On Elysian Fields, characters have access to a variety of abilities, ranging from elemental manipulation? to flight? to combat? tactics.

These abilities are dictated in-game by a character's species and class. Out-of-character, we use a system that divides each ability into levels, starting with the basic skill at Level 1 and increasing in power or understanding with every level after.

How the Skill System works

• Every time you make an in-character post, you are earning skill points which can be used to upgrade your character's abilities. The ratio is as follows. (Alternatively, you can use xanthai to buy a Skill Pack? containing 5 to 15 skill points.)

    20 in-character posts = 1 skill point = 1 upgrade

• We use the post count under your character's avatar to track how many skill points you have and thus how many upgrades you can afford. (This post count does not go down when you spend skill points; instead, the totals will be logged by the admins in your character's profile under the Skills section of the application template.)
• Upgrades bought with post count are non-transferrable except where the purchasing character has already purchased the maximum number of upgrades available to them and thus has skill points to spare.
• Packs? are transferrable between characters that belong to you. (In other words, you can buy a pack with one character and apply the skill points therein to a different character. You can also use an established character to buy a pack so you can create a higher-levelled character from scratch rather than constantly starting characters at a beginner level. However, you must spend all of the skill points in a single pack on the same character, which is to say you can't split a pack between multiple characters.)
• You can only purchase upgrades for skills that are available to your character according to their race and class. (For instance, a Viridis cannot acquire Transmute.) Be sure to check the availability before you try to buy skills!
• Your character can only use skills that have been approved and confirmed by an administrator, meaning that until the Skills section of your application template has been updated by the approving admin, you can't use any upgrades you've purchased. (Even then, you can only use those approved skills in threads that start after the upgrade has been confirmed.)

Things to Keep in Mind

When deciding which skills to grant your character, please consider some important factors:

• The age of your character is important in determining how many and which skills they might have learned. Consider the time they've been alive, and how long they've had to learn, because some skills can take a life-time to master.
  • We strongly discourage child prodigies. They simply wouldn't exist in this setting.
  • You also need to consider that even if a species has a longer lifespan, like the Anyeli living for up to a thousand years, that doesn't necessarily mean they've been at a learning age for longer.
• Consider where your character has lived. If they've spent the better part of their life in a tiny village of healers, for instance, then they most likely only had access to one or two people able to teach them and then only the healing abilities. On the other hand, someone raised in a larger town or city would have their pick of tutors able to teach them a much wider array of skills.
• Few of the realms have a formal education system, relying instead on apprenticeships and sometimes home education. Many of the races pass on knowledge first-hand rather than writing things down, so learning is a much more personal and subjective issue. The result is that most Elysians learn only what they need to know and what their mentor is willing to teach them!
• The cost of apprenticeships can be quite high unless the student lives with their mentor. The relationship is such that the apprentice essentially becomes a slave or cheap labour in exchange for their desired knowledge. This is more true for craft skills than it is for the racial abilities listed below, but something to consider nonetheless.
• Many of the skills listed below also require a practical education rather than theoretical (for instance, Therians really need to see an animal in action before they can taken on that form?, and for those animals which are too dangerous to study first-hand they usually learn by watching another Therian who has already mastered that shape).
• There are few books in Elysia? so learning for the sake of learning is uncommon (though the invention of the CORWW a few decades ago has made some information more readily available).

How to Upgrade Skills

1. Choose a skill you want to upgrade.
2. Check its availability for that character and that you have enough posts (or xanthai if you're purchasing via Packs?) to pay for the upgrade.
3. Post the appropriate form in the Upgrade Applications thread. (Note: If you are choosing skills for a new character during the application process, you need to list them in your application template rather than posting in the Upgrade thread. In this case, you can ignore the next step because the admins will approve your character's skills as part of the review process.)
4. An administrator will let you know when they've edited the Skills Section of your character's profile. Once your character's profile has been updated, you can start using the new upgrades in your roleplays (but only in threads that start after the upgrade is confirmed).

Skills & Weaknesses

By Race

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