Skill

A published folder of instructions in a standard's shape, which an agent loads when it needs it: one way of publishing a lesson, and a poor one.

The word names that object and nothing else. If you mean what someone is good at, the word is capability. If you mean their proven ability to do it when it counts, the word is capacity. Never use skill for the lesson itself.

The narrowing is load-bearing because the ordinary English word is loose enough to swallow three different things, and a language in which one word means three things cannot carry a rule. Holding the line lets a page say plainly that a person's capabilities can be listed, that a Player+ has capacity greater than either part alone, and that a lesson is a teaching act — all in one paragraph, without ambiguity.

It is also a judgment worth keeping: a skill is useful and standard, the way a book on throwing someone is useful, and it is not the same as a teacher who moves your arm. It is fixed and cannot answer back. A lesson can be corrected while you learn it; a skill cannot. So the deck publishes lessons, and a skill is one of the ways a lesson may be packaged for an agent to pick up when the moment calls for it.

A Player+ uses skills sparingly and on purpose: a folder taken on for a particular kind of session, carried into the agent's set-up when the person says so, with its own lineage and licence travelling with it. What a skill is for is convenience at the moment of use; what it is not for is standing in for learning, for character, or for a person's judgment.

Also called: agent skill Stands on: Lesson · Set-up · Agent Opens onto: Capability · Capacity · Module · The Kit · Lineage · License In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, Lexicon (the entry for skill), How an AI Agent Works, The Deck Standard · The DNA of Heaven, Part XII (lesson, module, journey, skill). Open: none found.