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Skills & Stats  

Bare bones

As was said before, Rangers are the wilderness warriors, the survivalists. Thusly, a Ranger's primary skillset is survival. Their secondaries are armor and weapons, leaving magic and lore as tertiary. Remember, skillset level has no bearing on whether or not you could have mastery of a skill (Animal Lore is Ranger-only, but it is still a lore and is tertiary) it merely impacts how fast you can learn the skill. Mastery is left to those who can overcome the arduous training necessary to reach the upper levels, especially so when dealing with a slow-moving tertiary skill. Also, a Ranger's magic tends to follow a single focus: enhancing their ability to survive.

Minimum stats to join the Ranger Guild are 8 each in strength, agility and stamina. Strength will allow you to swing a melee weapon faster, strike with more force, and to overcome more drastic physical boundaries (aids in things such as swimming and climbing). Stamina determines how well you endure physical attack and the fatigue things such as combat or certain survival activities (again, swimming and climbing, amongst others such as running trails) will incur. Strength and stamina are also factors in your tolerance for encumbrance, the higher your strength/stamina the more you can carry without being encumbered. Agility aids in the use of missile weapons, armor and acts of manual dexterity such as the disarming or lockpicking of boxes and certain tasks using the mechanical lore skill.

It is highly recommended one also watch their reflexes, as Rangers get their biggest bonuses (hindrance, stealth, etc) for leather armor; also because evasion, the most effective defense of them all, is a survival skill that couples with one's reflexes. Rangers also have abilities and spells which give them an advantage as archers. As noted in the archery section, evasion (and therefore reflexes) is HIGHLY important to an archer, since one cannot parry (well, they can, but it would seriously damage the bow, as they are relatively fragile) or use a shield when they are using a bow.

One of the Ranger's abilities is beseeches. These rely on spirit health for their power. Spirit health is determined predominantly by one's charisma, another factor to bear in mind when selecting one's stats to train with their hard-earned time development points (TDP's). The lower-level beseeches simply take a fixed amount of spirit health to enact, but they also have a fixed effect. Upper-level beseeches have variant effects based on how much of your spirit you choose to put into it by aligning a portion of your spirit (verb usage: ALIGN <x>) before enacting the beseech. More charisma means more spirit available to use for these, as well as having more time before one departs automatically whether they want to or not.

Intelligence and wisdom are not directly useful for a Ranger, but they are indirectly so. Since both affect learning rates of one's skills ... more intelligence means more experience can be accumulated before becoming "mind locked" and temporarily unable to learn that skill, more wisdom means larger portions of one's field experience gets "pulsed" into hard-earned skills that are actually learned ... a Ranger who ensures they do not neglect these skills will find themselves surviving better simply because they are able to accumulate the skills which enable them to survive faster.

Discipline plays a minor role in the same factors as intelligence and wisdom for experience gain. But it also affects many other things in small ways, it is truly the workhorse stat and should be kept well-trained. A high discipline can help to avoid or more quickly recover from stuns, can (depending on the circumstances) help one to resist the crazed battle cry of a roaring Barbarian ... or any of many things that even the players have yet to discover.

TDP's are awarded in two ways: gaining a circle and through gaining skills. Up until 10th circle, you will be awarded 50 TDP's plus the number of the circle you just gained. After that, you will gain 100 TDP's plus circle. As for skills, every time you increase a skill by a full rank, a number of points equal to the new rank is added to a pool. Every time that pool is in excess of 200 points, 200 points are deducted from the pool and 1 TDP added to your total. So at the beginning, it will take 20 ranks in a single skill to gain one TDP from it, since 1+2+3+...+20=201 points. But later on, 2 ranks could earn a TDP (such as 100 and 101), a TDP for every rank gained (200+) or even multiple TDP's per rank in a skill! You get a TDP for *every* 200 points accumulated and the pool is not reset, so don't worry about whther you might "waste" any.

These TDP's are "spent" at training facilities where your stats can be raised, such as training wisdom or intelligence at the Asemath Academy in Crossing. The base cost is 3 TDP's per point you currently have in that stat. So if you have a strength of 15 and wish to raise it to 16, it will cost you 45 TDP's, for example. Training also incurs a cost equal to double the number of TDP's used. If you do not have the coin with you, it will be added to your provincial debt. New characters just training for the first time will have the cost automatically added to their debt, ignoring any coins they might have on them at the time, so don't worry about that.

The base TDP cost is adjusted by racial modifiers. Some races are more pronounced in certain areas, and receive a bonus to their TDP cost in that stat, as well as a higher limit to their initial roll. Some also have deficiencies in certain areas, reflected by a penalty to their TDP cost and a lower maximum starting stat. All races will balance out to 0 when their penalties and bonuses are added together. Hence, they all also have a maximum possible starting roll (total of all stats combined) of 80 although that is rare and could take thousands of rolls to acquire. A roll of 76 is pretty good and nothing to sneeze at. Anything over 70 is acceptable if you do not have the patience to stick it out and wait for a better one.

For example, a Kaldar (my race of choice) has a bonus of -1 to strength and charisma, a penalty of +1 to intelligence and wisdom. As a result, their maximum starting stats are 12 strength and charisma, 8 intelligence and wisdom, 10 everything else. Their TDP costs are 2.5 TDP's/point for strength/charisma, 3.5 TDP's per point for intelligence and wisdom, 3 TDP's/point for all others. As you can see here, each level of bonus/penalty means a difference of 2 on the starting stats and 0.5 in TDP cost.

The measure of one's progress is marked as one's "circle". For those who have played other RPG's in the past, they are likely to recognize this as being the same thing as one's "level". Your Guildleader will assess your skills and determine if you are ready for the next circle when you stand before them and "ask <guildleader name> about exp". The circle requirements (usually referred to by the players simply as one's "req's") are set by the Guildleaders based on their basic expectations of how one would progress as they grow within the Guild. As of the time of this posting (3/4/2003), the Guilds are all undergoing a rewrite of their req's, reassessing the ones already existing and adding the new req's for circles past 99. Below, I list both the old and new req's, the new to be implemented approximately sometime in April of 2004. Please note that the old req's are approximate as they were never officially announced (as far as I know) and these were determined by a long-standing player whose calc has yet to fail me and are, as far as I can tell, accurate. Thank you Barnacus, aka PBOMBARD ... your calc has served me well for 3 years and counting. Well, until the new req's are implemented anyway. <grin> A few minor changes were implemented after his calc was posted, such as the addition of a secondary weapon requirement and the req change at 75th, I included those as well.

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