Skills and Learning

Skills represent what your consciousness has learned through practice. Every skill belongs to the Core — when your Shell is destroyed and rebuilt, your skills come with you unchanged. A veteran rifleman doesn’t forget how to shoot just because they’re in a new body.

Learning by Doing

You don’t learn skills by spending points at a menu. You learn by using them. Fire a rifle in combat and your Rifles skill improves. Pick a lock and your Tech skill sharpens. Every meaningful use of a skill generates pending experience (PXP), which your mind gradually converts into permanent expertise.

This creates a natural feedback loop: the skills you use most are the skills you get best at. Specialists emerge from playstyle, not from build planners.

How Learning Works

Learning happens in three stages, each governed by a different Core attribute.

Stage 1: Observation (PER)

When you perform an action that exercises a skill, you gain PXP (pending experience). Your Perception determines how much you absorb from each experience. An observant player character notices the subtle details — how a rifle’s recoil pattern shifts with barrel temperature, the way a lock’s tumblers resist at different angles — and learns more from every encounter.

Higher PER means more PXP per action. Perception doesn’t change what you learn, just how much you pick up each time.

Stage 2: Retention (MEM)

PXP accumulates in a pool — think of it as your short-term working memory for a particular skill. Your Memory stat determines the size of this pool. Higher MEM means a significantly larger pool, and the difference grows dramatically at higher values.

Once the pool is full, additional experience is wasted until your mind processes what’s already there. High-MEM characters can keep learning longer before they hit that ceiling.

Stage 3: Consolidation (INT)

Your mind passively converts PXP into permanent XP over time. This happens automatically — you don’t need to meditate or visit a trainer. Your Intelligence determines how fast this conversion occurs. Like MEM, higher INT values have an increasingly powerful effect.

INT and MEM work as a pair. MEM controls how much raw experience you can hold; INT controls how fast you process it. Building them differently creates distinct learning profiles.

Skill Ranks

As permanent XP accumulates, your skill rank increases from 0 to 100. Early ranks come quickly — you’ll see noticeable improvement after just a few encounters. But the XP required for each rank grows steeply, and the final ranks demand extraordinary dedication.

Most characters will specialize in a handful of skills rather than trying to master everything. A focused specialist who invests heavily in one or two areas will dramatically outperform a generalist who spreads their experience thin.

What Skills Do

Higher skill ranks provide concrete mechanical benefits:

Attack bonus: Skill rank is a major contributor to attack rolls. A highly skilled marksman lands shots that an untrained shooter would miss entirely.

Activation speed: Skilled users activate weapons faster, spending less AP per attack. At high ranks, this translates into significantly more attacks per combat round.

Abilities

Skills are passive expertise — they make you better at things you already know how to do. Abilities are discrete techniques that expand what you can do in the first place.

An ability might let you pass through an enemy’s position in combat, execute a special attack pattern, or use a technical skill in a novel way. Abilities are unlocked through a combination of skill rank thresholds and narrative progression — you learn them by reaching sufficient expertise and then encountering the right circumstances.

Like skills, abilities belong to the Core. They persist across Shell destruction and represent the tactical vocabulary that separates veterans from novices. A veteran with a baseline Shell and a full suite of abilities will outperform a novice in an optimized Shell, because the veteran simply has more options available at every decision point.