Editing Unwritten: System Reference Document/Dramatic Time and Milestones (section)

====Balancing your skill set====

During character creation, you organized your skills into a pyramid. You don’t have to stick to that for character advancement.

However, there’s still a limitation you have to deal with: skill columns. This means you can’t have more skills at a certain rank than you have at the rank below it. So if you have three Good (+3) skill, you must have at least three Adequate (+1) skills and at least three Fair (+2) skills to support them.

The pyramid from character creation follows this rule already, but when you’re adding skills, you need to make sure you don’t violate this limitation. It’s easy to forget that if you use a skill point to upgrade one of your own skills, you might suddenly not have enough skills to “support” it at the new rank.

So, let’s say you have one Good (+3), two Fair (+2), and three Adequate (+1) skills. 

After a chapter, you want to upgrade a Fair (+2) skill to Good (+3). That’d give you two Good (+3), one Fair (+2), and three Adequate (+1). 

That doesn’t work. You’re now missing the second Fair skill you’d need to be square with the rules.

When this happens, you have one of two options. You can buy a new skill at the lowest possible rank—in this case, Adequate (+1)—and then upgrade it in subsequent chapters until you’re in a position to bump the skill you want to the appropriate level. Or you can “bank” the skill point, not spend it now, and wait until you’ve accumulated enough to buy a skill at whatever rank you need to support the move.

So in the case above, you could buy an Adequate (+1) skill, promote one of your Adequate skills to a Fair (+2), then bump the original skill up to Good (+3). That would take three significant or major milestones to do. Or, you could wait, bank up three skill points, buy a new skill at Fair (+2), then bump the original skill up to Good (+3). It just depends on whether you want to put new stuff on your sheet or not in the interim.