“Never seek improvement. The mountain doesn’t climb itself, and neither should you. Wait, and let the XP flow.”

— The Tao of Idleness, Book 1, Verse 23

I nearly jumped out of my skin, but sure enough, there it was: a level-up notification. Whoop! I mentally clicked on it, and a screen I hadn’t seen before opened up. Funnily enough, it was just like the character creation sheet from all those games I’d pissed off any number of girlfriends by playing.

Name: James Brook

Level: 2 (1% Idle XP Gains)

Class: Freeloader

Health: 124

Mana: 0

Stamina: 54

Strength: 6

Agility: 8

Dexterity: 10

Constitution: 12

Endurance: 4

Intelligence: 10

Wisdom: 8

Charisma: 10

Luck: 15

Class Abilities:

Borrowed Strength: Your stats increase based on those around you. Find stronger allies to grow more powerful. Random Trigger Modifier.

Lazy Aura: Enemies within range may lose interest in attacking if you do not engage.

Loot Leech: You passively collect resources from your surroundings.

Passive Assistance: When within range of a stronger ally their actions may benefit from your presence. One ally’s next attack will deal critical damage. Duration: One use per day.

Opportunistic Luck: You are more likely to stumble into beneficial situations by accident. Duration: Permanent.

Lucky Bystander: When in the presence of an ally their combat effectiveness increases by 5%. Duration: Permanent.

Skills:

None

Unallocated points:

5

So. There’s that.

My first instinct was that I felt a touch hurt that I apparently had no Skills – my parents had told me that often enough, so I certainly didn’t need my internal soulscape going down that route too – but, then again, Freeloader seemed to have more than enough Abilities to be going on with. In fact, from memory, I sensed I would probably be describing myself as ridiculously OP as far as that went. This suited me just fine. Full disclosure: I’m absolutely the guy who opens the cheat menu the second he gets a new game. I think my record in Civ IV was having the nuke when the guys around me were still unlocking Bronze Working. And don’t get me started on the Villa’s awesome giant of a 100 stat Centre Forward in FIFA . . .

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Basically, I’m more than happy with everything I saw in the Ability panel. I’m fairly sure the only reason I’m still alive and kicking right now is that Freeloader has come through big in the clutch. But now for my least favourite thing about all this: let’s try to get my head around those scary numbers a little.

First up, Health, Mana and Stamina. They’re the be-all and end-all of making a go of whatever the fuck is going on here. Let’s state the obvious: I run out of health, I die. Again. Which would be sub-optimal. When things hit, bite, claw and rip into me, they’ll be making that number drop down towards zero. Probably via a flashing health bar. Ergo, I want my stat there to be as high as I can get it without comprising my numbers elsewhere. If I wanted to be a Tank – and, let’s be clear, there is no chance whatsoever of me doing that. Far too much responsibility – I’d do everything I could to send that stat through the roof. As it was, 100 HP felt pretty ‘normal’. Whatever that means, anyway. So, 100 as a base stat, then, and I’m going to assume the rest of the score comes from Constitution, right? So, all together 124? That would be my 12 Constitution times two added to the base 100. Yeah, let’s go with that. Loving the simplicity of the math there. Works just fine for me.

Moving right along, I felt a little burst of sadness at seeing the big fat zero next to my Mana. Surely, there’s no one in the world who doesn’t dream about flinging fireballs about? But, nope. Not for me. Whatever else it might be, Freeloader is manifestly not a spellcasting Class. So, I get no Mana. In fact, now I look at those Class Abilities a little more carefully, I don’t actually seem to have anything ‘active’ to trigger at all . . . Very passive. Again, can’t help but think that this Class is being a touch on the nose, personality-wise.

Stamina. 54?!? The fuck? Not going to lie, feeling a bit judged there. Did Sonia have a hand in setting all this up? Okay, so if we follow the Health logic and 100 is ‘normal’, and I have 4 in Endurance, it looks like I have a 50% reduction going on to the 108 I should have in there. So I must have some sort of Freeloader-debuff running. Lovely. Maybe I am not so OP overall . . . But hey, let’s not worry about it for now. After all, if I’m good at anything, it’s avoiding the confrontation of uncomfortable realities until they burst forth and bite me in the arse. It’s surely not like having tragically low Stamina is going to bite me in the ass in any ‘difficult’ upcoming challenge in the near future, is it?

Right at the bottom of the screen, I see I have 5 Unallocated Points, which I presume I have earned from levelling up. As I’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve that thus far, I presume the ‘Idle XP Gains’ next to the Level just happily ticks itself upwards towards the next level. Which is pretty cool. Even if the gap between levels increases, if I don’t actually need to do anything to get the job done, then having fuck all Stamina might not be too much of an issue. Yeah, and I’m currently trying very hard not to think about the ‘neck massager’ that Sonia had in her bedside cabinet . . .

As a distraction from previous . . . shortcomings, I found myself looking to where I should put my level-up points. To be honest, though, these stats are also generally pretty underwhelming. If 100 is ‘normal’ Health and Stamina, then I think we can assume a Level 1 in this world – yeah, I’m losing faith in the ‘I will wake up from this soon’ schtick – has 10 as a likely balanced starting point. Thus, apparently, as well as having the Endurance of a trigger-happy virgin, I’m weak, slow and – for some reason, this hits a bit harder than the others – rather unwise. Ouch. The hits just keep on coming. So, do I stick my five points in the sub-10s and try to balance things out for me a little? Or maximise my already strong points?

That bringing things towards 10 was my first initial instinct gave me pause. I didn’t have low Wisdom for nothing, so maybe thinking a bit longer would be the smart play . . . Having no active Abilities, no Mana, and no Skills as of yet means it seems unlikely I’ll see much benefit from beefing up too much, so Strength is out. If I’m going mano a mano with a nasty, we’re probably in the endgame, anyway. A little extra oomph on a swinging stick isn’t going to make much of a difference. Likewise, with a massive 50% debuff hitting it, it’d be a complete waste to throw too many points at Endurance, wouldn’t it? I’m just going to have to get used to taking lots of naps. For once, something from my previous life I have lots of experience in. On the other hand, I’d spent quite a bit of time already running away – so a bit more of a boost on the old acceleration there would be helpful. I dropped 2 points into Agility, to bring me up to ‘average’. Mr Tuck, my old PE teacher, how do you like me now?

What else to boost? For some reason, the 8 in Wisdom is really nagging at my attention, even though it was probably fair comment – in my previous life, my decision-making sucked, I often couldn’t find the remote, and the less said about my perceptional awareness, the better. Now, whilst that sort of goofy stupidity was hardly lethal when lying on the sofa watching Judge Judy all day, I’m not sure it was going to fly in a world with wolves the size of pit ponies. So, yeah, that would probably be 2 points pretty well spent.

Finally, I had a moment where I thought about putting the final point into Charisma – couldn’t hurt with Operation Bed Lia, could it? – but then I thought better of it. Well done, extra Wisdom. Earning your corn already. My highest stat by far was Luck, and if there was one thing I’d learned from countless hours of playing shitty games, it was that maximising Luck – whilst a massively stupid thing to do - could also totally break the system. Added to the passive nature of all my abilities, fluking my way through every engagement seemed likely to be my best option.

Reasonably satisfied with my choices, I closed the screen and turned back to the Elders, who were still discussing the politics of the realm and mithering about some sort of looming, epically shadowy threat I’d tuned out following minutes ago. Whatever. As long as my Idle XP Gains kept ticking along, I didn’t need to pay attention to the actual details, did I?

Yep. No flaws to that plan whatsoever. Note to self: keep adding the points to Wisdom.