At the end of the first book, Jace and Esther jumped from Level 10 to Level 12 by killing the four members of Drescher’s group. I didn’t think it made sense to spend time leveling them up since the story was basically over, and getting Jace out of the game and back to the real world would have been his top priority.
Now, as I begin the second book, I want to get directly into the action and the story and don’t want to spend a whole chapter walking through the leveling up. Also, some time has passed since the end of the last book (maybe a week), so Jace and Gracie would have already handled the leveling-up process, and I want to start fresh. So I am writing this introduction to review their advancement to Level 12.
Jace:
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AL9nZEUxhmvEPGVXxFJENaphyxLHHPwa0HCsYpHZtrFX92kYX2fWPm6euOrH0-WXMZ1ThnfS-uML1xBgcKHV8e5APHhKCyT4JSB38l6Bf15ice7CtKPpDzv0Nec4E25B0sjUk32THvIMNduOi43bWoZBLwt-=w1013-h776-no?authuser=1]
Jace chooses a Spirit/Shaman feat at level 11, Totem Reach +5, extending his totems to 15 feet per level, which is 180 feet now. Since he made Constitution his second key ability for the next five levels, he chooses a Constitution feat: Toughness, which adds +5 to your Hit Points and can only be taken once.
In reviewing Jace’s new stats, I don’t know if I’ve ever adequately explained how Armor works. The skill works like Dodge in that it raises your AC by half of the points put in there. Jace’s Armor is 17, so if he walked around with no armor, he would get +8 to his AC. However, he can spend those points to wear armor that will raise his AC at one-to-one. For example, full plate mail armor costs 10 Armor points to wear, increasing your AC by 10. Jace has a pair of boots that cost one Armor to wear and raise his AC by 1. Jace’s Armor totem raises his AC by his Level (12) but doesn’t cost any Armor points. So, when Jace wears his boots (which he never takes off), he gets +1 to AC, and his Armor skill is reduced to 16, giving him an additional +8 to AC. He gets a natural bonus of 10, so his total AC is 21. After he casts his Armor totem, it goes up to 33.
In the last story, Jace used his halberd a lot, but he will use his new sword, Diamond Etcher, in this one. I'm already regretting having a sword named Etcher and a character named Esther. He will only switch back to the halberd when he needs to trip something or take advantage of its Chaotic alignment. Diamond Etcher has +3 to Parry, raising his AC to 36 when he takes the Parry action. Jace invented the Dynamic Parry Feat, which lets him add up to his Athletic skill value to his Parry after a D20 roll. If he rolls a 20, he gets to add +19 (his Athletic skill). If he rolls a 1, he receives a -1 to his AC. Of course, a 20 is a critical success, so it would help him block a strike that still exceeded his Parry value by up to 10, and a 1 is a critical miss, which means it always misses regardless of whether the remaining parry exceeded the strike by 10+.
Assuming Jace will be getting 15-20 with his Parries in combat since his personal skill in sword fighting translates into the game, his AC will be between 50 to 55. Any opponent would need to have +45 to attack before they rolled the D20 to have a reasonable chance to hit him. Also, criticals against Jace when he is parrying will be rare since the attacker will need to get lucky with a 20 or beat his parry score by more than 10. I am doing the math here so that during combat in the story, I can avoid an overload of numbers and write the sword-fighting scenes as I am used to.
Another significant change is Jace’s Hit Points. At level 10, he had 260, and a 130+ damage strike against him was not impossible. Several times, he wanted to overload his Damage totem to get it to explode but not take enough to send him into a death spiral. Now his HP is 396, and he would need a strike of almost 200 damage against him to risk his life. He got this bonus by adding seven more points to his HP through leveling up and the toughness feat.
Jace’s Mana also jumped from 260 to 336, providing fewer restrictions when casting totems and healing spells. He told Gracie that he wanted a Summoning totem, but she told him that it was only possible to change your known spells at level change. If you are wondering why Jace didn’t change them, it’s because he wanted the Stone Elemental to help against Dresher, but that fight is over, and the Mana Bank totem is more useful generally.
For damage in attacks, Jace is using Diamond Etcher. It is a +5 Level 8 Two-Handed Longsword. Longswords do a base damage of 10. Because it is level 8, it does four additional damage, and the +5 brings the total to 19. Jace has a damage bonus of 31, so this works out to a nice round 50, almost like I planned it. Now, most of the enemies Jace fights will have some damage reduction, but in general, when he gets crits, he will be doing damage in multiples of 50.
