Worth the Candle

We had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred days before we found a new solution to the sleeping problem, and then a different deadline of sixty days until we killed or otherwise dealt with the Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle problem. I had never been a particular fan of timers when I was a DM, partly because tracking days was a pain in the butt, and partly because I didn’t like giving the players clear fail conditions. A clear fail condition tended to make the game less fun for everyone, since a blown deadline was, in essence, a punishment, and good game design was more about positive reinforcement of the fun aspects. Further, time limits could force the party into doing things that they didn’t really want to do, just from the fear of missing out or the time pressure involved. That wasn’t to say that I never did time limits, because I had done a whole bunch of ill-advised stuff and tried to make difficult things work, but it was something that I shied away from, as a general rule.

There were other deadlines looming. We were in hock with the dragons over the airspace thing, and the Void Beast was looming, two problems at opposite ends of the scale in terms of seriousness. It required a lot of consideration on our part, because we knew that whatever we didn’t focus on would keep rolling along without us. In a way, the exclusions were nice, because they didn’t really do much and would keep pretty much indefinitely. I was content to just let all of the exclusions sit there, being various degrees of horrible, for as long as I could.

The time pressure was a pain because in an ideal world, the Respec would be done immediately before a significant chunk of downtime, and putting downtime in right before a deadline was, essentially, procrastination. Worse, we didn’t actually know that scheduled downtime would be actual downtime, because stupid random bullshit could conceivably come at us from any direction at any time. For all that though, we were pretty sure that we knew where all of our enemies and potential enemies were, and so there wasn’t really a better time than the present.

The last time I had changed my skills, I’d had very little idea what I was doing. I knew virtually nothing about any of the skills, and I was working under the threat of imminent soul fuckery from Fallatehr, which seemed like ages ago. This time, I had friends and allies around me, plus as much information about the underlying mechanics of the system as Reimer could give me, as well as his particular picks for skills and how they had played within the game that this system was, apparently, based off of.

“Ready?” I asked. I got a round of nods, then went into my soul.

There were a few skills that were Tier 1, never removed from any possible reformulation of the character sheet. Those were Essentialism, Spirit, Bone Magic, and Still Magic, all of which were cost-less and evergreen. Everything else had been on the chopping block, at least in theory, but there were forty skills to fill in, and a few of them had been on the provisional sheet for a long time. One-Handed, Two-Handed, Parry, and Dodge made up the suite of martial skills, and there were a lot of magics that were slapped in as well, either in anticipation of unlocking them, or because they had enough potential utility to be worth it. Vibrational Magic, Blood Magic, Revision Magic, Star Magic, Velocity Magic, Plastic Magic, Ink Magic, Passion Magic, Water Magic, Warding, Gem Magic, Air Magic, Fire Magic, and Rune Magic all made the cut, with a lot of those being wishful thinking on our part. Back when we’d been in Barren Jewel, we had tried to unlock a bunch of different magics, but it wasn’t until I’d learned soul magic that I had known that some magics were simply locked off to me by virtue of having not been selected from the get-go.

That left another eighteen skills, which was where things began to get interesting.

Reimer was big on two things: synergies between skills and lynchpin strategies. He made the argument that with still magic as strong as it was, and entad armor working even if you didn’t have the skills for it, none of the armor skills were needed, especially if I had blade-bound quality parrying and at least relatively high dodge. Armor was good if and only if there was some kinetic threat that still magic didn’t actually deal with. On the other hand, armor skills gave virtues, and Medium Armor in particular had virtues that made it beneficial to have and level all of the different armor skills, though Reimer hadn’t known the full virtue list.

The problem with the synergies in general was that Reimer didn’t know all of them, and he half expected that “I” had made them up as needed for different games or just to give non-item rewards. There were a few that Reimer had been able to confirm for certain, like the blade-bound one and the monkish one, and a whole bunch of others that seemed neat but probably were never going to be used by me, like the skin/bone/blood/pustule one, which I couldn’t get now that skin magic was excluded. Others, like the ‘connections’ synergy, included crap skills that I would have to take and level up as a cost of doing business. Beyond those, there might be any number of synergies to be found, because they simply hadn’t played enough different characters to find them all, especially since they tended to play at the lower levels.

