Athletics (sage study)
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Athletics is a sage study encompassing a collection of lower rank physical aptitudes the character has chosen to collect through practice and effort. Each of these requires agility and conditioning of the body, applying the self to acquire sage abilities related to flexibility, precision, speed, power, endurance, balance, awareness and timing. The list of athletic forms include:
While technically each of these is a "sage ability," they are treated as individual pursuits under the general heading of "Athletics." As knowledge accumulates in a given athletic, the character's ability improves; thus, advancing from ability thorugh expertise, and thence achieving excellence.
Assigning Points
Unlike other sage studies, the character chooses which athletic skill to which knowledge points will be applied. Points can be applied singly to a single athletic, or varying to more than one. Most of these athletics can be done without any skill at all, though even a few points here and there can make a big difference. Any that has at least 10 points assigned to it becomes a "skilled" ability, with amateur-status. Authority, expert and sage status can be acquired by adding more and more points, as with any other sage study.
- For example, Samuel begins at 1st level with 12 pts. of knowledge and assigns them to himself as an "amateur" Runner. At 2nd level, he rolls the dice and finds he has three more pts. — he assigns them to Sailing. At 3rd level, he gets six points; he assigns 3 to sailing and 3 to Running. At 4th level, receiving ten points, he gives 4 to sailing, becoming an amateur, and 6 to Running, for a total of 21 points. If he'd given every point to Running, he'd have become an "authority." The process is deliberately sparse, so the character's forced to concentrate on two or three choices ... but with time and multiple levels, a real strength can be built in various directions.
It can be seen that Athletics represents many "sage studies" under a single rubric. Becoming a jack-of-all-trades is possible, but it's very hard to excel at more than one thing.
Skill Levels
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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.
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,
Fighter Sage Abilities
Ranger Sage Abilities