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As for his Stun ability, Etcher’s innate spell difficulty is 31. Any enemy with a Magic Defense of 21 will have a 50/50 chance of saving against it. A monster with an MD of 10 or less will have almost no chance. When Jace wants to ensure a Stun success, he can channel 100 mana (or up to 180) through his sword to increase the difficulty by 20. Most stupid monsters (Goblins, Orcs, Trolls, Giants, etc.) have low Wisdom and Spirit scores and, thus, low MDs. Most fighters at level 15 or below will also have relatively low MD numbers, but enough for Jace to boost it. He can forget about it if he faces off against level 20+ PCs with average abilities. Drescher spent little on his MD and had 44. His Priestess casting boons on him normally boosted this.
Jace also took Esther on a Bounty Hunting adventure to show her how it works. They took on a game generated NPC quest. He did this to get his fourth bounty and lock himself in at level 3 so his feats wouldn’t go away. At level three, he got another occupational feat and chose Intimidation. This is what he uses when he Stands His Ground. Intimidation is his Strength base plus his Intelligence base, which is 8. Now it gets an additional +5.
Moving on to Esther:
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AL9nZEUxM4I6iXRXTYAgVB8a_A4bliQihz32EwYxYwmTYmojieyeD4l0DrXoa7L7tN4B3ALLuBxIDl3jFSy2u1WmFoN8sCdxdOhpMbddpl9kpYbo711co9t8NYMOz4kBm4AHLg-u-NuOnTsrxa61-3ohjn3E=w1013-h826-no?authuser=1]
Esther chose Evasive for her Rogue feat, which adds +5 to Dodge. She took Toughness as her Constitution feat at level 12, adding +5 to her HP. Her HP jumped from 140 at level 10 to 264 at level 12. Hopefully, she doesn’t “almost die” as much now. Also, she took up a second occupation as a Bounty Hunter with Jace and got her last Weapon Master training feat to boost her Melee even higher.
Her Stealth and Grapple abilities are key for her. She has five Grapple feats, each at +5. When added to her Athletic skill, her total Grapple ability is 50. the Grappling attack comes in two stages. First, the grappler needs to touch you, and then they need to grapple you. The touch attack is made without a weapon and uses your melee plus half your Athletic skill. If you have unarmed combat bonuses or any other bonuses to hit with your bare hands, you also add that. You can use both hands to attack. You don’t roll an attack die. To defend against it, only your natural AC + Dodge is used, but the defender rolls the D20. Wearing armor or holding a shield helps against weapon attacks, but not getting touched. Attacking from the shadows will bolster the touch attack, and any criticals earned can be carried over to the Grapple attempt. Defense against grappling is your Athletic + Resist + D20 + any grapple defense skills like Escape Artist.
Esther has two-handed melee attacks of 40 and 36, but for her main hand, +15 applies to light weapons, and +10 of her off-hand is the same, so her unarmed attack is 25 and 26, but her off-hand can never be higher than her main hand, so it is just 25 for both. That is added to half her Athletic skill and comes to 42. Most of her targets will be medium-sized, so they have a natural AC of 10. Usually, only rogues have good Dodge scores. Jace has a Dodge of 3. Drescher had a Dodge of 1. The Half-Orc guards in Ironfel had a Dodge of 2. So they would all have a starting defense of 11-13 before rolling a D20 and trying to beat a 42. Even if they got lucky with a 20, they would have to dodge her off-hand attack too.
Gwen would be different. She has a normal dodge of 24 but usually boosts it to 33 with a Dex boon and a haste spell. Adding her natural AC of ten, she could evade Esther with a roll of 9 or higher. Once grappled, she would be in trouble, as her Resist score is pathetic, but If Esther missed her touch attack, she would be weaponless and flat-footed for Gwen’s response.
Once Esther touches you, you must beat her grappling score of 50. Jace has a high Athletic skill of 19 and a high Resist skill of 15. Added together, he would still need to roll a 16 to avoid getting grappled by Esther. The Ironfel guards had a defense of 21. Of course, if she attacks from the shadows and gets a critical success on the touch, she can use that to change a Grapple failure into a success if someone gets lucky and beats her by less than 10.
On defense, Esther boosted her Dodge to 17. When she wears her armor, she has an AC of 18. So her total defense when dodging is 35. Her main tactics will be to hide in the shadows and not get hit. If she has to slug it out, she can cast Haste, which increases her Dodge by 5, so her defense can be as high as 40.
For attacking, if she uses her rapiers without the Heavy Weapon enchantment, she will do 22 damage per attack. With Heavy Weapon, she can do 33. Also, she stole Gwen’s hat at the end of the last story, which has a cool shadow ability that makes her Invisibility spell unneeded. She traded that spell for Fire, which the party had been lacking for a while. Her # of Spells skill is at 7, but she only has five memorized (Enthrall is a bonus spell from being a vampire), so the two empty slots allow her to memorize two additional versions of each spell, which will come in handy for her Charm+ and Fire spells.
Those are all the changes; anything I missed will be explained in the story. Hope you enjoy.