The World
Skills & Spells
You get better at what you do, not at what you buy. Skills improve by being used, and failing at something still teaches you about it.
Improvement comes from use
Every skill and spell carries a rank. Using it can raise that rank, and failing can raise it too - the attempt is what teaches, not the outcome. The way to get good with a blade is to swing it, badly, until you do not.
Practice takes you part of the way. There is a ceiling on what practice alone can reach, and the last stretch to mastery is earned in the field.
Your class decides what you are built to do
A class is a shape rather than a schedule: its dice, its starting pools, the attributes it leans on and the weapon it leaves with. A Warrior carries the biggest chest in the realms and the reserves to swing with; an Arcanist trades both for the only magic there is; a Monk arrives with no weapon at all, because the open hand is one.
No class hands you an ability at a level. Everything is earned by doing it — which is what the three tiers above describe — so two characters of the same class diverge by what they spent their fights on rather than by what a ladder gave them.
Skills re-sync against your class every time you log in, so a class that gains something new reaches characters that already exist rather than only new ones.
Weapon rank is separate
Long blades, short blades, blunt weapons, hammers, staves, axes, thrown weapons, bows and your bare hands each have their own rank. Your class starts you off skilled in the weapon it prefers; picking up anything else means learning it the hard way.
Casting is instant, and it costs
There is no cast bar and no interruption window. A spell fires when you type it, spends its mana, and then imposes a delay before you can act again - so a "slow" spell is one that leaves you standing there afterwards. Running out of mana mid-fight is a mage's real death sentence, not a slider to manage.
Anything can be scripted
Skills and spells can carry Lua for custom formulas and effects, which is also how quests, NPC behaviour and room events are written. It means an ability can do something genuinely specific rather than being another damage number with a different name.