Scars of War Dev Blog Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 877
Basically, in SoW, there are two types of skills, Active and Knowledge. Active skills are a measure of how well you can perform some activity, whereas Knowledge skills measure how much you know on a certain topic. An example of an Active skill is Stealth whereas an example of a Knowledge skill is Ancient History(Talurian Empire). Now, in real life everything you do contains elements of knowledge and skill but, for simplicities sake, I divide skills into these two sets. For example, Herbalism is a Knowledge skill, because it is primarily about knowing what herbs are what, even though there might be elements of skill to how you mix the herbs. Likewise, Healing (non-magical doctoring) is a Knowledge skill; I'm sure that practicing your bandaging technique is useful but most of the benefit is gained by knowing the human body and it's ailments.
The way that you gain these two skills is somewhat different. During the game you spend experience on Active skills to improve them, however you cannot do likewise for Knowledge skills. You can only increase them by finding a source of knowledge and learning it, whether a teacher, book or some other method. The rationale is that experience represents your gain from practice. You practice swinging a sword, you get better at it. But you don't get new knowledge just by repeating old knowledge. No matter how many times you write essays on the American Civil War, you aren't suddenly going to gain knowledge on the Napoleonic Wars out of the ether. So you can't choose to increase Knowledge yourself via XP, you must learn it in game.
