The second part of this series covers the skill system and its design. When we first set out to build Athiria, we knew that one of the crucial elements of the game would be how the skill system worked. A consistent, logical and relatively simple design was required in order to keep the complexities of things designed on top of the skill system from getting out of hand. Our first design decision was to make sure that every skill test and resistance test was based upon the same process. This gave rise to our resisted skill testing system. A resisted skill testing system is one in which your character rolls a skill and counts successes against some target number to determine a degree of success. Whatever your character is trying to do determines how that success is resisted and a similar skill roll is made to offset your character's degree of success. The resisting skill roll can come from another character, the environment, or even the ethereal plane. The only other rule is that situational/conditional modifiers can alter the target numbers used in generating the degree of success or the success of the resistance roll.