About Abilities
In the tabs here you can find all abilities available on Penwick, organised by Tier. A lower tier ability is cheaper but less potent than a higher tier ability. Abilities are purchased using Advancement Tokens, which you can read more about here.
Abilities are organized by tier, going from Tier 1 (cheap and fairly mundane) to Tier 4 (expensive and character-defining). Unlike spells, there are no Tier 0 abilities.
Each ability requires a certain amount of AT (Advancement Tokens) to purchase. Since AT is also used to purchase spells on your character, you will have to make a careful decision between buying spells and buying abilities.
Some abilities may have special requirements or prerequisites, such as being bound to a particular Origin. You may choose to give your character advanced Abilities early on if you believe this would suit them. However, due to their high cost, you will be left with fewer Advancement Tokens to spend elsewhere, so choose carefully!
Abilities at a certain Tier have a fixed price in Advancement Tokens. These prices are:
- Tier 1 Ability: 25 AT.
- Tier 2 Ability: 50 AT.
- Tier 3 Ability: 100 AT.
- Tier 4 Ability: 200 AT.
This pricing scheme also applies to Origin (Special Race) abilities. Story Tier abilities, which are temporary abilities for a specific moderated scenario, are often free or refundable after use.
Triggers
Triggers specify the conditions under which abilities can be used.
Moderated only. This ability may only be used in moderated scenarios, like a moderated adventure. Official sport games also count as moderated threads.
Once-per-thread. An ability which is marked as once-per-thread is an ability which may only be used one time within a thread. "Thread" here is interchangeable with story or adventure. Sometimes a thread may consist of more than one topic, like a when a group splits up and an adventure continues in two separate new topics. In those cases, the whole adventure is considered a single thread and so the ability can only be used one time during that entire story.
Auto-activates. An ability which auto-activates is an ability that is always on. This means you do not have to state in your post that you are using the ability, because it is "on" by default. You do have to state it if you are turning this ability "off" however.
Manually Activated. These are abilities which you must declare when you use them. Declaring the use of an ability is done by adding an out-of-character remark (such as in a spoiler) at the start or end of your post. You may only activate one ability at a time per post/round in a thread. So while you may have a whole suite of abilities on your character that you can activate, you cannot activate them all at the same time.
Cap-breaking. An ability which is marked as cap-breaking will allow the ability's effect(s) to break the cap on the Aptitude(s) to which it applies. For example: first-year Penwick students have an aptitude cap of 8. If a first-year has an ability with cap-breaking on it, the bonus that the ability provides would allow them to raise their aptitude beyond their cap of 8. Cap-breaking abilities cannot raise any Aptitude beyond the hard limit of 16.
Stacks # times. This means the ability can be taken # many times. Often this means that the ability becomes more potent when taken more than once.