The "Best" RPG Ever-35

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"Well, while we're just copying a bunch of information from our own heads down on paper...may as well talk a little," said Aria. "What'd you two do back on Earth?"

"We did a show on the intertubes," said Rayna. "Kind of a sliding scale between a let's play and a review show. We'd pass the controller back and forth and question everything in the game."

Lynn nodded. "Mechanics, story, characterization, motivation.."
"We've found ourselves doing a little of that with this world and 'game mechanics' here, too."

"Pardon my ignorance, but...how does that make money?" said Clera.

"Same way a TV show does—ads," said Lynn.

"Well, at first. After a while we decided ads were stupid and did kind of a voluntary subscription thing where whoever wanted to could pay us monthly for our work."

"That...was enough?"
"You must not have a lot of faith in the human race," said the archer.

Rayna said, "Yeah, we did pretty well for ourselves on that. I guess we were just popular enough for it to work out. I mean, we weren't medical-degree rich or anything, but after a while we were pulling in so much a month we decided to donate a portion of it to charity."

"That is admirable." She didn't seem to react to the 'medical degree' comment at all.

"What about you, huh?" said Lynn, turning back to the shapeshifter. "How'd you make a living?"
"Well, my job was as a systems analyst, but that's just how I made my money. My life was games. High scores, speedruns—if it had a leaderboard I'm probably on there somewhere near the top. I did streams every night, man, I really wonder how some of my audience folks are getting along without me."

"You have a bit of an ego, huh," said Rayna.

"It's not boasting if it's true. You ever min-maxed in Baldur's Gate so hard you beat the sequel without ever leveling up?"

"Uh, can't say I have," said Lynn.

"Well that's why I'm in charge here once we get all this down. I can read game mechanics like a pamphlet and find the good, cheap stuff right away. I mean—you know, I'm not saying you have to do what I say but I'm pretty sure you'll agree with me once I give it a good hard look."

Clera had been quiet for a bit. She seemed to be glaring intensely at the part of her tree she was writing down, as if it specifically displeased her. Aria decided to distract her: "So what about you? You're a doctor, I know."
"..Correct."
"Well, what do you do for fun? I mean, when you're not busy...doctor-ing."
"I mostly read when I have the time, which wasn't very often. As far as fiction goes: Mystery, drama, or suspense. Otherwise, I would read medical journals and textbooks, but I suppose that falls under 'doctor-ing' still."

"Hey, what d'you think a medical textbook's like in this world?" said Rayna. "I mean, just between the four of us there's radically different physiologies all around. Are there—or should there be—a different profession for every possible combination of races, you think?"

"Well, there is magic," said Clera. "Using that seems to allow one to at least heal injuries without nearly as much understanding of how the body works as normal medicine. If I had to guess, I would suspect medicine in this world is well behind ours out of a simple lack of necessity. But—yes, if someone tried to perform medicine in this world without using magic as a crutch it would likely take a different person to handle each kind. The overarching principles would be the same, and possibly many organs shared since everyone seems to be humanoid, but more detailed work would undoubtedly require years of specialized study."

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"So, what do you all think? Are we on for tonight?" said Mika, on the way out of the guardhouse.

"I think we can do it, after a good early sleep," said Katherine. "Unless our tank is still hurt?" She looked to Zack and then Nora.

"I t-took care of the worse bruises earlier. After we sleep I th-think he'll be just fine," said the elf, nodding.

"Thanks, I guess," said the knight. "Actually, I wonder if..." He raised his left hand and got the shield to shimmer into view briefly; the cracks from its impact with the giant bony fist seemed to have mostly faded. "Hm. I guess it regenerates over time. Good, I don't really want to know what happens if it breaks."

"Shouldn't whatever skill governs shield usage say something about that?" said the catgirl. "Or like, the shield's description in inventory or something?"

"I don't think it really has a specific skill...I think it's actually part of the armor, so it's not a separate item either."

"We can worry about that later!" said the witch. "For now, we should eat good before going to bed. Tonight's fight is gonna be hard, probably."

"Yeah, I guess so," Zack agreed. "Maybe something different from the Broken Dragon, then..."

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Finally, they had finished writing everything down. The skill trees were all expansive in scope, and even with Aria stretching herself as tall as her body would go to hang the corkboards and put the papers at the tops of those they still wound up having to cut each tree into two sections to keep them from being half on the floor. She looked over the whole expanse for a few minutes, letting the others talk among themselves some more, before reaching a few conclusions.

