Skilling Up

Rhizome is a classless and levelless system; you do not gain experience points for directly killing enemies or completing crafts, and you do not hit 'level' breakpoints that represent tiers of your character's abilities. Rather, every skill in Rhizome trains independently with use. When you use a skill in Rhizome, it has at least a chance to be 'exercised'. Higher levels of skill require more exercises to increment the skill level, making skill gain slow down as you progress to higher levels. Additionally, you can only exercise a skill if you are practicing it in circumstances that push your abilities.

Some examples of what determines the challenge difficulty for skilling up:

System            Difficulty is
combat            the opponent's lethality
gathering         the quality of what you gathered
crafting          the quality of what you made
repair            the quality you restored to
appraise          the item's value / 25
swim              how deep the water you swim in
climb             how high the climb/dangerous the fall
flee / pursuit    the other side's skill
eavesdrop         how hard the speech was to catch
stealth / hide    the other side's skill
track             the weight and the hide skill of the trackee

When you successfully exercise a skill, that skill goes on a cooldown. That cooldown is determined by the governing attributes of the skill: average cooldown at average in both stats is one hour. Exceptional in both stats reduces this to 40 minutes, allowing you to train faster in a shorter period of time. Skills trained while on cooldown will not exercise. The first gain in a skill in a 24 hour period will count for three times the normal amount, and subsequent skill gains will count less, down to a floor of half the normal amount.