A character will build specific skills and abilities over time. The nature of a character’s training and experience will depend heavily on a game’s setting, but in any setting players will use the path to develop their character by turning experience into training.
Training
In the Augur’s Path, training operates as a character’s permanent adjustment to an action of a specified type. Any action will be modified by a character’s bonus or penalty in the source attribute connected to that action. Training should further modify an action by offering the character an additional bonus that represents their practice with that task. Established compendiums will outline repeatable and regular actions, with the opportunity for each action to be trained up to a maximum bonus of +8.
As an example, a setting might offer a character skill called “Pick Lock.” The compendium determines that the source attribute of the skill is ACC, so the player making the action “Pick Lock (ACC)” would make an action roll with [3d6] and add the character’s ACC bonus or penalty to the sum of the action role as outlined in the path core. Training would offer an additional bonus to modify the action test.
Players will keep track of a character’s training values on the character sheet. According to the path, all players have the discretion to train any of a character’s repeatable actions–both those outlined in the setting and any that the player might create or customize for their character. But the maximum for any training value must be +8. Players use character experience to add training to the character.
Experience
As characters pursue their adventures, they will accumulate experience points along with other members of their collective. Characters are not ranked according to a level; rather they improve and advance over time by earning experience points that are then allocated to training. There are two ways characters can earn experience points: party experience—earned together as a collective and divided among the group—and individual experience—earned when a character acts on their motivations or confronts their obstacles.
At the end of every game session, the players and the narrator should reserve about five minutes of time to talk through the experience earned for that session. First, the narrator will use their compendium to calculate the total party experience points. This will be a step-by-step process for the narrator to total all the situational experience of the party, and then divide that total by the number of characters in the party (represented by the players present), with a minimum result of 1. That result will be your party experience for that session. Then, each player will take a turn and discuss whether their character acted on a motivation or confronted an obstacle. When the group all agrees a character acted on a motivation, that character earns +2 individual experience points. When the group agrees the character confronted an obstacle, that character earns +3 individual experience points.
Not every session will yield individual experience, but each session will offer at least 1 party experience point to each participating character in the collective.
The game’s compendium will outline training and advancements available to characters, including the experience point costs associated with them. A narrator may also establish specific experience costs for the collective.