Advancement

The main reasons to join a guild is to do Things. Things, in the witches guild, such as cast spells, do commands, brew teas, fly through the skies, etc. Upon joining the guild, you'll be able to do none of these Things. However, through advancing and perseverence you'll be able to do these eventually.

The Discworld has a skill tree with branches of covert, crafts, faith, fighting, magic, and other. These can be seen by simply typing "skills" or "skills (branch)". Now each of these branch off and have their own individual branches and twigs. Each guild has its own set of primaries located in the skill tree, using "skills primaries" will list yours. As a witch, your primaries are the following:

Skills within the witches guild can be advanced at Granny Weatherwax, Bad Ass or Ogg-Sans, Bes Pelargic. These are the two witches you can originally join the guild with. With these two witches you can advance each of your primaries to level 300, advance magical nonprimaries to level 50, and all other nonprimaries to level 10 (except the faith tree which can only be advanced to level 5).

When you first attempt to advance you'll have to advance the "outer skills" or outer branch. Such as "advance magic", after advancing this to 10 levels you'll be able to advance the "inner skills" such as "advance magic.items.talisman" or in short "advance ma.it.ta".

To actually be able to advance you'll need experience points (XP) as well as money. You'll spend both to gain more levels. The more levels the higher your bonus and through this process you'll be able to achieve the acts you want to perform.

There are alternate methods of teaching: including teaching yourself and being taught by other players. This is mostly used after guild maxing, as it's always cheaper to advance in your guild if it's possible. When trying to find a teacher you may find this page helpful. Using the online teachers option will show you the players online who can teach you as well as the top ten overall teachers. The better the teacher, the cheaper the XP cost.

Primary advancement determines your guild levels. Fifteen primaries turns into one guild level and ten guild levels turn into one wart.

Here is the magic skill tree and what each skill does.

In Depth Advancement

As you advance you're going to have skill levels as well as a bonus. The level is what you have it advanced to (or your stage of learning) while the bonus is the important part (your stage of understanding of this skill). The bonus is the bit of the skill that actually secures your ability in using said skill. Bonuses are determined by your stats, any stat items you may be using, whether or not your burdened, etc.

In addition to advancing, there is a wonderful TM or taskmaster system where every now and then you'll be performing an action and advance in it without it costing any XP or money. TMs are wonderful but tend to slow down the more advanced you are. When casting a spell you're more likely to TM if you're at the "flip a coin stage".

Teaching yourself should only happen because it's the most convienent at that time or no one about has a high enough bonus to teach you. It gets exceptionally costly with XP to teach yourself though it is free of charge. To have someone else teach you first they have a better teaching bonus than you. Teaching bonus is a combination between a persons skill and their ot.te.* bonus. The "other" skill branch has a "teaching" tree and this will determine the XP cost. To check the bonus, try "teach bonus (skill)".