There were also “soft” synergies, those that weren’t hardcoded into the game but nonetheless existed through either rules interactions or simply the way that two skills meshed with each other. Air magic and rifles had a soft synergy because you could make the air less turbulent, which would mean not having to account for the wind. Blood magic had a soft synergy with anything that let me bleed less and regain blood faster. There were a bunch of those, all over the place, ways that X would make Y stronger simply because of different non-explicit overlap between the skills or ways that an inherent weakness could be shored up.

And beyond that, there were synergies that were barely synergies at all, like skills that depended on the same pair of attributes. Rather than being synergies, they were places where a single cost paid for more, and in the optimization balance, that made some skills worth getting simply because they slotted in so well.

To that end, Reimer and Amaryllis had agreed that I should probably focus on being a melee mage, with a focus on the mage side of things. The idea was that I would be able to run into combat, unleash a ton of magic while hacking at things with my sword. Reimer wasn’t terribly fond of it, I could tell, but that was because he saw it as making the best of a bad situation, the kind of thing you did because you had poor stat allocation from the get-go rather than optimally placed points. The plan was to place all remaining points from every future level into MEN, angling toward more and more mentally-oriented magic.

And that meant cutting out social skills almost entirely.

“Give the numbers a look,” Reimer said. “It’s skill multiplied by the primary attribute in the naive case. Right?”

“Right,” I replied. “And what kind of DC are we looking at?”

“DC?” Reimer asked.

“Difficulty class,” I replied. “The target number.”

“We called them TNs,” said Reimer. “Why ‘difficulty class’?”

“It descends from ‘armor class’,” I replied. “Or at least, I think it does. Early editions had THAC0 but not DC, I think.”

“How did they do skill resolutions without a TN?” asked Reimer.

“This really, really isn’t important, but they had different resolution mechanics for everything that you could want to try,” I replied. “So you’d have fatigue factors and a percentile chance for drowning based on a table, and other things like that. It wasn’t until third edition that everything was put together under difficulty class. Arthur had us play a one-shot of each of the older versions.”

“That’s wild,” said Reimer, shaking his head. “And that sounds just like him.”

“You were telling me to give the numbers a look?” I asked.

“Right,” said Reimer. “Right. So, let’s compare you against a hypothetical optimized character, even a poorly optimized character. Heck, even one as poorly optimized for social skills as you are optimized for physical skills. An eleven in SOC means they’re multiplying their skill by ten, and that skill is going to be thirty or so, which means they get a bonus of three hundred against the TN. That means achievable range in the naive case of three hundred and one to four hundred.” He waited for me to nod. “Right, so you’re sitting here with a four in SOC, meaning a multiplier to skill of three, and you cap out at a whopping nine on that skill. That means a bonus of twenty-seven, and an achievable range, again, in the naive case with no adjustments or multipliers, of twenty-eight to one hundred and twenty-seven.”

“So you’re saying that there’s a … what, no point?” I asked. “That it’s mostly just down to luck?”

“Well, no,” said Reimer. “It’s down to GM fiat, because the GM sets the TNs. But after the TN is set, then it’s down to luck. Wait, did I tell you how our system handled unskilled rolls?”

“You said there was some leeway,” I replied. “More GM fiat, which I’m sure you hated.”

“Right,” said Reimer. “Because it was inconsistent.”

“Oh come on,” I replied. “LIke you would really have liked if I had written everything down as it came up and then ran off that.”

“Well, no,” said Reimer. “Because it would have been completely busted, like half the stuff you came up with. But my point is that unskilled rolls had this wishy-washiness to them, where you would try to take into account the character’s life and what they had been through, and it was all just so,” he threw up his hands without completing the thought. “I liked the system, but I liked it because I liked the numbers, the idea that it was, you know, a process that was unfolding in front of us, a clockwork.”

“A simulation,” I said.

“Yeah,” replied Reimer, nodding fervently. “A simulation. And to circle back some, I think your numbers as they are now are really just about who you are as a person, rather than being explicit rolls, except in certain specific cases. Mostly I think that because you’re just being Juniper. Maybe a little better than you were, but we could just chalk that up to you getting your head partway out your ass.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I replied with a frown. “I’m on the fence over whether the changes that I’ve noticed were from me just trying more or placebo effect or what.” I looked down at the papers in front of us. “I still think there’s an upside to keeping social skills. It cuts off the lowest possible results.”

“Sure,” said Reimer. “I’m not some moron arguing that there’s no benefit, I’m saying that the benefit of getting a bonus of a few hundred on any other check is worth more than a plus twenty-seven on the social stuff, even if you have to deal with social stuff on a regular basis. The range change we’re talking about for social skills is basically about taking you from baseline functionality to slightly better than baseline functionality. You’re not going to get extreme disposition changes or wildly impressive performances, not on the social side of things.”

“I get that from a numbers perspective,” I said.

“That’s the only perspective,” said Reimer.

“No,” I replied. “There’s the arbitration-of-rules side to think about.”

“Which happens with or without the numbers,” said Reimer. “Or which the numbers only influence, not control.”

“I’ll think about it,” I replied.

“Just so you know, I’m probably going to give Amaryllis the same speech, and she’s probably going to agree with me,” said Reimer.

“Yeah, she probably is,” I sighed.

I was trying hard to view the game layer as being just a game layer, rather than being me. It was hard though, because the game layer was written on my soul, and though I wasn’t the sum of my learnable abilities, it wasn’t that far of a stretch. Reimer’s interpretation of “effective skill” had been that it was just the base number, meaning that it would be multiplied by my abilities, rather than by whoever’s abilities I had borrowed from, at least for the purposes of Symbiosis. Taken that way, my nine in Flattery was really useless, because Symbiosis would push me up into the mid-twenties. The same applied to pretty much all of the social skills I had retained.

So I cut them, as much as I didn’t want to, because that was the plan.

In their place went a wide array of useful things, mostly those along the same axis as everything that had already been added, taking into account all of the skills that I was planning to keep. Optics went in, because there was a known synergy with Gem Magic. I took a cluster of mental abilities, because I was going to be pushing MEN anyway: Engineering, Analysis, Research, Repair, Logistics, Logic, Mathematics, and Alchemy, some of which synergized with either magics or with each other. After that, because there was some space, a few additional skills were added, some because I found them consistently useful: Athletics, Rifles, Language, Unarmored, and Unarmed.

Two skills were for my personal preference, Heavy Armor and Thrown Weapons, skills which I could arguably do without, but where my own desires won out. Heavy Armor in particular seemed like a skill that was bound to save my life some day, especially if Still Magic eventually got knocked back down from grandmaster status. Thrown Weapons was also arguable, given how much range I already had, but it had been a part of my arsenal for a long time, a fair amount of entad support, and honestly, I just thought it was cool.

That left two, which went to more speculative abilities: Tree Magic and Gold Magic.

Tree Magic was contentious, because we still didn’t know what it did. Gold Magic was even more contentious, because it came with a steep downside. Both were taken on contingency, the former because it might end up being necessary, the latter so that we could break glass in case of emergency.

As I went through, taking skills out, I was stripping the ones I'd never use again of their points through Skilled Trade. Sixty-one went into Essentialism, getting me back to the capstone, and the rest went to pushing up skills to higher levels, prioritizing good virtues. Gem Magic was also a priority, because it had historically been one of the slower skills to gain levels, and the newfound synergies made it actually usable.

And that was that, dozens of hours of work and argument condensed down into forty skills. I didn’t even necessarily know all the reasons that everything was chosen, because character optimization was never a strong interest of mine, and a lot of the work had been done while I was in the middle of other stuff, especially that week I’d spent in the temple at Li’o. It was all decided, and it was just a matter of putting it into practice with no deviations or surprises.