ROA(M)D - 5 - I claim that one over there

Its time to talk about the player characters in the game, the claimed ones. As I explained earlier, the players are astral beings, not really existing in the world of the game. To interact with the world, they have to claim mortals who will then be their vessel. However, these mortals are, well, mortals and still can die. There is no respawn or magical resurrection, when they die, they are gone for good. But there are always more mortals to claim.

The claimed ones, or characters, are not too different from your run of the mill RPG character. They have attributes, stats and status, they can equip items, level up and learn new skills. Let's start with the attributes of which there are 6.

Strength:
Physical strength, useful when attacking with a weapon, helps you equip heavy items and when you explore some encounters might need you to be strong enough, for example to force a door open.

Dexterity:
General dexterity of your character. Whether you have to actually hit with your weapon, use a fiddly tool or sneak around in the environment, begin dexterous helps with all of that.

Constitution:
You physical endurance and stamina. From your hitpoints to energy over equipping heavy armor to resisting poison effects, constitution defines how robust your character's body is.

Speed:
How fast you can move and react. It helps to hit and have the initiative, but it also helps to evade or, if necessary, run away.

Attunement:
This attribute indicates how well your claimed one adjusts to, lets say, otherworldly forces. It defines how well your astral essence can interact with them, but also opens the door to tapping other supernatural forces in the form of spells, equipment and... other things.

Charisma:
Unsurprisingly this helps with interactions with NPCs, from unlocking options to persuade or charm to recruiting people to your cause, charisma is helping you in situations where other attributes do not.

To increase these attributes beyond the base levels you will have to gain experience and level up. Once you do, you get attribute points which you can spend to increase attributes, fairly standard. However, there will be other sources of attributes, like gear or consumables in the future.

Let's move on to your stats. The obvious ones are your experience and level, as well as your hitpoints. I think those are fairly self explanatory. Other than that there is energy, which is basically your action limit. Exploring, working, gathering, it all needs energy, which can be restored by eating food and other means. There are many other stats which are not worth mentioning here or would require more explanation of other things, I will talk about them another time. But what I do want to talk about now are skills and abilities.

Traditionally as you level up you would just pick a skill or talent from a list or you go to a trainer who ominously knows how to train you in a skill with the click of a button. With permadeath for your claimed ones, it would be quite punishing to start at zero every time you die. It also doesn't make sense for you, as a claimant, to have to learn the same skill over and over again, after all, you can't die. For that reason the game has something I call forged memories.

The basic idea is that you the player, the astral claimant, forges memories from the experiences acquired during your interaction with the world. To abstract this, there are two components to forging memories, skill points and lingering memories. Skill points are acquired as you level up, in professions (combat, gathering, crafting, etc.). The skill points don't directly do anything, they are just indicators how much experience and knowledge you collected in a certain area of the game. The second are lingering memories, a sort of blank-slate memory which you can use to forge into a concrete one.

Lingering memories come from characters. As they die you will collect some of them into your inventory, the amount depending on your total skill points accumulated at the time of death. You can also retire your character peacefully which will give you more memories as you extract them peacefully. Further, you will likely be able to burn skill points to create lingering memories one way or another as the game and the economy develops. Basically lingering memories are the rogue-lite mechanic which makes sure dying rewards you in some way and makes you stronger over time.

But how do you get stronger? Well, you forge memories. So if you have lingering memories and acquired enough skill points during your claimed ones life, let's say in combat, you can forge a combat memory, for example "steady hands". This memory allows you to keep your hand calm and in stressful situations and increases your hit chance (one of the status effects I mentioned above). This means on the one hand, you need to secure enough lingering memories (which are tradeable) but you also need to have your character reach the required skill points in a profession to actually forge a lasting memory. The good news is, that if you did that, the forged memory will be yours forever, eternally available to you, the claimant.

So what do you do with forged memories? Well there are two kinds, knowledge and skills. Knowledge is sort of a passive unlock, for example the knowledge how to gather a certain herb or mine a certain ore. The knowledge how to read or communicate with certain types of NPCs. Things you simply know and that is enough.

The second category are skills, which can be active or passive. The above mentioned steady hand memory would be an example for a passive skill. It is a muscle memory thing, it is not enough to know that a calm hand will allow you to hit better, you have to live it. Or rather your claimed one has to live it, which is the reason why this memory must be infused. The other category are active skills, for example unlocking a special ability for combat. You could have the forged memory of how to do high kick and, if infused, your character would be able to use it in combat.

Infusing is simple, doesn't cost you anything, but there is a limited number of memories which can be infused into a claimed one, depending on the attunement attribute. To infuse a memory your claimed one may have to fulfill certain preconditions, like a minimum level or minimum dexterity. This is to, on the one hand, prevent incredibly overpowered level 1 characters, which would diminish the value of leveling and on the other hand make all forged memories situational useful. Basically you will build your memory library over time and then pick and choose which skills to infuse into your character.

Admittedly, it may sound overly complicated and daunting, especially when compared to traditional "level up, pick talent" games, but I believe that this is quite a revolutionary system for a rogue-lite MMO and I am not aware of anyone having tried such a system. It offers constant, open-ended progression without making the leveling experience just a chore until you reach the endgame. It offers room for experimentation and specialization without locking you into anything like a class system would and as a result you are not forced to level an alternate character all the way to see how it plays in the inevitable endgame. In fact it adds a lot of decisions. Which memories should I infuse? Retire to gain more lingering memories? Push further to gain enough skill points to unlock a certain skill? Focus on one specialization or go broad for more options? And as I mentioned before, I think options and decision are vital to enjoyable gameplay.

Well, that's it for today. I think the memory thing went on for a bit too long but I don't want to split it now. If anyone reads through all of it, let me know what you think or ask me if anything is unclear. Otherwise, I think with me mentioning a lot of combat oriented skills it makes sense to talk about the actual combat next time.

BR
thatclaimgamedev