.: Help for progression

How your character gets better. There are no levels and no experience
points in Gaius. You improve the things you actually use.

━━━ The One Rule ━━━

Every time you use an attribute or a skill, you get one chance to
improve it. Not a little bit of progress toward a bar. A chance.

Most of those chances come to nothing. Some of them land, and when one
lands you see a banner naming what improved.

━━━ What Makes It Harder ━━━

The further something has already come, the rarer that chance becomes.

That is the whole difficulty curve. A skill you have barely touched
improves quickly and visibly. One you have pushed a long way improves
rarely, and keeps improving rarely rather than stopping outright. There
is no ceiling you slam into. There is no point where a thing can no
longer improve at all.

What does not matter:

  How many times you have done it. Swinging a sword ten thousand
  times does not make the next swing teach you less. Only how far the
  skill has come counts.

  Your equipment. Gear that raises an attribute does not make that
  attribute harder to train. Only what you have earned counts.

  How big or old your character is. A fresh attribute is cheap for
  everyone.

━━━ How To Improve Something Specific ━━━

Use it. That is genuinely the whole answer, but the useful version is
knowing what trains what:

  Strength      Hitting things in melee.
  Dexterity     Attacking, dodging and parrying. It fires constantly,
                so each chance is deliberately smaller.
  Perception    Foraging, searching, spotting what is hidden, aimed
                shots, and the crafts that need a careful eye.
  Vitality      Taking a solid hit, and recovering afterwards. A
                glancing blow you mostly turned aside will not do it.
  Willpower     Casting, and holding a spell together when you are
                struck.
  Charisma      Taunting, haggling, and manifestation.

Skills train from the obvious thing: fighting with a weapon trains
weapon-combat, brewing trains alchemy, studying a corpse trains
manifestation. See help skills for the full list.

━━━ Doing Something Exceptional ━━━

A critical success teaches you more than a routine one, and so does a
fumble. Failure is instructive. Being on the receiving end of either
teaches you something too, though less than causing it.

━━━ Where To See It ━━━

  status   your attributes, described in words
  skills   your skills and their tiers

Both describe where you are rather than printing raw numbers, which is
deliberate. The feel of a thing is what you play with.

━━━ A Note On Companions ━━━

Creatures bound to you improve the same way you do, within limits. A
companion that has already come a very long way may have stopped
improving. It keeps everything it has earned. See help companion.

See also: help skills, help status, help combat, help companion