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Characters and progression

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.

How characters improve, how they heal, what they start with, and the principle the founder calls the point of the whole system: everything is numbers and modifiers. Status: the founder's theory, 2026-10-26. The math is deliberately unsolved: "we don't need to solve any math until we've laid down all our theory."

The keystone principle

  • M1. Everything is numbers and modifiers. Everything in the game is some combination of numbers and modifiers, applied to the character that owns it, to a character it affects, or to both. The founder's examples run from a piece of armour, a rocket and a banana peel to a freight train, a laser beam, and a disintegration spell cast from the eye of a mad god: "it's all just some combination of math applied at different angles." Things differ only in which numbers they touch and from which angle.

Readings:

  • "An affected character" includes objects. Objects already carry numbers (every object has a weight), and abilities can change the world. So a door or a wall can be what a modifier lands on.
  • What it means for the code: the existing combat systems (weapon statistics, conditions, exposure, attribute formulas, stamina and mana) are separate hand-built shapes today. Under M1 they become instances of one modifier model. That rebuild waits until the theory is complete and controllers are discussed. Nothing changes yet.

Decided

Progression

  • P1. Levels are earned with experience.
  • P2. Experience comes from combat victories, completed quests, and other events.
  • P3. Each level raises attributes by some amount X by default. Race and class modify it. X is math, so it isn't set.
  • P4. Attribute points can't be spent until level 3, following the books.
  • P5. Attributes can be modified temporarily by outside effects such as equipment or status effects.

Recovery

  • Q1. Lost health doesn't come back by default. Something has to restore it.
  • Q2. Anything can restore health, actively or passively: skills, items, racial abilities, spells and so on.
  • Stamina and mana still regenerate on their own. Q1 is about health only.

Starting state and equipment

  • C1. Every character starts with a full set of clothes, no armour and no weapons. (Reading: clothes are objects with weight, and by default carry no modifiers.)
  • C2. Equipment beyond weapons exists. It can modify any statistic or ability, as weapons, abilities and spells do.
  • Movement costs stamina: sprinting, jumping and dodging draw on the same pool as melee.

Deferred to the "pre-final" math

Dexterity's numbers; the movement baseline (speeds, jumping, dodging, climbing, falling); X per level; and how every attribute scales.

Open (founder's call)

  1. How P3 and P4 fit together. The assistant's reading: each level grants X points, the player spends them, and points earned before level 3 are banked until then. The other possible reading: part of each level's gain is automatic and part is points to spend.
  2. The shape of the modifier model. This is theory, not math, and it's the next thing M1 needs:
    • what a modifier names (which number, on whom);
    • its operation (add, multiply, set);
    • the order operations apply in;
    • how modifiers from the same source stack;
    • how long one lasts (instant, timed, while equipped, permanent).

The assistant offered to draft a proposal for the modifier model. That's where the project stood when it was parked.

The general version of M1 is on Everything is numbers and modifiers.