I wanted to go over the stats of Drescher’s three party members to show what a powerful character looks like. When I started writing this story, I created portions of the RPG game as needed. Each time Jace leveled up and needed a new feat, I invented one. Occasionally I would think of a powerful feat and realize that if that existed in the game, Gracie should have had Jace pick it first. Or if I think of a progressive feat that gets more powerful as you take it, Jace should have started on those earlier. So when I introduced Drescher’s team of four powerful humans (Gwen is a half-elf), I made sure to build them out completely with feats and upgrades so I would have a reason they were so much more powerful than Jace. Also, it forced me to think of feats in advance so that as Jace and his party members leveled up, I could have a path for them to go down instead of making it up on the spot.
Before looking at them, I want to go over character creation briefly. Because Jace took over a premade NPC with inflated stats, I never walked through character creation with the reader. I mention it briefly at the beginning but don’t really explain it because I knew I would never do it. The abilities work off a point-buy system. All abilities start at 10, and you have 25 points to spend to raise them. To increase an ability to 14 costs one for one. So if you raise all six stats to 14, that will cost 24 points. This is what most people do. Raising a stat to 15 or 16 costs 2 points per advancement, so increasing one stat at character creation to 16 costs 8. Going to 17 or 18 costs an additional 4 points per number. Since raising all your stats to 14 leaves you with one point left, and taking any of the abilities to 15 costs two, you can instead spend that 1 point to raise one skill by two. You will see +2 (CC) for some skills on the character sheets below. That means they got a +2 bonus at Character Creation.
After setting your abilities, you add your racial bonus. Most races give two bonuses and one penalty. Elves give +1 to Dexterity and Intelligence and a -1 to Constitution. Dwarves give +1 to Strength and Constitution and a -1 to Dexterity. Humans only give one +1 and no penalty; you can apply that +1 to any ability. Afterward, you will have five 14s and one 15 for your abilities. The goal is then to raise your key stat to 18, with a +2 ring to bump it to 20. Then use four other bumps to raise two stats to 16 or one to 18 or some other combination. You can only permanently raise one ability at a time, so you can’t wear six +2 rings, only one. This requires seven ability increases. You get 4 for getting to 20+ in levels, and you need to get three from the trials in Olympus. That is tough, but if you hook up with other level nine characters at levels 5 and 7, you can usually go along for the ride, and then when you are level 9, you return the favor for another lower-level character.
All the characters below will have gone through this process. The stat that is boosted by the ring will be in red, and while it increases the base for all the skills, it doesn’t get you additional skill points to spend at level advancement.
The different races also give you two +5 bonuses to skills. Your class gives three +5 bonuses to skills. For non-human races, those bonuses are predetermined, but for humans, you can decide where the +5 bonuses go with the only restriction that they can’t double up with bonuses given with your class.
One thing that might stand out about the Character sheets below is how low most of the abilities are. Jace and Esther both have two abilities at 20 or above, with others at 16 or 18. That can't happen normally.
First Gwen
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She is a half-elf which changes her appearance and lets her choose between elf character creation abilities or Human ones. She chose all human abilities and just wanted a more exotic look to her character. You can see most of what she can do from the stat sheet, but I will highlight three things.
Lock Pick: You need to take this feat in order to attempt a lock pick, and the feat gives you +5 to your skill. The base of the skill is Dexterity. So the feat on its own would give her a +15 to Lock Picking, and then she would roll a D10 against the lock’s difficulty. However, she took the occupation of blacksmith and specialized as a locksmith to take two more occupational feats in Lock Pick to give her an additional +10. She also has the Lock Pick spell, which boosts her ability based on how much mana she spends. She also took the feat Dexterous Fingers, which lets her add her Dex bonus to skills that require fine motor skills like setting traps, tying knots, and lock picking. She already had her Dex bonus to her Lock Pick ability; this doubled it. Then she took Athletic Fingers, which lets her take half her Athletic skill and add it to fine motor skills. This brings her base Lock Pick Ability to 49. Before entering the cavern, she had boosted her Dex to 24 through her spell, which added 8 to her base Dex and 16 to her Lock Pick, bringing her to 65. She then boosted her Lock Pick skill specifically by ten with a burst spell, taking her to 75. The difficulty on the pedestal lock was 75, so any roll other than 1 let her pass.
Elemental Protection: Gwen has three feats that let her not die from the lightning attack. She had Elemental Resistance and Elemental Reduction. These added a +3 special bonus to her Resist and Damage Reduction skills and allowed her to use her Resist and D/R totals in saving throws against Elemental Damage. She also had Elemental Dodge, which let her take half of her Dodge skill and add that to her saving throw. You can already Dodge fire and Earth attacks, but this also extended a partial benefit to wind, water, and electricity attacks. Her Dex was boosted to 24 during this, so her Dodge skill was at 28.
Fire Damage: Gwen uses fire to augment her damage. You can see that while she boosted her Melee value very high, she did nothing to her damage. She took three fire training levels, each raising her fire damage by 25%. She also carried a +4 Fire brand short sword that increased fire damage by 25% on criticals, so, combined with her three levels of fire training, she does double fire damage on criticals. The short sword has the Explosive trait and is level 8, so it can hold 180 mana. This would result in a 40-point damage (36+4) strike that would double to 80 on a crit. The sword also had a fire mana gem that would generate 30 fire mana within the weapon per round, so it would fully recharge after six rounds. If she attacked every round after the first big attack, she could still do 20 fire damage with a crit ((30/5 + 4)*2). And if she added some of her own mana, she could easily get that up to 40 fire damage with a crit. Also, the critical ability of the sword stacks for multiple crits (+25% per crit), so if she attacks from the shadows like Esther does and gets five criticals, she can triple the fire damage.
