Skills

Skills are the tools of trade your character needs for his everyday life. You usually learn a number of skills to make sure that your character can operate in the way you intend him to. For example for a thief, Stealing skill is a must, but Parry and Resistance would also be nice skills to deflect attacks or magical spells from people following you to lynch you if you have been spotted.

Skills are often used in so called skill-checks where a skill and it's ability are used together to determine whether the character is successful in what he is attempting to do or not. In this case it is important to have both, the skill and the ability.

Skills have a 5 step range 0-4 with a higher number meaning more skill knowledge. The more skill you have, the more options you have to do certain things, or the better you are in what you do.

In order to learn a skill, you must fulfill two steps; you need both credits and XP to complete these steps. The way to learn a skill is this:

1.) Earn credits and XP

2.) Open your skill dialog and click on the name of the skill you want to learn, once for each level you want to learn

3.) If you have enough unused XP, you will receive these empty boxes next to your skill's name. Once you have chosen the skills you wish to learn you have to hit the "Submit" button this means that your character has meditated and is now ready to actually learn the skill levels

4.) Find a teacher NPC then click him and select Buy Skill in your action tabs. The teacher will tell you how many credits you will have to pay for your first unlearned box in that skill. Click on the credit amount and click the buy option. If you had sufficient credits to make the purchase you are now trained in the next level. Continue with this process until all skill boxes are filled. Depending on how many levels he could teach you, you will see that the boxes in your skill dialog window are now filled with check marks. Now you can use the new skill

Teachers are mostly in Oxford. You can go to Oxford by train, or rather underground. there is also one teacher in Stratford that teaches all basic newbie skills, so newbie characters don't have to go to Oxford. The teachers can teach only up to level 3 in combat skills and upto level 4 in manufacturing skills. If you want to master the fourth level, you will have to find a wandering teacher. Those teachers appear after you have fulfilled a quest. Any type of quest can create a wandering teacher and you should be looking out for those quests, since they are in high demand. Once a wandering teacher has taught you a skill, he does not teach this skill again, and can not be used to teach the same skill to another character.

As you can see see, two currencies are involved in learning skills. While credits can be traded freely between characters, XPs can not. This ensures, that a character actually has to work to earn his skills and can not just buy them from being given money. However, our skill system does not involve learning by doing since this only leads to repetitive tasks like manufacturing chairs over and over. Instead you can earn XP in one field and then spend them to earn another skill. This is perfectly legitimate and enables people to work a character up with easy tasks like harvesting or bulk orders and then turn to the more interesting jobs, which don't earn XP or money easily on a lower level.

The price of money and XP per skill box learned increases exponentially. This means that it will become more and more expensive to learn new skills, the more skills you already know. After all, nobody can master everything. However in Socio this has the purpose to prevent "Supertoons" from being created which could seriously harm the game balance and also would cause tremendous suffering to the player should they be killed.