The Pyramid is a way to allocate skills so that folks don't become unbalanced. Basically it means that to grow a skill to a given rank on The Ladder, there must always be at least one more skill in the next rank down.

In other words, in order to have one skill at Good, you have to have least two skills at Fair and at least three skills at Average, etc. You cannot just throw everything in Character Building into a single skill.

This creates a sort of pyramid shape on the character sheet, hence the name.

The Pyramid only needs to be balanced at the end of a Phase, i.e., you can grow things out of balance during a phase, as long as you backfill at the end.

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There's an alterative mechanic for High Skill games, called the Skill Column. In this arrangement, you only need as many skills in the level below as you have at the highest level. So in order to have one skill at Good, you only need to have one skill at Fair and one at Average. This lets you build columns of fewer, but higher, skills.

For purposes of IDC, we'll be using the Pyramid, not the Column, until I see that it doesn't work.