Gaining Skills
Alliance is literally a fantasy game. It is a compilation of rules and policies by which we allow people to simulate doing things that they cannot really do. This means that your character’s skill may be far greater or far less than your own real life skills.
For instance, you must have the One Handed Edged weapon skill before you are allowed to use a sword. If you do not have this skill, then you cannot even use the sword to block blows. This skill represents an ability that your character has spent hours of practice a day for months to gain. When such an individual is faced with a person totally unskilled in weapon use, they would easily strike the person down.
Similarly, the Weapon Proficiency skill—which grants a permanent bonus in damage with every swing of a weapon—represents a level of skill that the player might never obtain. We use it as a way to artificially give a character an advantage over another character not as skilled, regardless of the player’s skill with the weapon.
Personal skills still come into play, of course—if you just stand there holding your weapon, you are going to lose every battle. Even if you buy the skill allowing you attempt to disarm a trap, you still have to disarm the trap. And having powerful spells does you no good if you can’t hit your target with your throws. Still, the purpose of our game is to be all that you can’t be by buying skills for your character.
You purchase these skills with Experience Points (“XP”) to help enhance your character. As you gain Experience Points, you can then buy more skills. Each skill allows you to perform a particular task or group of tasks. Many can only be used a limited number of times per day. Some skills allow you to improve your abilities when the skill is bought multiple times.
Many skills can’t be purchased until certain prerequisites are met. Sometimes these prerequisites are per purchase—for example, you can purchase the Improved Channeling skill once for every 20 ranks of Channeling. Similarly, you can only purchase the Dodge skill for every 30 XP your character has spent in the Stealth Skills category.
Other prerequisites need only be met once. For example, you can purchase Critical Attack as often as you want once you have a Weapon Skill. Similarly, you can purchase High Magic for your Primary School as many times as you like once you’ve spent 75 XP in Scholarly Skills.
Both types of prerequisites are outlined in the Skills chart, which lists all skills along with their prerequisites and their XP cost for each class.
In any case where a skill can be used only a certain number of times per day (such as a Slay or spells), you must keep track of your skill uses until the next Logistics Period starts. This is accomplished using Battle Boards, as described in the Logistics section of the Player’s Guide.
On a full weekend event, the “day” runs 24 hours from when the game starts (approximately) and so the time you reset your daily skills is usually at 6 p.m. This is known as the start of the game day. On a Game Day one-day event, the start and stop times for the game constitute the entire game day.