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Aptitude Skills

These three skills describe a character's propensity in three directions: Mental, Physical, and Social abilities. Think of them as stats, but also keep in mind they encompass a range of general skills that someone could have a knack for, given the Aptitude. Like stats in a pen-and-paper dice game, Aptitude Skills encompass what your character is naturally good at or has talent in more than what they have studied and applied themselves to (skills one has studied for are Focus Skills).

These are broad, umbrella categories that cover a variety of skills or qualities, and like in real life, these attributes can be improved through effort and training. Progress affects an open array of various skills that could fall under these three categories. Progress is made through narrative, and cannot be solely advanced through solos. Collaborative writing is required in order to grow in any skill, even Aptitudes.

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Focus Skills

These skills require a character to choose a focus in a particular field or subject in order to progress. They are limited by race and status—a wick cannot without very special permission learn galdori spells and a passive cannot begin with a Professional (Politician) focus skill. These categories still glaze over a range of skills for both Combat and Professional and somewhat also in Magic, but the character is focusing on an area, like Combat (Gunplay) or Magic (Type). Because of the narrative focus of Thorns, it is highly likely that no two players with the same types of Focus Skills will write or play their characters the same.

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Linguistics Skill

The Linguistics Skill is also a Secondary type of Focus Skill, but is managed a little differently than Combat, Magic, and Professional Focus Skills, so please check out that guide separately below.

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Spell Writing Skill

The special Focus Skill of Spell Writing is a highly specialized skill with different progression requirements than any other Focus Skill, so please check out that guide separately below.

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Making Progress

Although Thorns is not a mechanics-focused game, players are able to progress their characters' skills and show narrative development through the use of Progress Requests. Skills can be advanced once per season, and this is done through the submission of a Thread Review Request Form, as found on the forum.

The threads necessary to advance all skills are additive, meaning the 4 threads needed to move from Poor to Average in an Aptitude Skill cannot be used ever again in a Progress Request to count toward the 6 threads needed to move any other Aptitude Skill (even the same one) from Average to Good or Good to Expert, etc. Each stage of advancement requires a new collection of threads to validate progression in that Skill. You can, however, use the same thread in a review request to advance more than one skill, meaning you can use a single thread toward the advancement requirement totals for both an Aptitude Skill (or multiple Aptitudes) and a Focus Skill (or multiple Focus Skills) at the same time, depending on the depth of character development contained within a single thread.

Basically, you cannot "recycle" threads that have been used in a past review request already. If a thread has been used in a review request for advancement regardless of whether its Focus, Aptitude or Linguistic, it’s classed as “spent”. (i.e. if you used a thread to count towards the upgrade from Poor to Average in a review request, it cannot be used again in any future review requests.)

We ask that you as a player use your best judgment and know that we will also be using ours when weighing the value of a thread toward skill advancements.