Progression: Skills
You get better at the things you do, as long as they actually test you. There are no points to spend from a menu and no meter to grind down. Swing at a tough enemy, crack a hard lock, climb a wall that nearly beats you, or patch a serious wound, and the skill you just used gets a chance to improve. Two things follow from that:
- You specialise. There isn't enough lifetime experience to get good at everything.
- No two veterans look the same. Your character is the sum of what you practised.
The rest of this page covers how it works.
Three kinds of stat
Your capability lives in three kinds of statistic. They share the same machinery, and they all feed into skill checks.
| Kind | Examples | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Attributes | muscle, motion, senses, ego, moxie, grit, luck | Broad, innate qualities. Touch many checks; shift slowly. |
| Skills | athletics, security, scavenge, medic, survival, driving, dodge, parry, block, fuck | Learned, specific competencies. Sharpen with focused practice. |
| Languages | the tongues of the wasteland | How well you understand and are understood. Trained like skills. |
Worth remembering: skill checks are roll-under. The game builds a target number from your stats, rolls d100 against it, and you succeed on a roll at or below the target (the full curve lives on the Skill Checks page). The value a check reads is your total, which can differ from the number you trained:
$$ \text{total} = \text{raw} + \sum(\text{effect modifiers}) + \sum(\text{cyberware modifiers}) $$
Your raw value is what you've genuinely learned, and it's capped at $100$. Drugs, moods, injuries, and implants add to or subtract from it through the modifier terms, so your total can sit well above or below the number you trained.
How learning happens
Every use of a skill against a real challenge rolls for improvement. Three things decide whether the lesson sticks, and by how much.
You learn fastest while you're bad at it. Base gain shrinks as your raw value climbs, so early levels come quickly and mastery is slow:
$$ \text{base gain} = \frac{g_{\max}}{1 + \left(\dfrac{\text{raw}}{25}\right)^{1.2}} $$
Easy targets barely teach you. Gain scales with how the challenge compares to your skill. Against things well below your level it decays toward zero, so you have to keep finding things that stretch you:
$$ \text{effectiveness} = e^{-0.07 \cdot \max(0,\; \text{raw} - \text{challenge})} $$
At or above your level you learn at the full rate. The two multiply into your actual gain:
$$ \text{gain} = \text{base gain} \times \text{effectiveness} $$
It costs XP and has a cooldown. Each point of improvement carries an XP price (the curve below); if you can't afford it, the improvement just doesn't happen. A short per-skill cooldown keeps a single burst of activity from spiking a skill, so progress spreads across repeated practice.
Only players learn this way. Wasteland NPCs have fixed competence and don't grow.
XP: earning and spending
XP is the currency of growth. You earn it mostly by overcoming danger: putting down dangerous foes is the biggest source, and tougher targets pay more. You never spend it by hand, since improving a skill draws from your pool automatically.
Cumulative XP to reach a raw level $L$ follows a curve:
$$ C(L) = 25L + 0.17 \cdot L^{2.9} $$
Raising a skill from $a$ to $b$ costs $C(b) - C(a)$. Because of that exponent, the top of a skill costs far more than the bottom.
| Skill level | 1 | 10 | 25 | 40 | 50 | 59 | 75 | 90 | 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cumulative XP | 25 | 385 | 2,550 | 8,523 | 15,620 | 24,698 | 48,447 | 81,272 | 109,762 |
Some skills are intrinsically harder to train, which multiplies their cost on top of all this.
The XP cap, and ascension
Your earned XP is capped. That ceiling starts at 25,000 — separate from the points you allocate when you first create your character. Creation sets your starting shape; the 25,000 is how much you can add through play before you hit the wall.
You move the wall by ascending — resetting your character to start over with a permanent bonus and a higher XP cap than before. Each ascension lifts the ceiling further, so deep, long-term growth comes from repeated runs rather than one open-ended grind. See Ascensions.
Until you ascend, that cap forces hard choices. Look back at the table: 25,000 is less than the cost of mastering even one skill. Pour your entire starting budget into a single skill and it tops out around level 59, with nothing left for anything else. So early on, mastery is simply out of reach. You spread that budget across the handful of skills that define your character, and ascension is what eventually lets you reach further.
Why cap earned XP at all? It turns progression into a question of budgeting rather than hours logged. Two players with identical playtime can end up as wildly different characters, and nobody becomes a flawless generalist by default. Raising the ceiling then becomes a goal in its own right, through Ascensions.
See also
- Skill Checks — how attributes and skills turn into outcomes.
- Ascensions — resetting your character (remort) for a permanent bonus and a higher XP cap.