Your character runs on the classic six: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. They set your combat math, your saves, and what your skills are built on.
Your starting numbers come from two places. Ability scores are set fairly at creation, and your race adds its bonuses on top. Your first trained skills, tools and languages come from your background and your class together.
Skills are the things you roll for out of a fight, and some in one: Athletics, Stealth, Perception, Persuasion, and the rest. Mortmain adds Swimming (built on Strength and Constitution), which matters everywhere there is deep water, and there is a lot of it.
At creation you pick a background that gives you starting skills, tools, and a hook into the world.
Professions are how you make things and money: gathering, smithing, tailoring, alchemy, shipbuilding, and more, linked into crafting chains where raw materials become finished goods. Professions level as you work them, up to a soft cap, and True Mastery, which comes with membership rather than being sold, lifts that cap and opens rare legendary-tier crafting.
Two skills sit outside the normal caps because they cut across everything:
This is the part worth understanding early, because it changes how you play.
So a level 20 character who never crafted is a bad crafter, and a level 6 character who has spent every evening at a forge is a good smith. The two clocks do not feed each other and they are not supposed to.
Free players are not held below paying ones. The free game is a whole game and the ceiling is the same. What a membership raises is which professions you can take to their highest tiers, not how good you are allowed to get. See Membership & Store.
See Classes for what each class becomes as it grows, and Character for what all of it sits on.
Your character: Character · Races · Backgrounds · Classes · Items
Always: Mortmain · Start Here · Reference