As he nodded at the grayed out additional Race options on his character screen, frustration prickled inside Booth’s head. Of course nothing happened, but he tried a few more times anyhow, with increasing force, a virtual headbutt of sorts.
All these options are locked out for a reason, you know.
The game devs had adjusted this to be a deliberately-streamlined process, and he should probably be working to make it even faster, not slowing it down. Nothing he was looking at could be changed. Hell, he didn’t even know how this game worked, yet. He had nothing to gain from pounding his virtual fist against a virtual locked door.
And a lot to lose. You’re lucky to be here at all. Take it and move on.
Booth moved on to the Stats tab.
[Redemption Wars uses dice rolls to resolve combat and out-of-combat challenges. Some are made behind the scenes, while others are revealed and can be viewed at any time in your combat log. Dice rolls are modified by choices you make during character creation which impact your character’s stats.]
Booth skimmed the paragraph. It seemed straightforward enough, similar to most MMOs. And he understood the basics of the TTRPGs this game was apparently based on.
The explanation was followed by a mostly-empty table listing several stats. Each could be expanded to show an explanation of what it meant and was used for. An empty column followed each, along with a column filled with +1s for his Race adjustment and an also-empty total column.
Booth looked for some kind of mechanism with a bank of points to distribute. What he found instead was more explanatory text and a single button that just said, “Roll the Dice.”
[Redemption Wars utilizes random rolls to determine your starting stats. The resulting scores will be distributed onto your Stats table as recommended for your class. (The maximum possible rolled value is 18.) You may rearrange the scores if you choose but not change the numbers.]
The method seemed decidedly odd, not to mention unbalanced. As with so much else, though, he didn’t appear to have a choice.
Roll the dice.
Booth activated the button. A soft clatter brushed around him, the sound of multiple dice rolling. It was a nearly tactile sensation and oddly satisfying. A combined anticipation and anxiety fluttered in the back of his mind as he waited to see how he’d rolled. Numbers populated the Stats table.
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1163627398881886250/1164240758165995555/Booth_Stats_Rolled_Table.png?ex=65427eb3&is=653009b3&hm=7e10a4dd72d4a35e44d38f0f370ec879ade4f334d281f8c37874cfae57147999&]
Booth stared at the table for a long moment, trying to decipher it. If 18 was the max roll, then he’d done OK, he thought. But short of taking the time to study each Stat’s description and finding a build guide that couldn’t possibly even exist yet and certainly wasn’t accessible to him, he didn’t have the knowledge necessary to make any real decisions of his own. His Class had recommended prioritizing STR, END, and PER. That was how the table had distributed things.
He had no idea how classes worked in Redemption Wars. Would he need to be tanky? The automatic assignment of his highest score to STR suggested he’d need to be focused on dealing damage, but the game systems didn’t always get it right. Maybe he’d need to be more of a caster-healer type, although the armor and shield abilities suggested otherwise.
This was the point where under ordinary circumstances, he’d go with the suggestion and play the game for a while to get a feel for whether he’d be happier with a different starting build. He might reroll his character more than once until he fine-tuned it exactly the way he wanted.
Not happening this time.
If he chose wrong, he’d be stuck with that choice forever—literally.
A sense of breathlessness and racing thoughts crept like rising water around his rational thoughts. The sensation wasn’t unfamiliar—it happened before every test, before every football game, any time he was about to do anything that his father was watching.
You can only do the best you can, Booth’s mother had always told him. I’m proud of you just for trying, and I love you no matter what. She’d believed every word. And Booth knew that his dad adored his mom, and so Dad would always smile and nod whenever she said it. But Booth had never been able to shake the certainty that his father always believed everyone could and should actually do more than they thought was their best.
You can’t be perfect, son, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying.
Booth stared at the Stats table. He couldn’t know what the right answers would be without first knowing the questions. That rising-water, drowning sensation started an inevitable transition toward frustrated fury.
This is stupid. Whatever you choose, you can make it work.
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Make it work, sure. Min-max to make it work well as he possibly could? That was a different story.
A message fluttered at the top of Booth’s screen.
[ALERT: The System has detected a potentially deteriorating connection. Please complete your character creation in an efficient manner to avoid loss of data.]
“Fuck.” It was the first time Booth had attempted to say anything out loud since he’d entered the game. He was startled when his own very real voice boomed around him. The shock was enough to break his choke.
Strength, then Endurance, then Personality. It made sense to him. It made sense to the System AI. Booth accepted the recommended Stat distribution, and the tab resolved briefly into darkness before switching to the final tab.
The avatar facing Booth stood in a realistic idle stance. It wasn’t a mirror reflection, but the similarity in appearance was startling. Whatever its other advancements, Redemption Wars limited itself to the predictable two body types for each gender, one tiny and spindly and the other musclebound and massive. Without thinking, Booth kept the larger version the game had assigned him. He’d never say he was as musclebound as that type—in his youth he’d heard enough comparisons to a late 1900s football player nicknamed “The Fridge” to become self-conscious about how much of his size was fat.
