Athletics (sage study)
A collection of activities that improve a character's specific athletic proficiencies (in virtually any activity). These must be treated as individual skills that demand much physical conditioning of the body, concentrating upon specific forms of concentration, flexibility, precision, power, speed, endurance, balance, awareness and timing.
Knowledge points accumulated by the character are assigned to a specific athletic activity, listed below. These then determine the character's ability at that pursuit. As ever, Amateur ability is gained once the character has accumulated 10 knowledge points. Unlike other sage abilities, however, there are two levels below amateur that apply.
Untrained is the lowest of these two levels. This refers to any individual's ability to perform. Most people can run, jump or throw, for example, so that untrained describes the baseline ability in these activities. No knowledge points are required to perform any of these activities as an untrained character.
Talented is a level above untrained yet less than Amateur (which should be thought in terms of trained enough to compete in the activity). Talented persons have accumulated 5 knowledge points in a given activity.
The specific limitations of these two levels, along with Amateur and levels above amateur, are included within the description of each activity, as linked below. Note that characters may 'share around' knowledge points gained at any level to different activities as they prefer.
- Cliff Diving
- Kayaking
- Martial Arts
- Running
- Sailing
- Scrambling
- Skating
- Skiing
- Surfing
- Swimming
- Throwing
Details to be added on these activities as needed for game purposes (I simply don't want to spend hours working on these until characters actually want to be proficient in these activities).
Note that many of the abilities described above are limited or do not include special benefits from achieving the 'expert' or 'sage' level of expertise. This is simply because at higher levels of achievement, benefits accrue largely from nuance of existing knowledge rather then whole new abilities.
Please also note that characters with a constitution of less than 10 or a strength of less than 8 cannot gain knowledge points in Athletics.
The accumulation of knowledge points for various activities to promote proficiency should not be compared with modern training techniques allowing Olympic-style development. It should be remember that this is a game and that no ability should - in a game - be accumulated without risk and as a deliberate reward for action. I've no interest in enabling persons to accumulate a game ability through means that do not relate to the game mechanics of my world (experience gained for risk/achievement).
See Also,
