System: Improvement

One of the derived statistics you determined during character generation is your number of foci. Foci determine which skills a player may improve in rank.

How do you learn?
Players must decide at the beginning of a character's career: does my character learn by success, or by failure? It must be one of the other, and the choice will apply over the life of the character.

How foci work
Playing here on GP, players assign each focus to a skill at the beginning of a sequence (in the tabletop version, you'd do it at the start of each session). If you attempt to use the skill and succeed/fail (depending on how your character learns) during that sequence, you get 1 roll to improve that skill.

But you do not need to use that roll then. You can save it. If you do save it and keep your focus in that skill for the next sequence, the next time you use the skill and succeed/fail, you will get 2 more rolls to improve that skill. If you continue for a third sequence, you get 3 additional rolls to improve that skill. Basically, the rolls accumulate as long as you keep a focus in a skill that you keep using.

If you reassign a focus from one skill to another, you must roll to improve the first skill with whatever rolls your character has accumulated.

Attempting to improve a skill
When you have 1 or more rolls accumulated for improving a particular skill at the end of a sequence, you may attempt to improve that skill before the next sequence begins. Once you declare that you are attempting to improve that skill, each roll that you have accumulated allows you to roll 1d20 against the applicable characteristic for that skill. When you roll, you are trying to roll equal or under that characteristic, but the level that you have in that skill already adds a modifier to the roll. If you are Experienced, add 5 to the roll. If you are Seasoned, add 10 to the roll.

If you succeed on any of the rolls for that attempt, it increases by 1 rank, and all the rolls for that skill are expended. No matter how many rolls you have accumulated for that skill, a skill may only increase 1 rank per attempt.

This means that you have a decision after each sequence: save up more rolls (increased chance of improvement in that one skill, but may "waste" rolls) or roll right away (decreased chance of improvement, but may select another skill for the next sequence).

Improving characteristics
If, when you increase a skill, your level increases in that skill (if you go from Familiar to Experienced, for instance), your associated characteristic increases by 1 as well. Different skills map to different characteristics, for the purposes of increasing the characteristics when the skills increase in level. Some characteristics do not map to any skills, and so cannot be improved by such means.

The following skills can increase by improving the level of skills: STRENGTH, SOCIAL, COLOR, AIM, LEARN, EDUCATION, and AGILITY.

- Interaction skills improve SOCIAL
- Dysha and moon skills improve COLOR
- athletic and melee combat skills improve either AGILITY or STRENGTH
- ranged combat skills improve AIM
- common/practical knowledge skills improve EDUCATION
- languages, sciences, and other skills improve LEARN

Gythaar learns by success. At present, his foci are: Sword, Tracking, Tail, & Earth-Tec. In the fight against the dichandra he succeeded at Sword once. So now I attempt to improve Sword by rolling 1d20 against STR 16.

Am I aiming to roll over or under? Is it ok to be making this roll here or should I do it in the game thread?

I think I might reassign foci. Can I do that now?

For my personal tracking of Gythaar's progress.

Prologue:
Sword: 16/S
Tracking: 12/E
Tail: 6/F
Earth-Tec: 6/F

Improvement Rolls
Improving Sword? (vs STR 16) - (1d20) ( 5 ) = 5 (success!)

Sequence 1
Tail: 6/F
Search: 6/F
Contacts: 6/F
Traveler: 6/F

Improvement Rolls
1 roll saved for Traveler

Sequence 1.2
Traveler: 6/F
Geography: 12/E
Search: 6/F
Lightning Blast Dysha : 6/F

Improvement Rolls
1 roll saved for Traveler

Got a couple questions:
Do we take these rolls immediately after making our check, or at the end of a sequence?
Do we get the improvement roll if we auto-succeed on a check based on our skill level and don't have to roll?

Good questions.

For the first question: I realize that I was thinking that the rolls would be granted at the end of a sequence, but I see that I didn't write it that way in my original post. I am amending it to reflect my idea more explicitly: you can gain a roll to improve a given skill by succeeding/failing in that skill (depending on how your character learns) at least once in that sequence. You can then spend all the accumulated rolls for a skill to attempt to improve that skill at the end of any sequence.

For the second question: yes, if your character learns by success, any success (whether it's a roll or an automatic success based on your level) counts.

Sequence 1.2 Foci:

Getting Around: 6/F
Current Events: 8/F
History: 12/E
Contacts: 6/F
Traveler: 6/F

Not one single roll from the last sequence. Oh well :)

Sequence 1.2 Foci:

Current Events: 6 (F)
Geography: 12 (E)
Gaming: 10 (F)
Underground Information: 4 (F)

Sequence 1.2 Foci, Miniri

Geography: 9 (F)
Flora Recognition: 14 (E)
Quarterstaff: 13 (E)
Dysha:Lightning Blast: 9 (F)

Vordenir has 3 foci to spend on this next round: they are

Two-handed Sword: 13 (?)
Tackle: 10 (?)
Talmaron handling/riding: 4 (F)

How does one determine what level of experience one has with certain abilities? i.e., how does one know whether one is experienced or expert in the use of a sword?
Thanks!

The information is there, but it's a lot of information across several threads.

First of all, I should have told you what levels you got with your occupation as part of character generation. After that, you use the chart in the Skills section to determine what levels you have as you gain ranks in the skills (both through the rest of character generation and skill improvement in the game).

But here's a summary:
There are four levels of skills: Unfamiliar, Familiar, Experienced, Seasoned.

The difficulty of the skill determines what ranks (numerical value) you need for a particular level.

There are five difficulties of skills; each skill in the skills list now shows what the difficulty of that skill is. The five difficulties are:
Melee
Easy
Moderate
Hard
Very Hard

Melee skill levels are: Unfamiliar: 4, Familiar: 10, Experienced: 13, Seasoned: 16
Easy skill levels are: Unfamiliar: 1, Familiar: 6, Experienced: 12, Seasoned: 18
Moderate skill levels are: Unfamiliar: 0, Familiar: 5, Experienced: 10, Seasoned: 15
Hard skill levels are: Unfamiliar: 0, Familiar: 4, Experienced: 8, Seasoned: 12
Very hard skill levels are: Unfamiliar: 0, Familiar: 3, Experienced: 6, Seasoned: 9

So, for example: someone with a sword skill, which is melee, with a rank of 12 would be Familiar with the sword. A one-point increase in that sword skill would bring the character to 13, which would mean that the character would then be Experienced with the sword.