The Lee-Gygax system, a brief overview. - part one Experience, the whys and the hows.

While it makes perfect sense to the gamer of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept of a quantifiable experience gain from a battle, a task, or an encounter is alien to the real world. Or such was the case before the introduction of The System and magic into the world. However alien it might have been, it is however now an undeniable fact of life for everyone who has been exposed to a high enough level of magic to trigger their baptism.

The baptismal experience occurs when the human body is exposed to a magic level higher than their natural resistance. This resistance will vary from person to person , but the average human will have a resistance of about 1.5 to 2.5 Thaum. For more information on Thaum, see Magic, an introduction, in this appendix. It was called a baptism as every cell of the body is washed through with mana from the Other Realm, washing away the spiritual residues of humanity. This can often affect the morphology of the individual, from the relatively mild changes that those who assume an elf-shape experience, to the more drastic faced by those whose junk DNA have pre-disposed them to have a bestial or even elemental form.

The newly formed body is primed to grow and evolve, but the process is not yet complete. The body is not yet fully ready to grow until it has also passed the first level. The zeroth level is where most humans remain, their speices specific abilities are available to them, and they are in no danger. This suffices for nearly all people. However, if these people were to face a significant challenge while in a high magic zone, they could gain the solitary experience needed to advance them to level one. For most experience, any challenge will suffice, but for this first step on the journey, there must be danger to the life of the individual.

Documented cases exist of administrators gaining their first experience when dodging a car while crossing the road, bar fights are a common example also. The vast majority of people who gain their first experience, do so in a controlled environment such as a specially created arena or dungeon where they face a monster. A common monster chosen for this is a low level goblin, but the challenge is not limited to goblins. The challenge is to defeat the monster, and to survive. The fatality rate for this is significantly lower than that of bar fights, but there is a fatality rate and so it counts.

Most people do not want to gain a level however, as those who have levels are legally obligated to work for the Trans-national planar incursion relief task force, or as it's known colloquially, the Diver's association (see appendix two).

Each level unlocks new abilities, capacity for active spells and statistic points. For more information on the first two please see below.

Experience is gained by defeating a monster, or by completing a task. The experience gained is the sum of the experience that the monster had, or the difficulty of the task as rated by the System. There appears to be a direct correlation between the computational complexity of solving a problem and the experience gained. For example, solving a routing task is notoriously difficult, if not impossible (refer to a computing text book for information on this and other NP-hard problems.) thus the experience for impossible problems is given for the achieved efficiency. This means that somehow the System must know the perfect solution. It is mooted that the System must be omniscient, but no way to query it has been discovered that doesn't involve at least the same amount of work as other, more mundane methods. The only exception to this is in scrying, which to preempt your inevitable question, apparently shows you what the System knows is happening rather than what is happening. This seemingly semantic difference allows for instantaneous knowledge without violating causality.

The amount of experience needed for each level increases in an exponential fashion. Level one takes but a single point of experience, level two takes ten, level three takes one hundred, level four takes a thousand, level five takes ten thousand, and so on. There are very few people who have the experience necessary to reach level one hundred and thus far only one person has surpassed this level.

Statistic points

Statistic points are an indication of your physical and mental capacity and strength. They are not only descriptive, the System allows the individual to spend these points on any statistic. Points spent in this way cannot be lost by inactivity. That is, a healthy adult human of age eighteen, of mediocre appearance and average intelligence would have a statistic sheet of straight tens. However, if the individual were to become sick or injured, the points would be reduced in the areas affected. A simple cold might shave a point off strength, agility and intelligence, while a broken leg would lower strength and agility. As an individual levels, they can gain a point for each level to distribute as they wish. Thus, at level ten, one might have invested ten points in constitution, meaning that even with inactivity, they would never dip below the average. Through exercise of mind and body, the individual can gain points in any area. Charisma is famously the hardest to level this way, as it relies on the perceptions of those around them.

The basic statistics are as follows

Strength

This affects bodily strength, both in the amount of work that can be done by the muscles and the strength of the frame of the person. Thus, you cannot break your bones because your muscles are too strong by increasing your strength. Strength increases how much you can easily carry and how little your armour will affect your movement.

Agility

Agility is the prime attribute of acrobats, it affects your balance, speed and reflexes. Agility increases your ability to dodge attacks, and your ability to move in a straight line. Agility also affects your ability to use a weapon. An agile person will be more precise with their attacks, and more easily hit their target.