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I know this is a lot of information for a character that picks one lock in the entire book and then dies, but I wrote it all down, so I thought I’d share it.
Axilia
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Axilia is a standard priest who heals and boosts her party members. She has two feats that complement each other nicely: Wise Difficulty and Negative Difficulty. Wise Difficulty lets her use her Wisdom base for her Difficulty check, and Negative Difficulty lets her reduce the difficulty of a spell and get mana back for it. This takes advantage of the fact that party members cannot save against each other. I hinted at this in an early chapter where the Germans talked with Esther and told Jace to give the Crystal to Drescher. She said you could only exchange items with non-party members in a hostile zone. And she said there was no way Drescher would allow Jace in his party. This is because party members cannot save against each other’s spells. They always act as if they rolled 1 under the required difficulty.
I imagined a situation where a healing spell would do damage to an undead creature. This shouldn’t be automatic, and the undead creature should be able to attempt to save against the healing spell. Likewise, if you are facing a barbarian that gets combat bonuses when they are below half health, a strategy might be to heal him slightly to bring him back above half until you are ready to focus on him. He should be able to save against that too. Well, what happens if you try to cast a healing spell on a party member and they save against it?
I also understood that the best way for high-level mages to do extra damage is to up the difficulty of their spell instead of paying mana for more damage. Every ten levels of difficulty cost 50 mana and could cause someone to critically fail the spell, which adds 50% to the damage, so once your spell does over 100 points of damage, it makes more sense to up the difficulty to get more damage. This allows you to throw a 100-damage fireball into a swarm of fighters, including your party members. They might take 100 damage, but everyone else will take multiples of that.
So, Alixia has a difficulty rating of 50 for her spells. Since her party members will never save against her, she can lower that by 10 or 20 and get a discount of 50 or 100 mana on spells she casts to boost their abilities or heal them. The only limitation is that she can only lower difficulty by the amount that she is “inflicting” on someone else. So, if she is casting a boon to raise someone’s strength by 5, she can only decrease the difficulty by five. But for healing, since the lowest she can ever heal someone is 49, all her healing spells can be free. Of course, she has to memorize the spell that way, so she can’t change the difficulty on the fly in the middle of combat. She can also take advantage of this when casting Hold or Dispel spells against lower opponents. If she knows that level 10 characters have an MD of around 20, she can memorize a hold spell that lowers her natural difficulty from 50 to 40 and cast the spell with a 50 mana discount.
The one exception to this ability is that it doesn’t work on herself. She still has to pay normal mana costs when healing or boosting herself.
Because of this versatility, she needs to memorize many different versions of each spell, or else she will have to go into her inventory every time she casts to reprogram them. She knows 11 priestly spells but has 16 known spells. The Divine spells are all bonus spells and don’t count against her total. These five open spots allow her to memorize six different versions of each spell.
As for the Divine spells, she worships a warrior god. Divine Warrior costs ten mana per level, and she can swap her Melee and Damage Skills with two of her Wisdom skills for ten rounds. So, when she casts that spell, she will have +54 to attack and +48 damage. Her Armor, Shield, and Mace each cost 100 mana and last for ten rounds. The armor is equal to her Armor Skill, so it will give her +15 to AC and raise her MD by 15 as well, which is good because, after the swap, her MD went from 90 to 38. The shield is a medium shield +3, with one crit protection built in. The mace is a level 10 (two levels per 4 of the caster up to 10) +5 mace. Casting all that at once uses 520 mana, so she still has a little left.
Pieter
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Most of his character sheet is easy to understand, but I wanted to point out the damage he can do with his magic. Earlier in the story, Jace questions the effectiveness of magical attacks. He points out that he can do more damage in one melee attack than if he spent all his mana. Gracie assured him that high-level mages can do a ton of damage. Pieter has a Spell Difficulty of 66. Jace, at level 12, has a Magic Defense of 39, which is really high. Most melee fighters at 12 will be less than 30. If you have a MD of 30, even a roll of 20 is a critical failure against a Spell Difficulty of 66.
Pieter has a Spell Damage bonus of 55. So, if he spends five mana on an acid spell, it will 56 damage. Since he has all four levels of Acid training, that damage is increased by 100% to 112 damage. If the target fails the saving throw, the damage is increased by 50%. If they critically fail, it is increased by 100% to a total of 224. Acid damage continues every round, dropping by half each round. The difficulty to save drops by ten each round. Failing the save doesn’t result in any increase in damage. It is reasonable to assume that a fighter with poor Magic Defense might fail the save three rounds in a row and take 224 + 112 + 56 = 392. That would be the result of a 5-mana spell plus whatever Pieter spent on distance. Pieter has over 800 mana, so he could do this every round for a long time.
Obviously, Pieter is a level 22 mage, and at level 12, a mage would be less powerful, but if they attacked dumb monsters with low MD, they could get similar results.
Pieter has a # of Spells skill of 13 but has only chosen to know four. The nine empty slots mean he can memorize ten different configurations of each spell. This is specifically useful for his Control and Charm+ spells since the cost depends on the level of the player he casts it against. You want to maximize the difficulty to get as many critical failures from the target as possible. His three occupational feats (Influence) give him a +5 to Charm and Control spells.