Ability Scores and Skills

Abilities

Your character can be viewed as a composite of various abilities and how proficient they are in each. Their abilities are summarised in their seven Ability Scores:

• Strength: your character's physical strength and ability to exert themselves; determines melee weapon hit chance and melee weapon damage.
• Agility: your character's flexibility, reflexes, and coordination; determines armour class and initiative.
• Constitution: your character's physical hardiness and ability to withstand physical stresses; determines hit points.
• Perception: your character's ability to notice and detect things; determines passive perception, ranged weapon hit chance, and ranged weapon damage.
• Intelligence: your character's mental sharpness, acquity, and knowledge; determines starting mana and mana gain.
• Willpower: your character's mental fortitude, ability to project their will on their surroundings, and withstand mental stresses; determines starting mana, spell hit chance, and spell save DC.
• Charisma: your character's force of character, personality, and ability to influence others; determines disposition, starting mana, and mana gain.

Skills

Your character can perform tasks involving their abilities through their skills, which measure their aptitude and abilities in various tasks and processes. Checks made with skills may be either Unskilled or Skilled. An Unskilled check is one that can be made by anyone. Examples of Unskilled checks would be trying to climb a rope, or trying to determine if an object is magical. A Skilled check can only be made by someone proficient in the skill the check requires. Examples of Skilled checks include attempting to decipher a message written in code, or trying to track an animal in a forest.

• Acrobatics (Agility): your character's flexibility and whole body coordination.
• Arcana (Intelligence): your character's knowledge of and familiarity with arcane theory, practice, and objects.
• Athletics (Strength): your character's physical athletic ability and exertion.
• Dexterity (Agility): your character's fine motor coordination and deftness with their hands.
• Intuition (Intelligence): your character's ability to determine causality, deduce, and judge motivation.
• Investigation (Perception): your character's ability to search and find things.
• Lore (Intelligence): your character's knowledge of the world and their ability to recall it.
• Medicine (Intelligence): your character's knowledge of the body and ability to perform on it.
• Mercantilism (Charisma): your character's knowledge of commerce and value and abiilty to haggle and barter.
• Occult (Willpower): your character's knowledge of taboo and forbidden things and their ability to resist its deleterious effects.
• Performance (Charisma): your character's ability to act and perform artistic endeavours.
• Speech (Charisma): your character's ability to get others to do what they want them to.
• Stealth (Agility): your character's ability to avoid detection.
• Survival (Willpower): your character's knowledge of survival techniques and ability to perform them.

Combinatory skills

Some things your character does can't be summed up or attributed to a single ability, and are performed through combinatory skills. Checks made with combinatory skills use the average of the modifiers of the base skills that comprise the combinatory skill. Skilled checks of combinatory skills may be made as long as the character attempting the check is proficient in at least one of the base skills. Some combinatory skills are preexisting, while others may not have names and may simply be required for a specific task. For example, attempting to tie a specific knot might require a combination of Lore to recall how to tie the knot and Dexterity to actually tie it.

• Crafting (Dexterity, Lore): your character's ability to make things.
• Intimidation (Athletics, Persuasion): your character's ability to get others to do what they want by threat.
• Nature (Lore, Survival): your character's knowledge of the natural world and ability to use it to their advantage.