Character Progression: Stat Points, Skill Points, and Core Stats

Character progression is driven by Stat Points and Skill Points, allowing players to customize their characters’ physical, mental, and magickal capabilities. Whether you aim to master physical combat, TRACE Magick, or agile maneuvers, Stat and Skill Points form the foundation of a character’s unique strengths and abilities.

Stat Points are used to enhance the core attributes of your character, including Strength, Intelligence, Agility, Vitality, and Speed. Each stat influences different aspects of combat, movement, and TRACE control, shaping your character’s overall effectiveness and role within the team.

1. Roleplay Points (RPP): Each time you earn Roleplay Points, you receive 1 Stat Point per RPP earned. This rewards active engagement with the game’s world and storyline, allowing your character to grow through meaningful roleplay interactions.

2. Leveling Up: For every level gained, your character is awarded 2 Stat Points. This consistent increase allows for gradual but steady specialization in your chosen areas of expertise as your character advances.

Skill Points enable characters to unlock abilities, passive bonuses, and advanced techniques from their Skill Trees. Skill Trees are organized in the Skill Book, with branches for various abilities tailored to core stats, specializations, and TRACE abilities. Skill Points grant access to both offensive and defensive skills, as well as valuable passive effects.

1. Roleplay Points (RPP): Similar to Stat Points, each RPP earned also grants 1 Skill Point. This balanced system encourages both roleplay and mechanical growth, allowing characters to develop skills alongside their core attributes.

2. Leveling Up: For every even-numbered level (Level 2, 4, 6, etc.), your character receives 1 Skill Point. This slower progression rate supports a thoughtful approach to skill selection, ensuring each choice aligns with your character’s role.

Shounen tokens(ST) are limited-use tokens a player may obtain to help prevent death.

Core stats are the foundation of your character’s strengths and abilities. Investing Stat Points into these core areas enhances specific attributes, influencing everything from attack power and TRACE potency to movement range and defense.

Strength governs the power of physical attacks, increasing damage with certain heavy melee weapons like Claymores, Warhammers, and unarmed strikes. Strength represents raw, brute force and influences both offensive capabilities and inventory capacity.

• Damage Scaling: Strength directly boosts the power of heavy weapons, making it ideal for close-range combat specialists.
• Inventory Capacity: Every 5 points in Strength grants 1 additional inventory slot, reflecting your character’s enhanced carrying ability and physical endurance.

Intelligence measures your character’s ability to control TRACE energy, enhancing magickal skills and abilities. Intelligence not only boosts the raw power of TRACE-based attacks but also increases TRACE reserves, allowing for more prolonged spellcasting.

• TRACE Ability Scaling: Every 2 points in Intelligence raises the effectiveness of TRACE-based abilities (Power, Healing, etc.), which influences all spells and Magitech abilities.
• TRACE Reserve: For every 10 points in Intelligence, gain 1 additional TRACE Reserve point. All characters begin with 5 TRACE points, with 1 point regenerating per turn during combat. Starting at max TRACE Reserve in each battle provides a strategic advantage in casting.

Agility boosts your character’s Initiative and enhances the effectiveness of finesse weapons such as Katanas, Swords, and Odachis. This stat allows for faster reaction times, increased movement flexibility, and agility-based combat advantages.

• Initiative Boost: Each point of Agility contributes 0.5 points to Initiative, allowing characters to act more quickly in combat (see Initiative below).
• Agility-Based Weapon Scaling: Agility directly influences the damage of lightweight weapons, allowing faster characters to strike effectively and with precision.

Speed increases both your character’s movement range and Initiative, enabling rapid positioning and strategic placement on the battlefield. Characters with high Speed can navigate terrain more efficiently and act earlier in turn order.

• Movement Range: For every 10 points in Speed, gain 1 additional movement tile. This allows high-Speed characters to cover greater distances quickly.
• Initiative Contribution: Speed contributes 1.0 Initiative per point, making it more impactful in determining turn order than Agility alone.

Vitality enhances health, resilience, and resistance to both physical and magickal damage, making it essential for tank or frontline characters. Vitality grants both health bonuses and damage reduction, reducing the impact of incoming attacks.

• Health Points (HP): Every 1 point in Vitality grants 3 additional Health Points. Characters begin with a base of 100 HP.
• Physical Damage Reduction: Every 5 points in Vitality adds 10 pts in Physical Damage Reduction.
• Magical Damage Reduction: Every 10 points in Vitality adds 5 pts in Magical Damage Reduction.

Note: Both Physical and Magical Damage Reduction are capped at 80%, which includes cumulative bonuses from skills, stances, and armor.

Initiative controls the order of movement and attacks in combat. High Initiative allows characters to act earlier, giving them a tactical advantage in positioning and action.

• Initiative Formula: Initiative is calculated as (Agility / 2) + Speed.
• Higher Initiative scores allow characters to react quickly, dodge incoming attacks, and control the pace of combat.

This stat reflects the percentage of physical damage your character mitigates. Physical Damage Reduction is valuable for frontline characters, tanking hits, and reducing overall damage intake.

• Increase with Vitality: Every 5 points in Vitality grants 10 pts in Physical Damage Reduction.
• Reduction Cap: Physical Damage Reduction is soft capped with reduced gains scaling towards a hard cap of 80%.

This stat reflects the percentage of magical damage your character mitigates. It’s especially useful for defending against TRACE-based attacks from enemy magick users.

• Increase with Vitality: Every 10 points in Vitality grants 5 pts in Magical Damage Reduction.
• Reduction Cap: Magical Damage Reduction is also soft-capped with a full hard-cap at 80%.

The HUD provides a real-time overview of your character’s stats, abilities, and current state, helping players stay informed during gameplay.

• Health: Displays current Health as a percentage of maximum.
• Energy: Shows current Energy level, typically on a 1:1 scale with TRACE reserves.
• Sanity: Reflects the current Sanity level and mental state, which affects dialog, reactions, and may trigger involuntary behaviors at lower levels.
• Experience/Activity: Displays experience progress and activity level. Reaching 100% grants maximum RPP rewards from daily challenges.

The HUD also displays additional metrics, such as Level, Roleplay Points, Reputation, and Shonen Tokens.

Sanity represents a character’s mental stability, expressed as both a percentage and descriptive mood. Sanity fluctuations impact dialog choices, character actions, and may lead to automatic or involuntary behavior at low levels.

Sanity levels, from lowest to highest, include: Insane, Psychotic, Very Stressed, Disturbed, Stressed, Anxious, Stable, Sane.

• Visual Trauma: Observing dead bodies or bloodstains lowers Sanity.
• Shadow Entities: Prolonged exposure to Shadows reduces Sanity by 7%, with a cooldown.
• Encounters with Entities: Contact with certain entities reduces Sanity by 25%.
• Combat and Sacrifice: Killing NPCs, burying bodies, or performing rituals may reduce Sanity.
• Augmentations: Bionics lower maximum Sanity by 10–20% per implant.

• Consumables: Items like alcohol and cigarettes provide minor Sanity restoration.
• Interactions: Engaging with furniture or activities (petting a cat, tending a bonsai) restores Sanity on a 20-minute cooldown.
• Companionship: Taking selfies with friends or praying at the Shrine of the Fallen provides boosts.
• Rest: Sleeping restores +15 Sanity.

With these systems, character progression becomes a rich, flexible journey, allowing you to craft your character into a uniquely capable force, ready to face the myriad challenges trace/ALTER has to offer.