Spoiler (click to show/hide):
This section is meant to explain the mechanics of And What We Found There. To explain it in words briefly; the main system of this RP is very stat-intensive. Players are meant to build up their stats in preparation for future events in order to pass them, while also trying to figure out how to prevent these events and put an end to them, or conversely, they could choose to be on the side causing them. Much like how a college would work, right?
Statistics & Attunement: Considering how important they are, the first thing I should explain should be this. Statistics, or stats, are the parameters that measures your character's aptitude in that stat's specific subject. Then there's Attunement, or Tune, which act as a sort of "class" that your stats spec into. These two work in tandem to produce various effects in the game, such as unlocking options in Delusions, assisting you in Class Evaluations, influencing how your peers see you, and various other niche, important things. To increase Attunement, you have to increase your stats, and you can increase your stats in a multitude of different ways. From completing Tasks to simple roleplay decisions, your stats can change. But be careful; some stats conflict with others. A raise in one will be an equal decrease in another, or just in general, neglecting to hone a stat for too long will result in it lowering.
All of the statistics will be listed below, along with the Attunement the stats build into being underlined on top, with a brief explanation of what it can do.
Academic - The measure of your academic knowledge. Used in Class Evaluations.
Knowledge - Every 1 point in Knowledge offers 0.6 points in Academic.
Diligence - Every 1 point in Diligence offers 0.5 in Academic.
Logic - Every 1 point in Logic offers 0.5 points in Academic.
Adaptive - The measure of your versatility and survival ability. Used in Delusions.
Independence - Every 1 point in Independence offers 0.3 in Adaptive.
Craftiness - Every 1 point in Craftiness offers 0.5 in Adaptive.
Bravery - Every 1 point in Bravery offers 0.4 in Adaptive.
Depraved - The measure of your delight in sin and general sinfulness. Cardinal Attunement.
Charisma - Every 1 point in Charisma offers 0.3 in Depraved.
Indecency - Every 1 point in Indecency offers 0.4 in Depraved.
Libido - Every 1 point in Libido offers 0.7 in Depraved.
Pure - The measure of your general innocence and humanity. Cardinal Attunement.
Morality - Every 1 point in Morality offers 0.5 in Pure.
Chastity - Every 1 point in Chastity offers 0.5 in Pure.
Humility - Every 1 point in Humility offers 0.4 in Pure.
You've no doubt noticed the "Cardinal Attunement" tag attached to the Depraved and Pure Attunements. These mean that they're important cornerstones that will heavily influence your general experience in the RP. Some entities, NPCs, and other things will be aware of your levels in these Attunements and will interact with you differently, so be very careful with how you manage these.
Sanity and Energy: The next important thing to note before we move on. Your Sanity and Energy act as substitutes for the usual HP and MP, though both do much more than act as a score to be depleted.
Your Sanity is your grip on reality. It's your understanding of the world, and your mind's health. Treat this right and keep it high... as the lower this gets, the higher the likelihood of you becoming a victim of Delusions. Once it reaches 0, your mind will be broken. You'll be forced to act as the slave of a higher will with no wants or desires of your own. You would effectively be killed. To make sure this doesn't happen, you can maintain your mental health by meditating or praying, having pleasant chats with people high in the Pure Attunement, enjoying a decent nightmare-less rest, and surviving for long periods of time without sustaining Sanity damage.
Your Energy is your physical body's ability to work. Every Task takes Energy, either by minute or high amounts, and it's important to keep this at least decently high so that you have some to spend in case of a dangerous situation. Once this reaches 0, you won't be able to complete more Tasks and you'll suffer a demerit to all Ability checks until you rest. Furthermore, if this hits 0 during a Delusion... bad things will happen.
Delusions: Since they've been name dropped multiple times, it's important to explain how these work so that you understand the danger. Delusions are the RP's action sequences. The times when you're alone in a room with a berserking monster and you need to dodge, roll, and use your brain to escape unscathed.
The start of the event will be marked by the generation of the arena you'll need to escape from. Every arena has its own specific effects that may help or hinder your escape, from traps, to certain people or other entities, to items and objects you have on you or are lying around, to even the entity you're facing off's weaknesses. So long as you're crafty enough, you can use anything you can to survive. But you'll need Options, which are quite literally strategies your character can employ in these dangerous times. They are unlocked with your Adaptive Attunement, but your statistics or other Attunements may sometimes be necessary as well.
