Ability Improvement

Characters can improve their abilities by practising, training, or studying. Abilities do not normally improve as a result of activities during the game: instead, the players gain Fate Points, with which they can tip the hand of God in their character's favour.

When a character wishes to improve his abilities, he must calculate his improvement total. This will vary depending on how he is improving them, but it acts in the same way. Every month, the character gains experience points equal to his improvement total in whatever ability he is trying to improve.

Ways of Improving

Practice

Practising is what a character does when he tries to improve an ability all by himself. The improvement total is the appropriate Aptitude. The GM may limit the abilities that can be practised: generally, it is not appropriate for knowledges unless the character has the opportunity to debate with another knowledgable character.

An apprenticeship counts as practice, because you get advice, despite having to make a living at your work.

Training

The character gets a teacher, and studies with her. The improvement total is the character's Aptitude plus the teacher's Teaching Ability. Note that certain types of Teaching Ability may impose additional modifiers, often depending on the relative abilities of the teacher and pupil.

Study

The character hits the books. The improvement total is the character's Aptitude, plus the book's quality. This option is obviously only available to literate characters, and may be limited to knowledges and certain other abilities by the GM. You can't learn everything from books, alas.

Research

The character tries to create new knowledge or abilities. The improvement total is Aptitude/2. Note that this is a very basic rule, and may well be superseded for many activities in many game-worlds.

Work Experience

Work Experience is like practice, except that you make sure that you can earn a living in the process. The improvement total is Aptitude/2, rounded down.

Hobbies

Every year, each character gets experience points equal to each Aptitude to put into abilities falling under that Aptitude which have not been improved any other way during the year. For example, a character with a Mental Aptitude of 12 and a Social Aptitude of 13 would get 12 experience points to put into Mental abilities, and 13 to put into Social. This allows hard workers to have some outside interests.

Cost of Improvements

Abilities cost a varying number of experience points. An average sort of ability costs (current value + 1)x5 experience points to raise by one point. Thus, it costs ten experience points to get from a score of zero to a score of one, and fifty points to go from four to five.

Abilities may have differing multipliers. On the whole, these should go in intervals of 5, to keep the numbers simple, but there is no reason why you shouldn't go for different multipliers if you want to.

Learning Things

Characters may also wish to learn things: songs, codes, spells, etc. The rules for this are slightly different. The character generates an improvement total as above, depending on the source of the thing. (Trying to learn a song by listening to performances would count as Practice, learning it from a book is study, and being taught it by a singing master is training.) However, the improvement total is not based on an Aptitude, but on the appropriate Ability: Sing for a song, for example.

Divide the learning difficulty of the thing by the improvement total. In most cases, the learning difficulty will be equal to the crafting difficulty. Multiply the result by the base time period for crafting the thing (or another period, in special cases). This is the length of time that it takes to learn the thing.

In most cases, it will be simplest to assume that the character can learn things with a total difficulty equal to or less than the improvement total in one time period: only sometimes will the exact time taken be important.

Note that it may be desirable to make learning things easier or harder, relative to creating them. As the rules stand, it is significantly easier. By increasing the crafting difficulty relative to the learning difficulty, and the crafting base time relative to that for learning, it is possible to make learning things much easier. This might be desirable in a magic system, for example, encouraging characters to seek out old spells.