Behind the Scenes: System Design - Stats and Concepts

Today I’d like to talk about the system of Stormborn Sorceress, its inspiration, and some of the earlier iterations.

The system is inspired by other systems of the genre, particularly the stats of Unbound by Nicoli Gonnella and Beneath the Dragoneye Moons by Selkie Myth and the Aspects of He Who Fights With Monsters by Shirtaloon. I will be talking about these three to a certain degree, not to the degree I would consider it spoilers (no plot points are mentioned), but enough that if you have a zero spoiler tolerance, you may want to skip this (one of the protagonist of HWFWM’s very early powers is mentioned as an example of that power system).

Stats are possibly the deciding factor in determining if a story is a LitRPG or not, so perhaps it is unnecessary to attribute any particular inspiration to anyone in particular here, but it was Unbound what I was reading when I started thinking about what stats would I pick if I was to design my own system.

In Unbound, there are (primarily) eight stats: five physical and three mental. It is not the first to have physical and mental stats, but it was the first one that made a point about them falling into these categories, and I liked that. But it bothered me that the divide was uneven and got me thinking about how I would organize stats into more even categories.

I had considered borrowing from Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, which also has eight stats. In that universe they come in four pairs, which balance and oppose one another, and these pairs could be divided between physical and magical. The way the magical stats are outlined in particular appealed to me, the four being something along the lines of power, control, mana, and recovery. But I also knew I wanted a defensive stat and I like symmetry. I wanted a Stamina resource alongside a Mana resource. That meant if I wanted to use such a scheme, I would need at least five stats for both the physical and mental categories. This was already becoming unwieldy.

My other issue with this arrangement was I was struggling to find interesting build variety in this kind of structure. It was too rigid, with each stat being a little too tightly related to one another, yet also having a gaping divide between physical and mental. Stats are not overly important in BtDeM, rather build definition comes from classes and the elemental system instead. The main interest in the stats of this universe is the way they oppose and simultaneously synergize with one another, for example, too much Strength cuts into your effective Dexterity, while not having enough Dexterity for your Speed can leave you running wildly out of control. It is a system that encourages a kind of balance that makes it hard to imagine what someone specializing in a given stat would look like.

It’s perfect for underpinning the much more complicated elemental and class system present in BtDeM, but wasn’t exactly what I was going for.

I wanted to have characters who specialize in one stat and are forced to compromise in other places to do so. At the same time, I wanted there to be stats that rely on each other such that you can’t just dump all your points into a single stat. It was a difficult balance, and BtDeM was a good place to start, but not where I wanted to end. I wanted a system that it would be easy to get very different fighters depending on the prioritized stats.

The Paladins of the Copper Crescent are a good example of what I wanted my system to be able to make. They are Fortitude specialist with ungodly amounts of Fortitude. Their leader, the Captain, also has quite a lot of Perception to counter the loss of pain reception that naturally comes with high Fortitude. He is an example of how one would build a traditional tank archetype under my system. His focus is first and foremost on mitigating enemy attacks. Not explored in the text, but it would have been a good idea for him to also have Endurance to maintain his defense longer or Vitality to recover faster between engagements. Alternatively, he might have prioritized Strength to more easily wear heavier armor and deal more significant damage with his sword.

The many other paladins on the other hand have poorer distribution of Perception to their Fortitude, at least against a fast and stealthy spellsword/sorceress like Cass, and she is able to exploit that imbalance to hide from them or deal damage before they can evaluate the danger. This is meant to show the difference between the Captain and his soldiers is more than just level.

I wanted a system where any stat was viable as one’s primary stat and where one’s priority in the other stats could redefine how one’s fighting style.

Iterating on these ideas, I eventually came to a grid of nine, with three rows, each representing a domain of influence, and three columns, each representing an approach to what they modify. In other words, Physical, Mental, and Body; Power, Control, Depth. Stats across a row are closely related; stats across each column are moderately related.

I had the structure in mind, and the kind of variation I wanted to be possible, I just needed to fill in the names for each slot. The physical and body rows were set pretty easily. Strength, Dexterity, Endurance are all pretty standard game stats. The only real question there was if I was going to use Dexterity or Agility. In my mind these are the same, but Dexterity leaned more into the ‘control’ direction I had in mind, so that was what I picked.

I picked out Perception fairly early on, and it slotted easily into Body-Control. That left something healing related for Body-Depth (Vitality) and something defense related for Body-Power. I remember struggling with naming Fortitude for a while. I can’t say why now, because I can think of two other names I could have given it that did not occur to me then (‘Defense’ or ‘Constitution’). I’m happy with my decision in the end, though. I think ‘Constitution’ would have overlapped more than I wanted with ‘Vitality’. And ‘Defense’, while serviceable, is a little lackluster compared to the other stat names.

Overall, the mental row is the one that gave me the most trouble and underwent to most changes from the first draft to serialization. The initial draft called them Mind (Mnd), Insight (Ins), and Will (Wll). I knew from the beginning I didn’t want any of them to be ‘Intelligence’ because I didn’t want to have to write a character who got ‘smarter’ in that way. But that left me floundering a little on what increasing these stats meant. I think this is still a weakness of this story, unfortunately.

Under this original scheme, the idea was Mind has to do with memorization and organization. High mind helped with methodical, logical thinking. Insight, which at various points I considered calling Inspiration instead, was about spontaneous connections and creativity. Will was intended to be a defensive mental stat, about resisting outside influence.

However, this is a hard thing to depict and, as I worked on the first draft, I liked it less and less. For one thing, I kept using Will in more offensive contexts. I wanted to use it actively, rather than let it act passively, so I moved it to the Mental-Power position, letting it be more about one’s ‘force of will’ than anything else. That meant I needed a new name for Mental-Depth. I fluctuated between Resistance and Resolve for a while, before settling on the second because it was more specific. It kept the intended defensive nature of its predecessor.

But these changes left Insight feeling out of place, and I still didn’t have a good way of demonstrating how Insight worked as an increasing stat. Also, I wanted the Mental row to more closely match the Physical one. This lead it to be replaced with Alacrity, a stat more about processing speed than thought process. This better matched Physical’s Dexterity and created an interesting bridge between Physical and Body. It has since become my favorite of the mental stats.

The other big influence on my system was He Who Fights With Monsters. In it, characters have four stats and four Aspects, each Aspect binding with one of the four stats. What Aspects you have determine the magic powers one unlocks. For example, the protagonist has a Dark Aspect and so gets a skill fairly early on called ‘Cloak of Night’ which, among other things, lets him wear shadows. The skill design is fairly extensive and very creative. It’s an easy system to capture the imagination.

But, I always felt that binding Aspects to the initial four stats was under utilized. I wondered what would it mean to have Dark-bound Speed? How could that be different from someone with, say, Wing-bound Speed? HWFWM is not interested in this question, and that’s fine, not every power system is going to explore every corner of its potential expression, but I knew this was something I wanted to explore in my story, leading to the creation of Stormborn Sorceress’s Concepts.

Concepts also pull on the broader ideas of Dao more common to the Cultivation subgenres of progression fantasy. This is more unconscious influence or converging evolution that intentional design as I don’t actually read much cultivation progression fantasy (though if you have favorites, leave me your recommendations, I haven’t looked particularly hard through that branch of the genre and I would like to explore it more). But the idea of one’s powers being a reflection of your beliefs and ideals makes for excellent character exploration.

I look forward to diving into the Concepts of the larger cast and on exploring how Cass’s will change in the upcoming books.