System File: The Rankings
Anyone reading my stories will soon see that they don’t use the common GFEDCBAS-ranking system of most other LitRPG- and dungeon-stories, but my own system. I developed my 15 ranks about ten or fifteen years ago for the fifth version of my PnP-RPG-rules, long before the computer games introduced that other ranking.
I decided to keep my own ranking even for the new story and system of the Sphere, but to help readers understand and reference it, I’m giving an extended description here (no need to fill up every story I write with walls of text explaining this).
There are a total of fifteen ranks in five groups of three each, with the groups identified by color. Each rank has names, a number and a short form – and it depends on the context which one will be used. That context can be the rank of a class, of an item, of a skill or similar objects.
For example the first rank has the names [Limited] and [Broken] – if the context is of an item then it is often called of [Broken] quality, but a skill or a spell on the other hand would be of [Limited] effect or power. The short form is one to three star symbols in the color appropriate to the rank
The Ranks are:
Rank # Star display Color Rank/Quality name Level Range 1 1 dark star dark black Limited broken 1- 10 2 2 dark star dark black very low very bad 11- 20 3 3 dark star dark black low bad 21- 30 4 1 copper star copper orange below average below average 31- 40 5 2 copper star copper orange average average 41- 50 6 3 copper star copper orange above average above average 51- 60 7 1 silver star silver grey good high 61- 70 8 2 silver star silver grey very good very high 71- 80 9 3 silver star silver grey master rare 81- 90 10 1 gold star gold yellow heroic heroic 91-100 11 2 gold star gold yellow legendary legendary 101-110 12 3 gold star gold yellow mythical mythical 111-120 13 1 light star light white immortal holy 121-130 14 2 light star light white divine divine 131-140 15 3 light star light white infinite unique 141-150
The effect and strength of each ranking is relative to the object and it’s function it refers to.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
A [unique] butter knife would (if used in combat) only have a damage like an [average] sword, but it would have some truly extreme powers in the area of food preparations, like summoning a ton of bread and half a ton of butter each day.
A [unique] sword on the other hand would one-hit-kill most beings and be able to harm even a God’s avatars or one of the demon emperors.
People also have ranks, and they can raise through them through experience, special circumstances or luck. Most people start at [Limited] as babies and slowly raise to a usual maximum around [Average] (or copper-ranked) at the age of forty. This is especially true if they decide to remain civilian as that is only a slow rising rank with experience levels.
Adventurers and Explorers on the other hand go into their risky lives in hope of finding or fulfilling special conditions to get a skill, ability or class of a much higher rank as early as possible. Dozens of them die as unknowns for everyone that succeeds, but the stories of those who succeed are a potent lure.
The main reason for this is the so-called “Maximum Rank Bonus”. This bonus applies to every point value (Health, Endurance, Astral, Soul for people or Health, Mana, Influence and Dungeon for Dungeons) and goes especially high beginning at the silver ranks, so getting a silver rank early will drastically improve survival rates for adventurers.
The rank of a person depends on the maximum rank attained in anything, which is why people sometimes have skills or spells that don’t fit their style – they just had the chance to learn them on a higher rank when they themselves were of a lower rank early in their career.
The people of the sphere are of the opinion that dungeon cores cannot increase their rankings and that all legends of that happening are just legends or cases of wrong class assignments on the first dungeon survey. While that opinion was true for the past, it came from the fact that the past dungeon cores were basically computer programs that could not learn and not due to any restriction.
So with the new dungeon cores that contain souls this no longer applies, although it will remain a very rare case due to the requirements for advancing at high ranks. Dungeon cores can start at any rank according to chance (Info: Bareen just took an existing rare core for the General, she couldn’t create it directly), so a rank-advancement is much more likely for low rank souled dungeons than for high ranked ones.
To get an overview of the numbers and ranks of the dungeon cores:
The largest floating lands of the sphere are about the size of Australia and usually contain around 1500 dungeons – with the distance between two dungeons averaging about 70 km or a few days travel (without magic). However because dungeons prefer certain environments there are clusters with much lower distances and areas with fewer dungeons.
Upon creation, only about one in 2000 dungeons will have a [unique] rank, and one in 350 will be Light-ranked (including the unique one). One in fifty will be gold-ranked, one in a dozen will be silver-ranked and one in four will have a copper-rank. And more than half of the dungeons will be black-ranked.
Just for info on the General: [Mythical] is the highest gold-rank and while the chance for a gold-rank is one in fifty for all three ranks total, the chance for a mythical core is lesser than one in two hundred.
However, these numbers only apply to the creation chance – the number of dungeons that really exist are much more geared toward copper and silver ranks. This is due to the two facts that at one end the black-ranked dungeons are considered useless and often destroyed for their cores, while on the other end the requirements for dungeons to really grow into gold- and light-ranked sizes (100+ floors) are difficult to fulfill.