Your Options will have a list of information to offer for you to better understand how they'd work; they'll display their (estimated) success rate, difficulty, (possible) consequences of failure, and resources consumed such as your Energy levels or items. Use this information to better weigh between one option and another. Once you've chosen an Option, you'll have to work through it piece by piece until it comes to fruition. While you're playing out your strategy; be warned. Whether aware of you or not, your enemy will be playing out their turns in between yours, offering them a chance to mess up or otherwise hinder you. Plan carefully.
Now is the part where you use your chosen option. You'll have to pass a series of Ability Checks using your Adaptive Attunement as the modifier, with the values to beat being either high or low depending on the difficulty. You're allowed an infinite amount of failures and it's possible to win even after failing every check, but every failure gives the one you're competing against the opportunity to turn it around on you. They need only pass one check to immediately spot you, and from there, most entities can't be escaped. So it's best to pass as many checks as you can.
You won't only need to use one option to survive a Delusion. Most will have you employ multiple strategies in order to succeed, and sometimes, even if you successfully implement one, it might not be the one you're supposed to.
Class Evaluations: While we're on the topic of minigame events, here's another type of one that's less blatantly rapey. Class Evaluations are meant to keep you all in track of what's really important; your studies. These aren't actually relevant to the grander scale of what's at stake, but of course, your College doesn't know the world is in mortal peril and expects you to perform to the best of your abilities. Failure to comply will result in remedial classes taking up a whole day's worth of Tasks and leaving you with the Stressed state and low Energy. On the other hand, passing these expectations with flying colors will heighten the difficulty of your next Evaluation, and provide you with a temporary 20% boost to Sanity and the Focused state.
You'll have to pass a series of Ability checks measuring your Knowledge, your Diligence, and your Logic. The results of these checks will then be added to your overall Academic stat, with the result being your grade. Your Grade will then be fitted in to a tier system that will evaluate your scores in accordance to everyone else's. The three tiers are Failure, Success, and Total Success. Each tier is separated by 10-20 points. You want to be in the green or above.
Lastly, if this is too much of a chore to deal with, you can always cheat by visiting the Lacuna Students' Secret Market and buying the answers to the test. But depending on the difficulty of the test, they may cost you a pretty penny, not to mention cheating forfeits the Sanity boost and beneficial state reward. Maybe you should just study regularly.
Tasks & Your Schedule: You've seen these mentioned a few times now. Tasks are basically normal everyday actions given a spot in the mechanics. They usually offer benefits from stat increases to possible item gains and can also lead to individual events. Every day, you are given a list of Tasks to choose from, and you can select 3 of them to add to your Schedule, which is your essentially a list of actions your character will take. Then, as you do them, I'll calculate your rate of success by rolling 2d12. 1-8 is a fail, 9-16 is a partial success, and 17-24 is a full success.
Phases & Scheduling: Every day has three phases; the morning phase, the afternoon phase, and the night phase. Each of these phases allow you to do different things.
As stated before, every day you'll organize your Schedule and have three tasks to do. The morning phase is the part when you're actually planning that out. You'll select three from a list of Tasks provided to you that you'll complete throughout the day. Then we move on to the afternoon phase, which is meant to be all of the roleplaying and actual doing of these Tasks (note: you don't actively have to do them in the roleplay, since we can say you did it off camera or something if I need to speed things along), then it's night, when you'll reap your rewards, sleep, and dream...
At night is when many things in the background happen. Every night, all of the players have a chance to have a Night Terror, which is a type of Delusion that happens only in your dreams. Just experiencing one of these is enough to lower your Sanity by a small amount, but they also reduce the gains you get from resting by 30%.
Another thing to mention; the NPCs can have Night Terrors too. They obviously won't be seen, but they'll be happening. And that's important because...
World Sanity: This is the crux of the game. Every event that includes an entity's presence in the reality of this world will lower the Sanity of the World. It makes these creatures more likely to pop up in existence, which will do even more damage. You'll either want to keep this high so that they can't come in their physical, true forms... or you'll want to help destroy this barrier to let them in.
Once the World Sanity reaches 0, the game is over, by the way. It also won't immediately be displayed to you until you meet certain conditions, but some flavor text will clue you in on the state of the world.
Unique NPCs: These will be instrumental in the battle against evil... or good. Unique NPCs are named recurring characters that have some plot significance and can help players in a number of ways. You'll encounter a few of these every now and again, and it's important to keep track of them. Like players, these NPCs can be mind broken or corrupted, which would remove all of their ability to help, so sometimes you may have to help them help you by saving them from something dangerous.
