
Skills Overview

Player characters advance in The Brass Ring by using their skills to advance
their abilities and become more powerful players. As your skills increase,
you will be able to advance your character's level by asking non-player
characters (npcs) in the game "to advance." For example, "ask (npc name) to
advance". If you have the required skill points, you will be advanced to the
next level. If you don't have the required skill points the npc will let
you know how many more skill points are required to advance. Every time
your skill points increase with use, you will get a message saying something
like: "You are a bit more adept with your melee attack." To see how many skill
points your player character has you can use the "skills" command. This will
show you a table of the skills your character has, the skill level, the
maximum skill level that skill can be advanced to, and the percentage of
use towards advancing the skill to the next level. For example, if typed
"skills" you might see a line like this in the output:

melee attack        : 6/8    (37%)

where the skill is melee attack with a 
skill level of 6 and maximum skill level of 8 and 37% trained in that skill
before advancing the skill level to 7. As your player level increases the
maximum amount of skill points you can have will increase, and your character
will be more powerful with the skill. Once the skill is trained to the maximum
level it will not increase any more until your character advances to the next
player level. It is a good idea to consult your skill chart to see what skills
have been maxed out and then focus on using your other skills to advance to the
next player level.

There are three categories of skills: primary, secondary, and minor. Primary
skills advance faster when used than secondary skills, which advance faster
than minor skills. So, when creating your character, you want to choose a skill
set that fits your desired player concept. If you want a fighter, you might
choose weapon type skills (blade attack, blade defense, blunt attack, etc) for
your primary skill slots. A mage-type player might want to have magical skills
(conjuring, magic attack, magic defense, etc.) in their primary skill slots.
With this system you can have magical and fighting type skills in those primary
slots to create a fighter/mage type player. 

You need to have a skill in a slot to be able to use the skill, and be able to
increase it through use. So, even if you choose a skill in a minor slot it will
be able to be used and increase, but it will advance slower than skills in the
primary and secondary slots.
 
