technique cannot be used until it is fully trained, which in itself takes some time as characters need to absorb what they have learned. Time to train increases with each technique learned.

There is a cap of fifteen techniques, preventing mastery of all skills simultaneously. One may also redistribute skill levels by "forgetting" techniques, but all experience used to train a technique will be lost. Players may forget techniques at any given time. This makes it relatively convenient to attain different milestones.

User Interface


This was the initial design of the skill UI. The skill panels scroll and can be minimized individually which is why only five skills are visible. The segments in the skill bars represent major expertise levels, the slots below are for milestones that are trained or being trained. The small buttons to the right of the bars are toggles for training and forgetting the skills or keeping them at their current level. The bar at the top represents the global skill cap, when full, the player will no longer be able to train any of his skills.