Skills

Skills are a character's secondary stats define how good the player is at various groups of tasks. Like attributes, they can be assigned points by the player for each level. Unlike attributes however, their full values are also influenced by the player's attributes.

In Arx Fatalis the player has nine different skills:

Name	Alias	Minimum
Stealth		12
Technical	Mecanism	12
Intuition		12
Ethereal link		12
Object knowledge		15
Casting		12
Close combat		18
Projectile		18
Defense		18

Skill points do not have a minimum themselves but there is an effective minimum of 12 to 18 due to skill bonuses received from starting 6 points in each [Attributes#attribute] according to the table in the next section.

The player receives 18 skill points for level 1 during character creation and then another 15 skill points for each additional level for a total of 168 skill points that can be freely assigned.

The raw skill values without any modifiers are known as raw_<skill>.

Attribute-based Skill modifications

The following table lists multipliers for attributes to get the contribution to skill points.

Skill	Str	Men	Dex	Con	∑
Stealth			2		2
Technical		1	1		2
Intuition		2			2
Ethereal link		2			2
Object knowledge	0.5	1.5	0.5		2.5
Casting		2			2
Close combat	2		1		3
Projectile	1		2		3
Defense				3	3
∑	3.5	8.5	6.5	3	21.5

These factors are known as mod(<skill>, <attribute>)

Based on them we define for all skills:

base_<skill>     = raw_<skill> + ∑<attribute>[ raw_<attribute> * mod(<skill>, <attribute>) ]
fullbase_<skill> = raw_<skill> + ∑<attribute>[ full_<attribute> * mod(<skill>, <attribute>) ]

Arx Fatalis 1.21 and Arx Libertatis 1.0.2 and earlier have a bug causing the fullbase_<skill> values for the Object knowledge and Projectile skills to be calculated as (ie: not including attribute modifiers from items and spells):

fullbase_object_knowledge = base_object_knowledge
fullbase_projectile       = base_projectile

This is fixed in Arx Libertatis 1.0.3.

Absolute Item-based Skill modifications

Equipped items can add or remove skill points:

modabs_<skill> = ∑<item>[ modabs(<item>, <skill>) ]

Relative Item-based Skill modifications

Alternatively, equipped items can also add or remove a percentage of the skill points:

modrel(<item>, <skill>) = modpercent(<item>, <skill>) / 100
modrel_<skill> = ∑<item>[ modrel(<item>, <skill>) ] * ( fullbase_<skill> + modabs_<skill> )

Full Skills

full_<skill> = fullbase_<skill> + modabs_<skill> + modrel_<skill> + cheats

These are the numbers shown in the player book.