Skills

Skill Categories
All characters may have skills that provide bonuses in one of four fields:
 * Civil skills usually provide bonuses in the running of estates
 * Military skills usually provide bonuses in leading armies or units.
 * Naval skills usually provide bonuses onboard starships
 * Ecclesiastical skills usually provide bonuses in church matters, diplomacy and espionage.

Major or Minor Characters
Major characters may have any number of skills whilst minor characters may not learn more than one skill.

Acquiring Skills
Skills are obtained in one of the following ways:
 * Apprenticeships: Novices (14 year old children) may be put towards an apprenticeship as a squire, ward, lady-in-waiting or ensign and receive a skill at age 18.
 * Teaching: A character may teach another major character a rank of a skill provided he is an expert or better at the skill.
 * Self-Taught: A major character or a minor character with no skills may advance from no rank to rank one on the job by electing a skill to train. What skills can be trained are determined by the type of job (e.g. Civil skills as Steward, Naval skills as Lieutenant or Ecclesiastical skills as an Emissary).

Training Skills
Each adult, free character may choose one of his current skills that he is training over time. He may alternatively choose a skill he does not know as long as he is a major character or a minor character with no skills.

Each character gains 1 training point per chronum when training a skill. As long as the character is in the right role for the skill they will continue to train that skill. If they change roles they will stop training.

You may issue the Train order to resume training a particular skill.

The Teach order allows an Expert in a skill to teach another character at the same estate up to the Neophyte rank immediately, bypassing the initial training process.

Novice characters may also obtain a skill at Neophyte rank during an Apprenticeship

The amount of training points required to train another rank in that skill is determined by the type of skill involved:

Jobs for Training
The type of jobs for each service are listed below:

Academies
Some World Projects allow skill training outside of a job by any character on that world. These benefits are only available to characters in positions situated on that world.

Combat Experience
Characters who take part in Space Combat whilst training a naval skill will gain 1d4 training points towards that skill.

Characters who take part in Ground Combat whilst training a military skill will gain 1d4 training points towards that skill.

Using Skills
Skills are used automatically when a character does something which the skill offers some kind of benefit towards or when a character is in a role that checks for that type of skill. For example, the Repair skill is used whenever a character issues a Repair Hulls order whilst the Management skill is considered when running updates on an Estate at which the character is a Lord or Steward.

When two or more characters' skills apply to the same position only the highest ranked skill is used. For example, the Captain of a starship may have a Neophyte rank in Shooting and his Lieutenant is an Expert at it. The Lieutenant's skill is used in all space combat weapons shooting in preference to the Captain's.

Healing
Characters with the Medicine skill may try to heal characters who are injured, wounded or have an illness for 2 action points. The chance to do so is determined by rolling 1d10 on the following table, a roll of 1 being a fatal error causing death to the character: