Nobody hands out experience points on this grid. There are no level-up screens, no quest turn-ins, no skill trainers selling shortcuts. You become what you do. Drive and you become a driver. Shoot and you become a shooter. Sneak and the cameras start losing you. Every governed action in the city quietly rolls a chance to make you better at exactly that thing, one tenth of a point at a time.
Open your sheet in game with F6 (the Skill Matrix panel) or through the Neural Link (F1, SKILLS tab). Both show every skill, your milestone bands, and your lock controls.
Your character can hold 700 total skill points, across more than sixty skills that each cap at 100. Do the math: mastering just seven skills fills your entire capacity. You cannot be the best decker AND the best surgeon AND the best wheelman. Nobody can. Every operative on this grid is defined as much by what they left behind as by what they mastered.
The cap breathes. The fuller your 700 pool, the slower every gain gets. A fresh character learns fast; a near-capped veteran crawls. When you hit 700 exactly, gains stop entirely unless you set a skill to DRAIN: then each new tick you earn pulls a tenth of a point out of the draining skill to make room. Your character sheet becomes a living budget, not a wall.
Your starting class grants 120 points across 4 skills on creation, and yes, those count against your 700 from day one.
Every relevant action triggers a hidden gain check. Pass it and the skill ticks up 0.1. The rules that govern that check:
Hard actions teach more than easy ones. Landing shots at long range grows your firearms faster than point-blank work. Driving fast teaches more than crawling through traffic. The closer an action sits to the edge of your ability, the more it gives back.
A skill at 10 climbs fast. A skill at 90 fights you for every tenth. Going from 0 to 100 takes roughly a thousand successful checks, and the last hundred are the slow ones. Below 10, every attempt gains: the first steps always come easy.
Repeating the same action in the same spot teaches you nothing for a short window. Parking in one place and macroing the same move is a waste of your night. Move, vary the work, take different jobs: that is what the engine rewards.
Whole points whisper past in the corner of your HUD. Milestones announce themselves properly, because they change what you can do.
Every skill crosses the same four thresholds, and each one changes how the game actually feels in your hands, not just a number:
| Band | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| NOVICE | 0 to 25 | You are a liability. Weapons sway and fumble, vehicles fight you, machines refuse you. |
| STREET | 26 to 50 | Functional. Rough edges, no perks, but you get the job done. |
| EXPERIENCED | 51 to 75 | Clean, stock performance. The game behaves exactly as intended. Heavier gear unlocks. |
| EXPERT | 76 to 99 | Beyond stock. Tighter, faster, stronger than the city baseline. Top-shelf access. |
| MASTER | 100 | The ceiling. Perfect control, everything unlocked, and your name starts meaning something. |
Next to every skill in your panel sits a lock control. Click it to cycle:
| State | Behavior |
|---|---|
| ▲ RAISE | Normal. The skill gains when you use it. |
| ▼ DRAIN | The skill never gains, and once you are at the 700 cap it bleeds points back into your pool as other skills grow. This is how you reinvent yourself. |
| ● LOCKED | Frozen. Never gains, never drains. Protect what you have mastered. |
At the cap, plan your drains. At exactly 700 points, a gain only lands if some skill of yours is set to DRAIN and has points to give. No drain set means no growth, no matter how hard you work.
Three skills sit outside the 700 entirely: Strength, Stamina, and Lung Capacity. They cost nothing, they cannot be locked or drained, and they train exactly like the base game intends, because they ARE the base game's own stats. Your body is free. Your craft is what costs.
| Skill | How to train it | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Strength | Land melee hits. Every connected punch, blade or bat builds it. | Harder melee, the body the city respects. |
| Stamina | Sprint and swim. Distance covered at pace is what counts. | Longer sprints before you gas out. |
| Lung Capacity | Stay underwater. Sustained dives build it. | Longer dives before the burn. |
And the engine feels the rest of you too. Your trained skills feed the city's native systems: your Ground Vehicles skill drives the game's own driving feel, Air Vehicles your flying, Stealth your noise, and your best firearm discipline your gun handling. The character sheet is not a menu. It is your body and hands.
Six firearm disciplines (Handguns, SMGs, Rifles, Shotguns, Snipers, Heavy), Explosives, three melee lines (Unarmed, Bladed, Blunt), Cyberware Combat, Tactics, and Armor Use.
Firearms grow on real hits. Connect with a target and the matching discipline rolls a gain; the longer the range, the faster the growth. Spraying at the sky teaches nothing. Each weapon class is its own discipline: a master pistolero picks up a rifle like a novice.
Melee grows the same way: landed hits with fists, blades, or blunt iron train their own lines (and build free Strength on the side). Explosives grow from connecting with thrown ordnance. Tactics builds from taking cover while armed in live situations. Armor Use trains when you take hits while wearing armor: getting shot at is, regrettably, educational.
A NOVICE shooter sways, kicks, and occasionally fumbles a reload mid-fight. A STREET shooter is steady enough. At EXPERIENCED the weapon behaves exactly stock. EXPERT hands hit harder with less kick, and a MASTER is surgical. Cyberware Combat governs chrome weaponry (retractable blades, shock systems) and matters once the ripperdoc economy opens.
