Patch Notes (& BtS) - 12/24/23

I've been wanting to do some behind the scenes commentary here on my balancing process, so here's the first one of those.

• The "Unrestrained" skill's scaling as listed in Ch16 has been nerfed a bit. It now costs more stamina (High), and it's immunity effect is now 10s per-level. 
• Devil in the Details has had it's prerequisite changed from level 10 to level 50 demonologist.

Unrestrained:

This doesn't actually change anything in the narrative but I'm future proofing it against being too easy to become totally immune to CC effects. It will now require an investment of 270pp (with Limit Breaker) to be able to chain the skill until you run out of stamina. 

That also makes it theoretically possible to achieve the same effect with Effort at only a 90pp investment, since Effort can provide temporary progression points in a skill up to double it's maximum rank. 

The Effort scaling doesn't have the same flaw Limit Breaker does (increasing the cost each rank), but there is negative synergy between Limit Breaker and Effort in that Limit Breaker increases the base PP cost of the skill in all situations.

This means that the 3 ranks of Unrestrained you would normally need to become immune via Effort (assuming you purchased 3 ranks with 90pp) would normally cost 60pp, but because Limit Breaker raises the cost by 10pp every time the skill is over-ranked the cost per-rank instead becomes 40pp by that time, and 120pp total for all three ranks. 

It gets a little better if you toss an extra (real) 40pp at it to bring the skill up to rank 4, as then you only need 100pp worth of Effort. One more rank and you only need 60pp worth of Effort to bridge the gap.

Keeping mind that 60pp by itself is enough to get 6 ranks out of a T5 skill, it would be virtually impossible to pull off a 120pp Effort expenditure. It's the kind of thing you do, and then fall over dead because your heart gave out. We might see Corona do it in the future through shenanigans with her skill that lets her convert mass into spiritual energy, but outside of her very few people could pull that sort of thing off.

Some of the mechanics behind Effort are intentionally vague/obscured. However, a good way to think of it generally is that the more you attempt to do at once, the harder and more costly it is. Likewise, active effects are more expensive than passive ones. Expending effort has the effect of reducing your effective level, and shaving off maximum HP/Mana/Stamina. It can get to the point where you just die because you have effectively zero max HP.

Devil in the Details:

This was one of the first skills I made, and I didn't really have a good grasp of the level scale yet. Since multi-classing is definitely a thing in this system I was trying to keep in mind that individual class levels may not always go very high. That said, as we'll learn in the next chapter, there are reasons why that skill should be more of a high-level demonologist feature. I'll talk about that a bit more in the comments for that chapter.

There's a chance I may reduce it's level a bit by the final version, but likely no lower than 30. For Infinity specific level requirements hardly matter. She's capable of ignoring a level 50 prerequisite as easily as a level 10. What starts to get expensive is things with multiple prerequisites, since Innovator ranks are extremely valuable. 

Innovator has caused me to put a ton of thought into the prerequisite system used in this book. Partially because I want to leave things open enough for Infinity to abuse, and partially so that certain things can't be abused too much. The entire system has to be designed with that one skill in mind. Limit Breaker has something similar going on, but in some ways it isn't as bad since the system already has to account for Effort doing something similar (and ironically, Limit Breaker has a built in limitation).