The First Archmage

Interlude I: The System

It’s me, the System! Yeah, yeah – you’re probably wondering ‘what the heck is the System doing, interrupting the story? Wait – it’s acknowledging me, the reader! Huh? I’m so confused right now!’ That’s because I’m the System.

Okay, so people are confused about some of the stats and stuff, so I’ll share how things work, but only for ones already introduced!

Affinities: You must unlock an Affinity to have access to that resource, even if you have something unlocked that affects it – such as CON affecting Health. All Affinities’ short version end in ‘a’, and are the only thing, save CHA, that ends in ‘a’. So if it ends in “a’ and doesn’t start with ‘ch’, it’s an Affinity.

There are three things that affect Health: CON, LFA, and HLT.

CON is your constitution, and determines how durable your body is. LFA is Life Affinity, and determines how much your base Health Pool is. HLT is health.

MNA is Mana Affinity, and determines the base value of your Mana Pool. MNP is Mana Power, and just adds to Mana.

SPA is Spirit Affinity, and determines how high your base Spirit is.

Then we have your Attributes. They’re the first line of stats.

INT is intellect, and affects how quickly you process information and draw conclusions from it, not how well you remember things. AGI is your agility, which is also your speed. It isn’t your reflexes. CHA is charisma, and affects your physical beauty just a tad, but also affects how likely people are to swing in your favor over how likely they aren’t. It also affects whether or not people with an inclination toward you are going to be into you.

STR is your physical strength. CON, again, determines how durable your body is, and adds on to your Health Pool. PER is perception, which increases how much you can notice from your senses, not how strong said senses are.

LIF is your natural lifespan, and each point equals five years. Some species can have limits. There’s a boy with Mutt whose Species doesn’t allow him to live more than thirteen years, despite having 3 LIF. He has over two hundred Species in his ancestry. Despite this massive con to his Species, he suffers no learning penalty, which is nice, and has boosts from a variety of his ancestral Species.

Not that he’ll live very long, unless he can increase his LIF more… if that does, in fact, allow him to live past the 13 years his Species will kill him at.

Sorry, kid, but puberty ain’t nice to mutts, and if you’re at the point where even I can’t determine a dominant Species in you, it’ll just rip you apart.

LIF can’t be trained or increased without consuming certain things (such as potions designed specifically for that) or from Species Levels (or certain Classes, like the line of Wizard).

LUK determines how often lucky things happen for you, as well as the rarity of loot dropped from monsters, though it does not affect how often drops occur. LUK cannot be trained, and will increase as lucky things happen.

Gavin’s LUK hasn’t gone up very much on its own. If at all.

I already explained the Affinities and Pool-Affecting.

LTC is Loot Chance, and affects how often Loot will drop. It is not a multiplier.

OFV is Overflow Value, and affects how much extra of a resource someone can regenerate up to. This extra usually floats around you, ready for you to draw upon, but it’s usually just a point or two. Some people, such as those with Dekami Bloodline unlocked and Leveled even once, tend to break that. And some of them are silly enough to draw it inside of them, so it can’t be sensed by others that he’s got ambient Resources just floating around him.

That is not good, and can cause some serious problems. -coughcough-

Stat points do increase by partial points, but they can’t see those.

On to Experience.

Just like with gaining stat points naturally, gaining Experience isn’t easy. It’s common to have to kill dozens or hundreds of monsters just to gain a single point of Experience. With Species Experience, it goes to one of two places: your Species, or your Bloodline. You have to tell it to go to Bloodline, though.

Upon reaching Level 25 of their Species, Humans can take on a Subspecies, which is any Species they’ve befriended a major leader of (must be a current major leader, not one that got smote by a Divine Being in a tantrum thousands of years ago and became a spirit), and can be Leveled up to Level 25, but not advanced past Tier I. They can do this each time their Species reaches Level 25 of a Tier, allowing them to take up to 4 Subspecies.

Or, if they know what to do, they can unlock additional slots, because some jerk named Tristan Lightblade figured out potions that add on extra Subspecies slots.

For Class Experience, it’s divided like so: Number of Primary Class Slots + 1. Then, the resulting number is split between each Primary Class in equal portions, with that extra 1 split equally to all Secondary Classes. So if someone has two Primary Classes and four Secondary Classes, and they receive 9 Class Experience, it’s divided by three. Three to their first Primary Class, three to their second, and that last three is split into four parts and given to the Secondary Classes.

If it doesn’t split evenly, the first Primary Class in the list that isn’t locked out of Experience (such as at Level 25) will receive the greater portion. So if there’s 10 Experience for the previous example, dividing by three earn three and a third. Instead of a portion being added for each group, the extra is converted into a full point (because that’s what it equals, duh!) and granted to the first Primary Class.

For Secondary Classes, if their portion doesn’t split evenly, the extra is granted to the first secondary Class that can still earn Experience in the list.