One skill per domain: Ground Vehicles, Air Vehicles, Sea Vehicles. Each one governs access, handling feel, and growth for everything in its domain. You train them by driving, flying, and sailing: speed and challenge accelerate the growth, idling in a parking lot does not.
| Band | Ground access | Air access | Sea access |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOVICE | Basic cars, vans, bicycles | Nothing flies | Jetski only |
| STREET | + Motorcycles, SUVs, coupes, offroad | + Planes | + Boats |
| EXPERIENCED | + Heavy iron: industrial, commercial, emergency | + Helicopters | All surface vessels |
| EXPERT | + Muscle, sports, supers | Everything airborne | All surface vessels |
| MASTER | + Military grade | Everything airborne | + Submarine |
Below 51 the machine fights you: loose traction, soft brakes, sluggish response. At 51 it snaps to stock. Above 76 it feels like somebody upgraded the engine and brakes while you slept, and at 100 the machine performs at its absolute ceiling. Try to take a seat above your band and you will be stepped right back out of it.
Hacking, ICE Breaking, Electronic Warfare, Trace Analysis, Counter Trace, Cryptography, Electronics Repair, Electronics Fabrication, Neural Interface, Systems Access, and Grid Surge.
The decker's toolkit. These skills are live in the engine now and they grow the same way everything does: by doing the work. The terminals, ICE, camera networks and grid nodes they govern come online with the city's net systems; when a target appears in the world, the skill that cracks it is already on your sheet. Deck hardware will gate the highest tiers: gear amplifies skill, it never replaces it.
First Aid, Trauma Surgery, Neural Medicine, Cyberware Installation, Cyberware Removal, Cyberware Diagnostics, Psychological Treatment, Medical Crafting, Pharmacology, and Drug Administration.
First Aid trains today: every bandage you actually use teaches your hands. The deeper disciplines (surgery, neural trauma work, chrome installation) come online with the medical and ripperdoc systems, and they will matter enormously: a hot-jacked decker can only be stabilized by someone who put the points in. Street docs are made, not hired.
Cooking, Brewing, Chemistry, Ammunition Crafting, Gunsmithing, Explosives Crafting, Forgery, Lockpicking, Safecracking, Demolitions, Fabrication, and Mechanics.
Lockpicking trains today: every pick you work teaches you, and better tools are skill-gated (advanced picks demand Lockpicking 25). The production lines (ammo presses, gun benches, chem labs, kitchens) train their skills as those benches come online across the city, and recipes will gate by skill: the engine already enforces it. Mechanics governs repair and modification of vehicles, separate from driving them.
Stealth, Pickpocketing, Surveillance, Counter Surveillance, Disguise, Security Bypass, Parkour, and Low Light Operations.
Three train today: Stealth grows from actually moving unseen: sneak for distance, in new places. Parkour grows from climbing and vaulting through the city. Low Light Operations sharpens when you do your sneaking between 22:00 and 05:00: night work makes night workers. The rest wire into the camera grid, disguise and security systems as those come online. Your Stealth skill already feeds the game's native noise profile.
Kindred Disciplines, Garou Gifts, Arcane Arts, Hunter Tactics, Willpower, Arcane Detection. Staff approval only. Unapproved characters cannot see this category, cannot train it, and gain nothing from trying. If you know, you know. If you do not, you are safer that way. See the Supernatural archives and the Masquerade.
At character creation you choose a background. It is a head start, never a lock: any class can grow any skill afterward. Each grants 120 points across 4 skills:
| Class | Starting skills |
|---|---|
| Street Rat | Stealth 30, Lockpicking 30, Handguns 30, Ground Vehicles 30 |
| Netrunner | Hacking 30, ICE Breaking 30, Electronics Repair 30, Neural Interface 30 |
| Wheelman | Ground Vehicles 50, Mechanics 30, Lockpicking 20, Handguns 20 |
| Combat Veteran | Rifles 30, Tactics 30, Unarmed Combat 30, Armor Use 30 |
| Corporate Drone | Systems Access 30, Cryptography 30, Handguns 30, Ground Vehicles 30 |
| Street Doc | First Aid 30, Trauma Surgery 30, Pharmacology 30, Cyberware Diagnostics 30 |
| Fixer | Fixer 30, Surveillance 30, Counter Surveillance 30, Forgery 30 |
| Ghost | Stealth 40, Disguise 30, Counter Surveillance 30, Forgery 20 |
Fixer is the desk skill: it opens the FIXER OPS board on your Neural Link (any value above 0) and gates which NPC intel tiers you can claim and broker: petty work from 0, mid operations at 26, bank heists at 51, corporate contracts at 76. It trains the only way that matters: settle real jobs. Post crews, pay them, deliver for the client, and the desk skill climbs; the bigger the tier you settle, the faster it grows.
Skill is access; reputation is trust. Your fixer reputation (Unknown up to Legend) is a separate ledger built from outcomes: it is what corps read before awarding contracts and what crews read before throwing a hat in your ring. Crew payouts escrow from the fixer's account at posting, so the crew gets paid even when the job burns. That guarantee is the whole institution.
There are no social skills on this grid. Negotiation, persuasion, intimidation, etiquette, street knowledge: that is YOU, in your own words, at the table. No stat will ever talk for you. If you want to be the smoothest fixer in the city, be smooth: Fixer opens the boards, but the talking is all yours.