When Sarah confirmed her readiness to begin skill selection, she expected to immediately be shown a list of available skills. Instead, she was shown what could only be her Status window.
Name:
Sarah Overmeyer
Race:
Human
Class:
None
Level:
0
Attribute Points:
3
Attributes
Physical
Mental
Strength
0
Vigour
0
Dexterity
0
Dexterity
0
Endurance
0
Fortitude
0
Perception
0
Perception
0
Skill Points:
10
Skills
There was a lot in there that she would have loved to unpack, but before she could do more than skim through it, the Status window was reduced to about two-thirds of its original size. It then slid to the left, until it was roughly in front of her left shoulder instead of her chin, and another window took its place.
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Warning: Some skills have Attribute requirements; therefore it is recommended that you select your skills before distributing your free Attribute points.
The warning screen folded into nothing and was replaced by an interactive menu with a huge list of skills. Sarah grinned manically as she skimmed the list.
“Oh, I am going to have so much fun with this,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “But first…”
She turned her attention to the Status window. As she focused on it, it returned to full size and slid over to be directly in front of her. At the same time, the Skills menu shrunk down and slid over to sit in front of her right shoulder.
“Huh,” she said, switching her focus between the two windows and watching them slide back and forth. “Very intuitive. Nice.”
Focusing one last time on the Status window, she began to read.
“No class, no level…that’s fair, though I wonder why I get to pick skills before I choose a class. Will I be assigned a class based on the skills I pick? Hmm…Okay, these attributes are different.”
She frowned thoughtfully. Most of the stories she’d read in the LitRPG genre had always seemed to handle this part in one of a few different ways. Whether they were called Stats or Attributes or something else, typically they either started with a fixed number – often ten – across the board, or they had varying numbers that purported to reflect the individual’s real-life abilities. She thought she might have read one or two stories where the stats started at zero but the player was always given a generous pool of free stat points to set up the foundation for a build. There were eight different Attributes here but she only had three free points.
Perhaps whatever program ran the virtual reality was becoming more in-tune with her thoughts, because Sarah’s pondering was suddenly interrupted by a small screen that popped up in front of the Status window.
Attributes: Each point gives a fixed increase that stacks on top of one’s natural abilities. Natural attributes vary, and can increase or decrease based on the actions and events of one’s daily life. For example, regular cardio-based exercise will increase Endurance, weight training will increase Strength, and regular study of logic puzzles will increase Mental Dexterity. Changes to natural attributes will not be reflected in the Status window.
Oh, well that kinda made sense, Sarah decided. Now she knew why she only got three attribute points to play with; she wasn’t actually starting from zero in any of the categories.
“That’s a bit of a different twist,” she said thoughtfully, as she waved her hand at the small screen and it folded itself into nothing. “I actually kinda like that my own abilities aren’t being reduced to a bunch of numbers. That would have felt a bit limiting, I think.
“Now let’s see, what are these attributes…”
Strength was obviously, well, how strong she was in a physical sense; how much weight she could lift, and so on. Vigour looked to be the mental equivalent of Strength, which meant it probably represented willpower, as in: the strength of one’s will.
Physical Dexterity probably covered everything from agility, to flexibility, to fine motor control; while Mental Dexterity was probably her ability to rationalize, deduce, and think in a non-linear fashion, along with the degree of creativity she brought to the table. In other words, she decided, Mental Dexterity was her ability to solve problems and think outside the box.
Endurance and Fortitude seemed fairly straight-forward. On the physical side, if Strength was a measure of how much weight she could lift, Endurance marked for how long she could hold it. There was probably also an element of how long she could resist against negative physical stuff, like pain or exhaustion, though that likely overlapped with the mental side of things too.
On the mental side, if Vigour was the degree of concentration and force of will she could bring to bear, Fortitude marked how long she could maintain the effort, along with how much resistance she had against various mental distractions and attacks, like how long she could keep her temper in check if someone was trying to taunt her, or for how long she could stay focused while tired or in pain.
Finally, Physical Perception probably had to do with the ways in which she perceived the world, specifically, her five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Mental Perception probably had to do with her ability to interpret the signals her brain received from the physical senses. Like, just because her eyes were good enough to physically see something at a distance, didn’t mean her mind would actually notice it, or – if she did notice – be able to correctly identify it.
The human brain wasn’t like a camera. A camera would record everything within an image equally; the brain on the other hand, only took note of some of what the eyes perceived, filtering the rest out as visible but unimportant.
That was one reason why memories were often unreliable, she knew. When meeting someone new, the brain would take note of things that stood out – the mole on the chin, the speck of broccoli in the teeth, the orange shirt – while more mundane things – the brown eyes, the plain shoes, the tidy-but-unremarkable hair cut – would simply fade to the background. Someone who had been trained to notice things, like a cop or a soldier, probably had much higher natural Mental Perception than the average Joe.
The really interesting thing would be finding out how artificially increasing the natural abilities with those Attribute points actually worked. Like, if she did a whole bunch of squats every day, and got her legs, core, and back really buff, but never did anything with her arms, the amount of weight she could lift would vary drastically, depending on how she tried to lift it. Would putting a point into Strength give a flat increase across the board, or would it even things out, increasing the strength of her arms but not affecting her legs?
Sarah sighed and reined in her excitement before it got out of control. She only got three points to start with, and the warning message had made it clear that her choices of skills could very well be contingent on her distribution of attribute points, which meant she would have to leave experimentation for another time.
Taking note of her number of available skill points (ten), Sarah turned her focus back to the Skill menu.