"Okay, let's start this thing for real now. Don't buy anything until we've gone over the whole party, though! The first thing jumping out at me is this," she said, pointing to a spot about halfway up Rayna's tree. "You see this skill? If I'm reading it right, it basically lets you add a modifier to all the illusion skills that makes them more real. You max this out and you can basically warp reality at will."

"Seriously?" The foxgirl genuinely hadn't gotten that from its description.

"I mean, there are limits of course, a lot of the effects seem to be temporary in nature, but yeah. The main problem is the prereq for this is literally every skill below it. All of those." She gestured to nearly the entire bottom half of the tree. "I think it's worth chasing after that skill, but it means having a large number of weak skills for a while, which isn't usually ideal."
"Well, I'll have lots of options at least," she said. "Seems like it's worth a try."
"As far as your role in a fight goes, it doesn't really change from any of these abilities. Distract enemies, draw their fire, feint so they block nothing, so on. I'd suggest starting with the skills that make your illusions register on all the different senses in case we have to fight something that doesn't rely mostly on sight. Maybe the ones that can make the illusions look like things other than you after that?"

"Yeah, that sounds fun."

She went over to Lynn's tree next. "Now, your skills are super straightforward. Big wheel of elements, and then some bow skills which you started out with but can still be improved on. I'd say get any elements you don't know first for good weakness coverage, and then improve the high-utility ones like rock, electricity, fire. Sprinkling some points into the shot range and accuracy skills wouldn't hurt either."

"I was probably just gonna do that anyway."
"I know, I know. Like I said, really straightforward."

She went to Clera's tree next, thinking Doctor Sweet might need more guidance than the others as a non-game-player in general. "Hokay. So, let's discuss this section first." She pointed to a branch of the tree taking up nearly a third of its horizontal space. This was what the winged girl had been glaring at before: Skills focused on transferring injuries and sickness to others, either from herself or from allies.

"Absolutely not," she said, shaking her head.

"You don't even know what I was gonna say about it."
"If you wish to discuss it then you expect me to take one or more of those abilities."

"Well—it would give you more reliable way to hurt bad guys than the sword."
"It is a perversion of what my powers are supposed to be for. I won't use something intended for healing to hurt people."
"You wouldn't be hurting people though, just monsters. Or—really bad people, maybe. It'd be a good emergency vent if you take too many hits or absorb too much from one of us, if nothing else."
Her eyes were fierce and her expression serious, bordering on enraged. "I won't do it."

"Well okay then. That's why I wanted to discuss that first, I thought you might react that way. So—there is an alternative build."

The central branch of Clera's tree was focused on healing herself; the branch opposite the "give wounds to others" one was focused on taking the wounds of others. These the shapeshifter turned to now. "If you pump a bunch of points into having loads of health and regenerating super fast, then you can be a perfectly self-sufficient damage sponge. Take about two-thirds these skills and one-third those—" (she indicated the "take wounds" branch) "—You can be a tank and healer all at once. The only thing you're missing is a way to actively draw fire from our enemies, but I bet we can find an enchanted item or something that'll do that for us."
"You're saying Clera here—whose bones I should mention are hollow to allow for flight—should be taking a bunch of hits for us?" said Rayna.
"Have you even seen these skills?" Aria waved at the middle portion of the tree again. "She probably has more HP than all of us combined right now—I mean if HP was a thing in this world—and it only skyrockets up from there. And if the ridiculous passive regeneration isn't enough there are active self-healing powers out the wazoo up here. The, uh.." She sighed. "The only real problem is that all these skills make it pretty clear in their description that taking damage still hurts and healing does too. This is why I thought the 'harm' branch might be a good investment, apparently it doesn't hurt to give your injuries away."

"I can deal with that," said Clera, nodding. "You don't know how many times I have looked on a patient and wished I could ease their pain, even if by taking on some of it myself."

"Yeah," Aria nodded seriously. "Just—you know—try not to overdo it? Obviously you should still dodge when you can, but having someone we can throw at enemies to keep them off our more fragile members' backs is always gonna help."

"Well, what are you gonna do with your skills then?" said Lynn, pointing to Aria's tree. It was a split between skills granting her more power while the sword was sheathed, skills to both weaken the constant blood hunger and give her more self-control when the sword was out, and skills which improved her abilities in the uncontrolled state.
"I noticed something very interesting about these passive buff skills," said the shifter, turning to the sheathed skills. "They all act as a percentage of my stats when the sword is out, which means if I take skills that improve those along with these then it creates a pretty great synergy. "But...realistically, when I'm in a battle I'm gonna have the sword out. I can't see any good reason to take a lot of the sheathed state skills on their own merits. Except, well..." She pointed to the skill at the very top of the tree, which had requirements high up on all three branches. "This thing."

