Skills

In virtual worlds, skills are tangible representations of the abilities that characters have (supposedly) learned.

In real life, a skill is a related series of actions that a person has internalized to the extent that they can apply it “without thinking;” skills are either innate or learned through practice. In virtual worlds, the notion of what a skill is remains the same, but skill acquisition is often only tenuously linked to “practice makes perfect.” In particular, some virtual worlds allow characters to improve skills when they go up a level, irrespective of whether the skills they choose to improve are ones they’ve actually used.

Why do virtual worlds need to make skills tangible? Actually, they don’t: Character skills are very useful as a means for players to individualize their characters, and they provide a good delivery mechanism for achievement, but they aren’t strictly necessary. The most important skills (like it or not) are those of the player, not of the character, and the virtual world can’t hope to rate these ¹.

Skills are interpreted by the virtual world in a number of ways, depending on the nature of the skill, of any tools required, and of the virtual world. The main four are

• Binary skills (feats ²). Either you can swim or you can’t.

• Discrete skills (skill levels). People can swim to an ability described by one of a fixed number (greater than two) of predefined levels.

• Continuous skills. People can swim with widely varying degrees of ability, from not at all to completely competent.

• Binary-continuous skills. Either you can’t swim, or you can swim with widely varying degrees of ability.

The idea behind a binary skill is simple command guarding. If you have the skill, you get to use the command, and if you don’t, then you don’t. Discrete skills take this a step further, with increasing levels opening up new commands (swimming underwater, swimming in stronger currents).

Continuous skills work slightly different in that everyone has a shot at performing any command. Sometimes, the effects are also continuous (the higher your swimming skill, the faster you can swim), but often it’s used as a form of binary skill based on the difficulty of the task at hand. For example, if swimming across a moat is rated at difficulty 30, then someone with a swimming skill of 30 or more will always succeed; someone with a swimming skill of 25 will fail some of the time, but not as often as would someone with a swimming skill of 10 ³. Binary-continuous skills work the same way, but with the proviso that if your skill rating in the area is zero then you can’t even attempt it (this is in addition to any other applicable preconditions—for example, armless characters don’t get to swim no matter how much they practice).

Skills can be active or passive. Passive skills are switched on the entire time, whereas active ones must be called into play explicitly. For example, if a character has a “deflect arrows” feat then that would be passive—the character automatically attempts to deflect any arrows fired at them. A feat such as “berserk fury,” on the other hand, might be active: Players have to decide when to sacrifice defense for offense, it won’t happen on its own. Most skills are passive, but only come into use as the result of an active decision: Your swimming skill is effectively dormant until you enter a body of water, but while there it’ll be taken into account passively. Because putting active and passive skills in the same list can be confusing for players, there is a growing tendency to refer to active skills as powers rather than skills.