Game Mechanic Types of Skills

Skills

All Skills are composed of Game Mechanic Types. Each Type describes the kind of Effect the skill applies to an Action, Action Type, Target, or Environment.
A Skill may have multiple Types; the total count is capped by the Skill’s Rarity Rank plus a Base Value of one. Evolved Skills raise the Base Value of a Skill's Game Mechanic Types by one per evolution. The Base Value of a Skill's Game Mechanic Type has a Qualitative improvement on the Effects it uses.

Game Mechanic Types

• Direct Effect — Immediate, one-resolution impact on an Action, Action Type, Environment, or Target (whether creature or object) with no persistence or special targeting/area rules (e.g., deal damage, heal, push/pull, move, create/destroy a simple object now).

• Sense Effect — Reveals, filters, or masks information (identify, inspect, detect, highlight, track, ping, mark for UI). Produces knowledge, not alteration.

• Alter Effect — Changes properties or resolution rules of actors or actions (convert damage/type, modify costs, tags, accuracy, resistances, immunities, caps, or calculations).

• Proc Effect — Defines conditional or scheduled firing logic for other effects (on-hit, on-crit, on-move, after X actions, random roll, sequence/chain).

• Extended Effect — Persists across Temporal Units; applies over time or while maintained (DoT/HoT, aura/channel, maintenance, lingering field).

• Area Effect — Specifies spatial coverage independent of payload (cone, line, burst, zone, hazard template, terrain overlay).

• State Effect — Applies, transforms, or clears statuses/flags on entities or systems (buff/debuff, cleanse/purge, silence/root, shield/ward, lock/unlock interactions, toggle dungeon/system flags).