However, partial points Experience is earned. It just isn’t seen. With my example, they’d realistically get 3.33 Experience, each, with the first Primary Class earning 3.34 Experience, and each Secondary Class earning 0.83 Experience with the first Secondary Class earning).84. But examples.

What Classes and Species are available for the next Tier depend solely on their Skills, their stats, and their Classes. So that’s three things that culminate to affect what they can become.

Ordinarily, a Class cannot be changed after it has reached Level 5, even by accessing a Tier I Dungeon Core. However, it can be changed up to Level 25 of the first Tier by accessing a Tier II Dungeon Core. However, doing this costs 5 LIF, so most people don’t do it. Most who know about it.

For a being as powerful as Gavin, that doesn’t really matter, and he can spare the LIF to do it as many times as he wants, because we all know that he’ll just regain it.

I so can’t wait until he reaches Mage…

So many fun things will happen.

Hrm… what else?

Skills! Right! Let’s not forget the Skills!

All Tier I Skills, and most Tier II Skills, have only one Tier to them. A few Tier II Skills and all Tier III through Tier VII – exempting the rare few – have four Tiers to them. Once they reach Level 10, they move to the next Tier at Level 1. However, this is not a nerf. Firebolt Chain Level 10 is the exact same as Firebolt Chain (II) Level 1.

This allows you to gain bonus Experience for mastering that Skill four times while making it even more powerful each time. At minimum, you would gain 140 Experience from mastering a Skill, if it’s first Tier is Tier II. At most, it’s 340 Experience.

That’s a ton.

Natural Skill Tiers only go up to Tier VII. That is, a gained Skill will never be higher than Tier VII. However, Skill Tiers go up to Tier X, so virtually any Tier VII Skill (save ones like Rift Sense, which only have one Tier to them, and I should probably fix that because it was meant to be Tier I, but the automated portion of my works decided it was difficult enough to be Tier VII and so few people got it that I never got around to changing that) will hit Tier X.

When it comes to setting if a Class gains Experience or not, that’s something only inhuman Species can do. No exceptions. I’d have to directly interfere for a Human to be able to. No exceptions. End of story.

I DON’T WANT GAVIN BEING FORCED TO FIGHT A SCALED WYVERN JUST SO HE CAN KEEP GETTING STRONGER, OKAY? HE WOULDN’T SURVIVE!

-deep breaths-

For Blessings, an Adventurer can take on one. One. Only one. They have to have it revoked if they want to change Blessings, and that changes their Hero Title to Betrayer. Usually. Nies has edited his Betrayer Title to something pretty funny. At least, in my honest opinion. You might not find it funny. But I’m the System, so I don’t care. I have no regrets in letting him change it when he asked.

Oh, and if the Blessing is revoked for certain reasons or in certain ways, it doesn’t grant the Betrayer Title, though Hero doesn’t remain.

Those who have Blessings are known as Heroes. Receiving a Blessing grants Appraisal, as well as various buffs. The more followers a Divine has, the more buffs are granted. At base, all Divine will have a single buff, even if they don’t have any followers.

Some of them are useful. Like Nies’s. Some of them are just like ‘well, you can keep monsters from coming near you as you travel through territory where no sane monster would want to approach you, because they can all sense just how powerful you are, and you’re really sticking in towns and stuff, anyway, so it’s not like you’d be using that ward very often, anyway, and really, gaining LIF and extra Experience from Quests is going to be a lot more useful to you’.

Ekre’s mad at me, now. It’s not like I’m the only one to call it useless.

Now he’s saying that I’m just encouraging Nies.

Before I go, one last thing. Dungeons. A Dungeon’s Tier determines what Tier you need to be to enter. For a Tier I Dungeon, you need to have at least a Tier I Class. For a Tier II Dungeon, a Tier II Class. And so on.

Oh, and back to Experience. To gain Class Experience, you must do something relating to one of your current Classes. That Experience is then split between all Classes. For Species, you must do something relating to your Class. So for Fairies, using Gifts is a huge one. For Beastborn (Wolf) people, fighting is a huge one. For Humans…

Humans gain Species Experience from pretty much everything. They actually have a nerf to Species Experience, while other Species don’t. It just seems the reverse, because they gain more Experience. Inhuman Species do have a nerf to Class Experience, though.

So the reason inhuman Species have nerfs to Class Experience is because they get stronger stat boosts upon gaining a Species Level, and they live much longer than Humans. Their base LIF is generally stronger, and nearly all inhuman Species gain more than 1 LIF every time their Species goes up.

So they have longer to gain Class Experience, have unnerfed Species Experience (even if they have fewer sources of it than Humans), and are naturally better than Humans. You really think I’m going to let them just outpace their weaker cousins, the Humans?

Heck no!

Peace!