The ways a unique NPC can help you depends on the NPC, but most of them are Teachers... and I don't mean professors. Teachers are NPCs that have a high statistic and have unlocked the ability to raise that statistic in others. Doing the usual stat-raising Tasks with this NPC accompanying you will warrant more rewards and less demerits. There are also other types like Healers who can increase rewards to your Sanity.
But (most of) these NPCs won't work for free. Some will demand money. Others will demand favors. And some you can win over only by knowing them well...
Relationship System: Which is where this comes in. The relationship system is meant to measure your importance to an NPC, or an NPCs importance to another NPC. You'll usually need this high to get an NPC to help you. Increasing your relationship with an NPC can work in numerous ways. Some will like you more if you just spent time with them. Others will test your abilities with every interaction. The one absolute that'll always change their opinion of you is the level of your Pure and Depraved Attunements. Most characters have a specific alignment towards one or the other, and if you're high in one or small in another, their opinion of you may either increase or decrease.
The rewards of the relationship system will briefly be explained.
-100% - Mortal enemy. Character will antagonize you.
-70% - Enemy. Character will likely antagonize you.
-50% - Rival. Character may attempt to antagonize you if given the chance.
-30% - Disliked Acquaintance. Character will refuse to speak to you.
0% - Coworker. No benefits. No demerits.
30% - Preferred Acquaintance. Character will be more likely to speak with you.
50% - Friend. Character will help you with stat-increasing Tasks.
70% - Best friend. Character will do all they can to aid you.
100% - Probably Romantic. Character is devoted to you.
Naturally this isn't exactly how the system will work all the time. Some characters see things differently and may see being your dislike acquaintance as reason enough to attempt to murder you. Some will see being your friend as close enough to get in bed with you. In any case, this is simply to explain how things could go rather than how things will go.
The Arcane: This whole section will be dedicated to explaining how spells, curses, and states will work, as they all fall under magical and don't take up much space.
In lore terms, Spells are the interact-able manifestations of Mysteries actively being called upon into the material realm. In game terms, Spells are energy-consuming abilities. These can be used in and out of Delusions and have a wide range of uses. However, Spells are rare due to the very recent studies into the Arcane, and usage of them is not entirely mastered. Due to this, players will not know the full extent of their Spell's abilities, and will have to learn what it can really do through trial and error. Learning a spell is also costly as it will consume a lot of energy just to obtain, so sometimes it may be wiser to turn down awesome power so as to not put yourself in a disadvantage.
Next are States. States are, put simply, status effects that last awhile. They can be either beneficial or detrimental, and they will last a certain amount of in-game time before they disappear. Here are a few examples.
Injured - You've sustained a serious injury. Demerits are based on the injured location. Example; broken leg reduces all movement attempts and lowers Movement by 2 spaces.
Terrified - You're shaking in fear of something. You have a 40% chance of freezing up at the sight of whatever you're afraid of, and a 10% chance to automatically fail Tasks.
Stressed - You're stressed out and don't wanna do annnyyythiiing. 70% chance to give up on any task, and 30% increase to energy drain until you rest.
Focused - You're feeling good and hyper-focused. 40% stat gain from ALL Tasks. 30% decrease to energy drain.
And finally, we move on to Curses. Curses are, essentially, scarier States that won't go away until you cure them. They're always intended to be detrimental and are always magical. They can also get worse or better depending on the Curse. Basically, they're really bad. Here's a few examples of some of them.
Perma-rousal - You're always horny. Like, always. Anything that would arouse you is now twice as arousing, even things that wouldn't will now kinda get you going. You will need to have sex daily or you will become Stressed. Chastity is locked at 0. Minimum Libido raised to 50.
Darkly - You've been cursed with the Darkly affliction. Your skin, hair, and eye color will lighten, and you will have a strong aversion to light. Maximum Sanity and Energy reduced by 30%. Being in the dark now increases your Sanity and Energy.
Tentacle Bait - For whatever reason, the Dark Gods of Ol'thul seem to like you... all Delusions will involve a tentacle monster and they will ALWAYS be searching for you. Avoid the forest.
Of course, there are more States and Curses. You'll encounter more of them as time goes on, and each one will be booked in the Necronomicon for your viewing/studying pleasure.
It's likely I'm forgetting a bunch of other things to explain, so if there's anything that doesn't make sense or something you'd like to be touched up on, do mention it here.