Constitution

Constitution is the most important statistic for a healthy individual. It affects the amount of damage that can be taken before the individual is dead. Constitution increases the body's natural resistance to injury, disease and poison. Medical professionals were at first somewhat leery of this, as it seemed to be an open door to auto-immune diseases. It appears, however, that it also increases the accuracy and targeting of the immune system. As such as people get older it's common to start to place more points in constitution to ward off the diseases of senescence such as arthritis, cancer and diabetes.

Intelligence

Intelligence affect, rather confusingly, the ability of an individual to assimilate mana and magical information, rather than the rather nebulous and poorly defined "intelligence" of common parlance. Intelligence allows the individual to cast more powerful and complex spells, and to use more advanced magic items. Intelligence increases the amount of mana that can be channeled into a spell also.

Wisdom

Wisdom affects how much mana a person can hold, but it also works with the other statistics synergistically to determine the power and effect of each point used in them. A person with high wisdom will know how to use their strength to perform feats that seemed out of reach. How to use their agility to best advantage, both in combat and out. When to rest and when to push themselves past their weariness. It allows more efficient use of mana. It provides a guide on when to charm someone and when to intimidate them, and when to speak plainly besides.

Charisma

The most misunderstood statistic is Charisma. People think that it allows you to somehow control the emotions of others, but this is not the case. Charisma merely tells you how best to present yourself to those around you. The individual with high charisma may listen to this guidance, or they may not. It allows a person to be more persuasive, and to be more terrifying. This is no different to learning psychology, but the shortcut of putting some points in Charisma is beguiling for many a young adventurer seeking to charm a beau.

Levels.

The very nature of levels is contradictory, as you gain experience, you don't gain experience, merely get closer to the next level. This means that the level up process is, simply, a traumatic experience for body and mind. There's no good reason why levelling should be like this, other than the fact that the creator of the system didn't know any better than to make it this way. In the lower levels, experience gain can be so fast that multiple levels can be gained in a single encounter. This is a problem for the individual, as they may fall unconscious or otherwise be incapacitated while the level up is in progress. Levelling up takes between thirty and sixty seconds normally. Statistic points must be spent at this time. Each tenth level is a class advancement level. The first chance a person has to choose a class is at level ten.

Classes

There are more classes every day as people find sub-classes, combination classes, advanced classes and prestige classes. They all fall into roughly the same few archetypes however, which can be categorised as the following:

Damage dealer: This is a broad church, covering as it does, wizard, sorcerers, plague bearers, dimensional warpers, elementalists, and warlocks on the magical damage dealing side. The barbarians, the rogues, the archers, the duelists, the street fighters, and the many flavours of martial artists on the physical damage dealing side. Then there's the summoner classes who can summon creatures, and the necromancer classes who can summon undead.

Damage absorber: A Tank in gaming parlance. These classes can not only draw the attention of their enemies, but also absorb damage. They do so in various ways, heavy armour, thick skin, agile grace, but they all have a common theme: they can face down a monster's attacks and live through them.

Healer: These classes are the ones that can heal themselves and others. They can do this in a variety of ways, calling on a deity to heal for them, sacrificing to a patron to have them heal, using their magic to bolster the bodies of the wounded through blessings and boons, or even combining magic and medical knowledge to heal using magic directly in place of medical devices or medicine.

Hybrid: Normally a mix of healer and another role, these are self-healing damage absorbers, or damage dealers who can aid a companion in a moment of need. Most Divers past level thirty will have a hybrid class of some kind, as the utility is simply too powerful to ignore in a combat situation.

Support: Very few people choose this path, but it is possibly the most powerful choice, and the weakest. These classes, the bards the shaman and the like are typically quite weak individually. Their class abilities don't let them take great blows. They can't deal much damage, and while many can heal to some degree, it's more first aid kit than operating theatre. But where they shine is in parties, where their true powers come to the fore. They can make everyone else in the party better than they would be alone, stronger, faster, more powerful healing, better armour. At advanced levels they can even create synergies between their party members, allowing a healer to get more powerful healing when their damage dealing colleagues injure the enemy, allowing the damage dealer to become more accurate and deadly when their damage absorbing party members are injured. The damage absorber might become tougher, or harder to hit the more they are healed.

[ This is the first part of this appendix, more information will be in the next installment]