Attributes, Stats, and Skills

Attributes

Attributes have two main functions - all of them have a direct bonus to certain skills and most of them offer a less obvious bonus to various other aspects of the game.  For instance, strength will increase your chance-to-hit when you are attacking with a sword, but it will also increase the damage you do by one point for every 10 points of strength.  Coordination increases the damage done by daggers and missile weapons.  Quickness increases the rate at which you attack to a point.  Endurance increases your natural immunities to damage and your regeneration time.

For a complete listing of the formulae to determine the bonus to the various skills, visit the race and creation page.

There are also 3 Secondary Attributes - Health, Stamina, and Mana.  Health is pretty obvious - run out of health and you die.  You can heal yourself with magic, healing kits, eating magical food, or by just laying down.  Stamina is used every time you swing a weapon, shoot an arrow, or avoid damage.  If you run out of stamina, you will be exhausted and be unable to make powerful attacks and your melee and missile defenses will be reduced substantially, which can lead to a quick death.  Recover Stamina in the same way as Health.  Mana is used any time you cast a spell.  The cost of casting spells increases with their difficulty and can be reduced by mana conversion.  You can recover mana in the same way as with Health and Stamina, but instead of casting a spell to increase your mana, you need to drain it from another creature or convert your health or stamina into mana.  All three of these secondary attributes can be raised by spending experience.  Health and Stamina are linked to Endurance, with Stamina increasing by one for each point of Endurance and Health increasing for every two points.  Mana increases by one for each point of Self.

Stats and Skills - The Core Mechanism

Each skill represents your ability to perform an action successfully.  The higher the skill, the more difficult things you can accomplish.  Weapon skills tell you how likely you are to hit an enemy, for instance.  Every single time you try to do something, your skill is compared to the difficulty of success, and then that difference is turned into a percentage of success using a normal curve.  If your skill and the difficulty are equal, you have a 50% chance of success.  If you have a positive difference of about 50 points, you should succeed over 95% of the time.  Having a skill lower than the difficulty isn't an issue if you are in melee combat, but if you are trying to heal, cast spells, or craft an item, a low success rate can be costly or even deadly.  Remember - there's always a change you'll fail, even if your skill is 100 points greater than the difficulty.

The base values for your stats have been determined by your attribute bonuses, but you can increase any stat separately by spending experience on it.  Keep in mind that it might be more efficient to raise the attributes tied to your skill than the skill itself!  Also bear in mind that there is a cap on the amount of experience you can add to any skill.  The total experience any skill can take is 2^32 or roughly 4.3 billion experience.  For attributes and trained skills, that means you can raise a skill 190 times.  Specialized skills cost less per point, so you will have a higher upward limit on those skills.

New Skills

As you level, you will earn Skill Credits at various levels.  You can use these to augment your set of trained skills.  Credits are earned at levels: 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, 35, and then again every 5 levels until level 130.  After level 130, you will earn a credit at 140, 150, 160, 180, 200, 225, 250, and 275.  There are  also a two one-time quests to earn an additional credit, which are available once you reach level 35 and again at level 90.  Credits can be refunded, but there is a quest involved that can only be repeated once every 3 weeks, so spend your credits wisely!  Also bear in mind that you may only spend a total of 64 credits on specialized skills (that includes training and specialization costs), so you will have to spend your specialization credits carefully.