Levelling Up Skills

IW uses a simple skills system where each character has a number of skills with scores from 0 (Incapable) to 5 (Exceptional). These skills are used to determine the outcome of the player's actions.

However, these skills are fixed, no matter the events of the story. A player can practice a skill as much as they like, or even undergo events that should improve it (for example, magically gaining knowledge in a fantasy game), but the skill value remains unchanged. This can cause incongruities in the story, as the player will typically still fail attempts to use skills and knowledge that they ought to have.

Currently, there is no way to edit skills, even with Storyteller mode, except through a trigger within the game. World creators may wish to consider triggers which improve skills, in order to allow characters to grow and develop.

It is also common to want to use some form of "experience" counter in order to track progression of a skill. A tracked item is ideal for this. Tell the tracked item to update whenever the player character uses or practices their skill, for example. Then, use trigger events to increase the skill value when the XP reaches a certain level.

This requires one tracked item and possibly several triggers per skill (it may be sufficient to use one trigger per skill which sets XP to 0 again too). It is possible to reduce the effort somewhat by having the AI manage all XP values in a single tracked item (or by using secretInfo). However, you will still need at least one trigger per skill.

Here is an example using secretInfo; the corresponding trigger event fires upon the writing of the "Increase" message:

Each turn, write at the end of secretInfo a list of my skills and my experience. The format should be one skill per line, with each skill followed by a number out of 100 which represents my experience with that skill.

Whenever I attempt an action for which one of my skills would be relevant, increase my experience with that skill slightly. A typical increase should be around 5 points, but increase the skill more for difficult challenges and less for easy ones. Increase my experience slightly more when I fail than when I succeed. Also increase this slightly when learning or practicing things relevant to the skill (for example, reading a magical tome may increase Magic experience by a few points, whereas socialising with others may increase Charisma experience by one or two). If my skill has a high value I will find more challenges easy so the increase should be less. Repeatedly attempting the same task over and over or practising in the same way should result in minimal increases, if any. Once my skill is 5, it cannot increase further, so do not increase the associated skill experience variable.

Whenever one of my skill experience variables is 100 or more, decrease it by 100. When you do, write at the end of secretInfo "Increase <skill>!", where <skill> is the relevant skill, and describe in the narrative how my skill level is growing.