Learn from the Past

Eons before Menitiros heard her own name, she was visited by five powerful beings who spread the seeds of life across the desolate land. Civilization flourished and spread across the land forming seven nations, all with their own language, culture, and ideals. With the clashing ideals came the inevitable thirst for supremacy, plunging Menitiros into a thousand years of strife. War, plague, and famine ravaged the land. The Sescenian Empire saw birth to a great leader who conquered nation after nation, intent on unifying the land under his iron grip, until the heavens themselves fell upon Menitiros and extinguished the flames of war. Civilization rebuilt, and with it came a new era - an era of peace and diplomacy, with every nation coexisting in harmony. Yet there were those who do not believe the fragile peace would last as history is bound to repeat itself. These individuals gathered and constructed a massive library - the Seat of Knowledge - holding every piece of writing ever recorded in history with the sole purpose of learning from their ancestor's mistakes.


This is an idea I've been thinking about for a while now, and it's to create a series of short statistical scenarios in a similar fashion to brief D&D campaigns. So instead of having everyone start at level 1 and do numerous sidequests and grinding on trash for exp the party will start at a higher level and trash encounters will be reduced. The entire roleplay will also be shorter, however, as it would likely be somewhere along the lines of 4 non-boss encounters and 2 or 3 boss encounters. There will also be much more free time given to the players in between statistical encounters to interact and sometimes the players will have to progress in a form similar to tabletop puzzle solving instead of trying to solve every problem they come across by bashing it in its face.

For example while exploring a cave the party comes across an old, ruined stone door that's blocking their way. The doors are too large and heavy to be pushed open. In this case there would be a description of the door as well as the area surrounding the door, and then the players would choose how they would like to progress. Maybe they just want to bash the door open, or there could be some sort of trap or mechanism to open the door. You could also go full animu and blast it open with the power of friendship. Or perhaps that strange-looking gem you found earlier coincidentally matches with a socket on the door. Regardless, this would be just an example of an encounter that isn't combat-oriented. Other examples could be a diplomacy test, or the act of sneaking past heavily-armed guards that the party has no chance of winning against in a fair fight.

To aid with that there would also have to be an additional statistical system since our current statplay system won't easily allow for any of these non-combat encounters. This would give each character a set of six additional stats that will not play much of a role in combat save for a few trigger commands from time to time.

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These stats will be determined by a point buy system, where each stat starts at 10 and each player is allowed 20 points to upgrade these stats. However every time a stat is increased the next point will cost more than the last. The exact costs of each stat is as followed

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This table indicates the total cost to increase a certain stat to the desired value from 10. So it only requires 2 points to raise a stat to 12 but you will need to spend 17 of your 20 total points to raise a stat to 18. However you can also lower a stat below 10 - in doing so you will be given 1 point for each point below 10. Do note however that a character cannot have any stat below 7.

These stats will mostly remain the same throughout the rp, there are few situations where the stat may change. So don’t plan your character on having more of any of these stats that you start out with. And aside from this new set of stats, the rest of the profile will be a standard Masqplay profile.

Equipment stats will be determined by another point-buy system where I will give the party a number of points to spend on their starting equipment that is dependent on the level of the party in the scenario. There will be two separate budgets for equipment, one for your equipment's stats and the other for any added effects. Note that while the stat budget applies to each individual equipment the effect budget is meant to be distributed across all your equipment. Any additional equipment slots gained from skills such as Dual Wield or Shieldbearer will have half of the normal stat budget, rounded up.

Stat Costs

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Effect Costs

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How the actual scenarios will work is that this thread will be used as a central hub where all of the different scenarios will be posted along with level requirements and equipment points. It's up to a group of players to get together and agree on a scenario, at which point they will inform me and each submit a character sheet of the required level.

I think that's about it. Hopefully I haven't missed anything and feel free to start asking questions on anything I didn't make clear.