I sat at the bar until closing time, but Hood Girl never came back. Keeper was way too busy to give me any more info about Dark Elves, as was Meg, so mostly I sat and stewed. But at least I did decide it was time to spend some points. Hoarding points was a thing that sometimes made sense and sometimes not, but obviously the story, so to speak, was about to pick up and I might as well try to be as ready as I could. Besides, I wanted to try to figure out how stats worked in the Leveling System.

Character Sheet.

Name: Chris Erikson

Class: Song Mage

Level: 5

Health: 110

Breath: 160

Stamina: 100

Strength: 10

Intelligence: 16

Wisdom: 12

Dexterity: 14

Constitution: 10

Charisma: 12

Resonance: C#

Element: Shadow / Thought

Stat Points: 3

Known Manifestations:

Call Shadows, Slow Thought, Disrupt Enchantment

Known Harmony Manifestations:

Create Dream Water (C#/D)

Special Skills:

Omniglot, Leader of the Band

Band Members:

Meg Brightman (Primary Singer, D)

Three points to spend. Not a lot. This system is really stingy. So let’s think about this…

I already knew that adding a point to Constitution had increased my health from 100 to 110, which made ZERO sense.

Or wait… does it?

In old-school Dungeons and Dragons, the scale went from 3 to 18 - you couldn’t have a stat lower than three and still be alive, absent some kind of curse or something, and it couldn’t be higher than 18 absent some kind of buff. This is because to get your stat scores you rolled three six-sided dice and added them up, which could have a sum anywhere from 3 (three ones) to 18 (three sixes.)

If the scale goes to 18, then 9 would be about in the middle, which would maybe make 100 an “average” health score!

Now this made a little more sense. (Yes, I know, technically 9 isn’t “in the middle” of 3-18. Shut up.) Normally in Dungeons and Dragons you rolled dice to get your hit point score, too, with modifiers based on your class and your stats. But if everything here was somehow at least loosely correlated to “reality,” then there was no randomness, just multipliers. Though maybe it wasn’t direct multiplication. I was pretty pleased with myself until something occurred to me.

But then why is my Stamina 100 when both my Strength and my Constitution are 10, which is a point past the middle?

Then something else occurred to me. Usually it was Strength, or Constitution, or both, that influenced how much health you had in most role-playing games. And it was Constitution, more often than not, that was either most important or the only influencer. But…

Meg’s Strength is 9 and her Constitution is 12 - but she only has 100 health! So with one stat average and one 25% above average, her health is… average?

So it couldn’t be that her 100 was based on an “average” score in them, either. I resisted the urge to bang my head on the bar and thought about where placing a point would give me the most information. Adding a point to Constitution had gotten me 10 Health - and no Stamina. Usually those were linked pretty tight in RPG as well. So either it wasn’t one-to-one, or Constitution didn’t affect Stamina… or nothing affected Stamina, which seemed unlikely but entirely possible. I was tempted to put a point in Strength, not only to get more buffer-er, but to see if that increased Stamina.

The Help System, by the way, was as usual not as helpful as it might be. If I asked it about the stats, it just had uber-simple explanations for each that were the typical vaguely snarky. For instance:

Strength: Strength is a measure of how strong you are. Admittedly, it doesn’t measure how “streng” you are, but it should have been obvious from the name.

None of the descriptions of stats said anything about how they were linked to each other, so that was out. Experimenting was my only option. But while Strength was tempting, I was a magic-user, not a marathon runner, and it was way more important to me to be good at that than to be able to run a little bit farther. If I was running I was probably dead anyway. The two stats usually linked to magic use were Intelligence and Wisdom. And my Intelligence was already frighteningly high - much higher than I would ever have said it was, honestly. So:

One Stat Point to Wisdom.

There was maybe the smallest little twinge in my head, but other than that nothing happened, just like before.

Character Sheet.

Name: Chris Erikson

Class: Song Mage

Level: 5

Health: 110

Breath: 160

Stamina: 100

Strength: 10

Intelligence: 16

Wisdom: 13

Dexterity: 14

Constitution: 10

Charisma: 12

Resonance: C#

Element: Shadow / Thought

Stat Points: 2

Known Manifestations:

Call Shadows, Slow Thought, Disrupt Enchantment

Known Harmony Manifestations:

Create Dream Water (C#/D)

Special Skills:

Omniglot, Leader of the Band

Band Members:

Meg Brightman (Primary Singer, D)

“Well, shit,” I muttered to myself. Keeper looked at me from down the bar but just shrugged when I saw I wasn’t talking to him (or anybody else.)

That didn’t change ANYTHING. What the Hell, System?

I sat and thought about this for a second. Then I realized that Manifestations used a certain amount of Breath to use. If changing Wisdom didn’t change how much breath I had, maybe…

Help Call Shadows.

Call Shadows: A Manifestation that causes shadows to collect around a designated target man-sized or smaller. 1 Breath per twenty seconds of Manifestation. Element: Shadow.

Even though I wasn’t actually “looking” at anything, my eyes widened.

Holy. Shit. I just DOUBLED the length of time I can cast Call Shadow. This thing is broken as Hell.

I could now hide myself in Shadow for the better part of an hour. I checked and had similar gains for my other Manifestations. Now the question was, was that a percentage gain, or a flat gain? If it were flat - in other words, add one base unit per Wisdom point - that was impressive. If it were a percentage gain… Holy Isekai Cheat Power, would that be ridiculous. So naturally, I had to know.

One Stat Point to Wisdom.

Definitely a twinge in my head, but nothing exactly painful. More like when you ears pop in a plane, but inside my skull. Not something you’d seek out for fun but livable.

Character Sheet.

Name: Chris Erikson

Class: Song Mage

Level: 5

Health: 110

Breath: 160

Stamina: 100

Strength: 10

Intelligence: 16

Wisdom: 14

Dexterity: 14

Constitution: 10

Charisma: 12

Resonance: C#

Element: Shadow / Thought

Stat Points: 1

Known Manifestations:

Call Shadows, Slow Thought, Disrupt Enchantment

Known Harmony Manifestations:

Create Dream Water (C#/D)

Special Skills:

Omniglot, Leader of the Band

Band Members:

Meg Brightman (Primary Singer, D)

This is it. Help Call Shadows.

Call Shadows: A Manifestation that causes shadows to collect around a designated target man-sized or smaller. 1 Breath per forty seconds of Manifestation. Element: Shadow.

This time I didn’t actually say anything, but my jaw dropped. It was a percentage gain - 100% of the previous level. I could now hide something in Shadow for more than an hour and a half. How that would work with me not, you know, running out of oxygen, I wasn’t quite sure. But the Help System hadn’t lied to me yet. That I knew of. If it worked the same for Meg and I could get her a few Wisdom points, she’d be able to recreate the Buffalo Creek disaster by wiggling her nose. Not to mention the other notes we could both apparently empower. I really needed to learn some Manifestations in other notes. If there was some kind of power law, I might now be as strong in my weakest one as I had started out in my Resonance. Another point or two of Wisdom and I’d be an absolute monster.

Which sounded like so much fun.