Editing Action Dramatic (section)

===Skills===
All skills have a base die which is the die sized rolled when making that check.

The die sizes, from lowest variance to highest variance, are:
*d2
*d3
*d4
*d6
*d8
*d10
*d12

Skills have 5 ranks:
Amateur
Novice
Trained
Professional
Legendary

and a special rank of Untrained for a skill which the player character has no experience in.

For all skills, a rank of Untrained means the player receives a -2 penalty to the check and uses the base die.

Each rank (except for Amateur) decreases the size of the base die and provides a bonus to the skill equal to the change in dice size (min +1). All changes are cumulative. For example:

<blockquote>
[Arbitrary] has a base die of d8. If a character where to increase their rank from Amateur to Novice, then the new die size would be d6 and the player would get a +2 bonus when using that skill. If that same character was to increase their rank from Novice to Trained, then they would use a d4 and the player would get a +4 bonus (2+2) when using that skill. 
</blockquote>

In other words, as a character increases in skill then the range of their results decreases while the median result increases. Most skills have a minimum die size that can be used. The die size cannot be decreased to lower than this (though the character still receives a +1 bonus per rank). Going back to the last example:

<blockquote>
Lord Homungous now has an [Arbitrary] skill at rank Trained which means he rolls d4 and gets a +4 bonus with the skill. He ranks up to Professional, but the minimum die size for [Arbitrary] is d4. So, he now rolls d4 and gets a +5 bonus with the skill.
</blockquote>

Finally, [though not currently written into actual rules] having a high rank says what actions are automatic for your character to do i.e. don't require a dice roll to determine success. If the degree of success is important, then the character still rolls but any result which indicates a failure is considered the lowest degree of success.

Skills also have one final property: the learning track. Each skill, as mentioned in attributes, has a track which says how far the PC has progressed in that skill. Each time the track fills up, the skill ranks up and the track resets to nothing. There are two ways to increase the track: using the skill in a sufficiently dramatic context (pretty much any time it's not an automatic success) and by spending time training. Each skill has a certain time to train up one on the track [might be different for every rank]. In keeping with the longstanding traditions of the mentor archetype, a character can help another character reduce the time it takes to train a skill [how exactly is to be determined at a later point in time]. In a more realistic game, it would be extremely difficult to increase a skill after a certain point without the help of a mentor/extensive library/high-speed VR training. However, realism is definitely a changeable variable and if the genre of your action game encourages self-taught heroes, then so be it.