But choosing the biggest avatar was as close as he was going to get, and screw reality anyhow. He also left his facial features and gray-blue eye color unchanged. After a second’s hesitation, he sheepishly tweaked the hair color a couple of notches darker, away from ginger to a darker red-gold.
Interestingly, a scar marred the left side of his avatar’s face, a jagged line from cheekbone to jawline. Instinctively, he started to change it—he had no such scar in reality. But he kind of liked it. It added character. Made him look tougher.
If it’s like any other game, there will be vendors to change cosmetic stuff later. Stop wasting time on this.
The only thing left was his name.
[The System has produced a lore-appropriate name seeded from the name provided when you registered for the game. You may make minor adjustments, but the final name must remain lore-appropriate.]
[Name: Booth Greenfield]
Booth snorted. It had taken his given surname and tagged on “field,” turning his already mundane farmer-sounding name even more stereotypically farmer.
Congratulations. You’re so conventionally Southlander Human that the name generator couldn’t come up with anything better.
And that was that. Booth glanced over his avatar and proofread his name one last time. A sudden rush of anticipation welled up, the kind he always felt when he started a new game for the very first time, when everything was entirely new and he could whole-heartedly entertain the hope that the experience would turn out to be something special and wonderful, a new favorite.
You get to live instead of being dead. Does it get more favorite than that?
Guilt side-swiped him. If he’d had eyes, maybe they’d have filled with tears. Because here he was, about to step into a new adventure, but somewhere outside the circuits and servers which contained him, his parents and his brother and his friends were dead or dying.
The whole world is dying.
Text flashed anew above his avatar’s idle animation, more stridently than before.
[ALERT: The System has detected a potentially deteriorating connection. Please complete your character creation in an efficient manner to avoid loss of data.]
Beneath the field containing his name, the Enter World button shimmered, indicating it could be activated. Booth fixed his attention on it and nodded.
The dim lighting of character creation faded into gray. The motes of gray drifted into a finer and finer mist.
Will it just keep dissolving until I’m completely gone? Is this how I end—dead because I screwed around with my hair color for a few seconds too long?
A brightness rose around Booth, so subtle that at first he didn’t realize what was happening. Gray gave way to an expanse of blue sky with drifting wisps of puffy white clouds. Very close to Booth, a voice spoke.
The year is 1315 WD, several years before Redemption Wars begins. You are fifteen years old, a farm boy growing up in the Southlander village of Traton.
Booth swung around, but even before he saw there was no one behind him, he’d realized there wouldn’t be. The voice was directionless but clear. It was also his own voice. A narrator feature, perhaps, feeding him information his character would know but he the player didn’t.
He stood on a village green that felt familiar. Buildings of stone and thatch construction stood in loose organization around a central grassy square. Booth picked out identifying features of an inn, stable, a smithy. What looked like a modest little chapel sat atop a small rise, surrounded by a riot of gardens containing both crops and flowers. Individual homes skirted the outer edges of the village, each with their own version of gardens and in some cases penned livestock, growing gradually toward full farms.
This was the image from his character sheet’s Origin section, Booth realized. He’d been set down inside it, like a figure into a diorama.
A figure—he had a body, now. He lifted his hands and touched his face. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, something plastic-feeling, maybe. But he rubbed his hands across feathery stubble covering youthful skin, and against his cheeks his palms felt coarse and callused, just like the hands of a farm boy. He looked down at sturdy boots and brown homespun trousers with a tunic dyed a muted gold, over a body that was big like the one in the creation screen but which seemed less exaggerated and more realistic now.
Other senses opened up. Voices and laughter and children shrieking playfully drew Booth’s attention to the dozens of villagers in motion all around him. Tables and stands spotted the green. A scent of baking bread and roasting meat assaulted his nose and brought the taste so powerfully onto his tongue that his mouth watered and his stomach growled—doubly impressive, since he didn’t actually have any of those body parts anymore.
OK. So the tech is pretty damn good. Miraculous, even. Booth felt a renewed pinprick of excitement about getting to play in this new world.
A man’s laugh rang out heartily from Booth’s left. “Good gods, Booth. I can hear that rumbling from here. Set that flour bag right over there. I’ve got your folks’ payment, and I’ll happily throw in this half loaf as a tip for the delivery boy.”
The man who’d spoken was tall and broad with blond hair, and he stood behind a table laden with an assortment of baked goods. A small handcart stood off to one side. The man motioned toward a spot at the back of a cart, and Booth looked down to find he was suddenly clutching a burlap bag with both arms. As he noticed it, its weight strained at his muscles.
Booth wasn’t sure at first what to do—most VRPGs used some kind of specific triggering motion to interact with objects or drop things.
Move over there first, fool.
Again, he spent a frozen moment in rising panic. He wasn’t wearing a haptic suit.
I have no legs, no body at all. How am I supposed to do anything?