Growing Your Character
Increasing the power and level of your character is done in two ways - gaining
experience and training skills.
Experience comes in three forms. Quest experience is gained by solving the many quests which appear throughout the lands. In Sparkle, visit the Tower of Realms and view the Quest Orbs for each land to see how many quests remain unsolved and to get hints on where they may be found. Quest experience, once gained, is never taken away - not even by Death. Combat experience is gained by killing opponents in battle. General experience is gained by performing specialized tasks like thievery or herb collecting. Both general and combat experience are penalized by Death should you ever be slain. A concept called "Brutality" controls how much experience you receive in battle, and is measured by the ratio of quest experience to combat experience you maintain. Solving quests will help you earn experience faster, longer, in combat.
Guilds take a portion of the non-quest experience that you gain as tax for being a member of that guild. The more power a guild gives to you, the more tax is charged against your experience-earning potential. The general principle here is that because the power given you by a guild increases the speed at which you are able to defeat foes, it also must reduce the rate at which you earn experience from such battles.
Because Genesis does not use numbers to display information to players, the rate at which you gain experience can be known through your mortal level ("levels mortal") and using the "stats" command to see how much experience you have gained since logging in.
Skills are perhaps the most important factor for how powerful a player is in the game. Skills can be trained either in the many all-access Adventurer Guilds that can be found throughout the Realms, or in the specialized guilds that players may join.
Next chapter: WHAT TO STRIVE FOR