The others came a little closer to read it. It was called "Fully Merge," a passive skill which when taken completely removed the separation between the demon in the sword and the weilder. It altered the "sheathed" skills to become constant percentage bonuses on top of the "unsheathed" boosts, which would now always be active, and granted total self-control, funneling anything spent on the self-control skills into weakening the bloodlust, which now became that of the merged being instead of the sword's.

"I want this, because if we're stuck here forever I don't want to be fighting against the instinct of something that's not me for the entire rest of my life. Plus I think this has the effect of making there be one less cursed demon-sword in the world. And—I mean, it's a pretty great bunch of advantages it gives anyway. It would...make me want to eat blood myself instead of feeding it to the sword, but it's not like it has to be person blood. I can just do, you know, 'friendly vampire' strats and get it from animals. So, in light of that I want to put just enough to cover its prereqs in this part of the tree," she said, pointing to the "sheathed" section, "take lots of this with a generous helping of 'not as hungry for blood all the time'," (the self-control portion), "and then some of this" (the "unsheathed" stat boosts) "in case my superbuffed self isn't enough at some point. I'm starting with self-control abilities for fairly obvious reasons, though, for now."

"Yeah, that...seems like a good idea to me," said Rayna, "long as you can put up with basically being part demon and whatever effect that has on your reputation."
"Pff," the shifter waved dismissively, "I'll be hero by then so nobody will care."

"No objections here," Lynn nodded. "Should we just start buying things now?"
"If everyone's okay with what all we've said, yes," Aria nodded. "When you do though, mark it on the sheets! We're keeping these handy to refer back to later. Feel free to make some pencil marks to remind yourself what you plan on getting with your next few points."

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The construction didn't seem to have started yet; when Zack and the others arrived, the place was still deserted. Mika had in her inventory all the things for another summoning ritual, freshly bought that afternoon after supper, and just needed to make a few small adjustments to deal with the site having been disturbed. The others sat in the grass nearby while she finished setting things up.

"Well, what do you think this demon's gonna look like?" said Katherine. "We've had, what, a pumpkin and then the weird little fire thing? I guess that's plant and element..so, animal maybe?"

Zack looked to the elf. "Did you read anything about demons in your research?"
"Uh, a l-little. It seems they c-can take on all kinds of forms. Some of the st-stronger ones are humanoid, but supposedly still not p-people exactly. The only d-demons that are people are s-supposed to be archdemons."

The psion headtilted slightly. "What, so you mean even humanoid ones aren't sapient?"
"It's p-possible that's incorrect, and more of a j-justification for killing them on sight. B-but then, records of demon attacks show little to no st-strategy or organization u-unless a witch or warlock or ar-archdemon is leading them, so.."

"Well, we have to kill this one even if it begs us not to," said Zack.

"...By the way, why's the wolf here?" said Katherine, pointing to the animal sitting on the other side of the knight from her. "What's the point if he doesn't like being close to this 'unnatural' thing or whatever?"

"I dunno." Zack looked at the wolf. "Any particular reason?"
The catgirl closed her eyes and relayed: "...Pack's here, so he's here. But...you weren't with us when you went off to hunt. Oh, he asked permission for that. Do you want permission to leave now? ...No point, we're already here. If you say so, whatever."

Mika left the circle, coming over to where the others were sitting. "I'm about ready to start casting. So...battle formation or whatever?"

They looked at each other for a second. "Yeah," Zack said, "we should probably just plan on attacking whatever comes out of the portal as soon as it's in front of us instead of waiting around like last time."

"That wouldn't have worked on the fire demon, though," said Katherine, hopping up to her feet.

"Yeah, but it might be something that it will work with, right?" He said, standing up and offering Nora a hand to help her up.
She took the hand and stood up as well, nodding. "S-seems possible." The wolf stayed seated outside the circle.

Mika chanted just as before, and the circle slowly burned, followed by the fire moving into the altar. Each of the three readied an attack: Zack in Light form with both swords raised for a swift strike, Katherine holding some elemental knives chosen at random in preparation to throw, Nora holding a large rock she'd found nearby a few inches in the air, ready to throw. Mika, panting as much from the effort as before, got out her shiny new scythe weapon as soon as the chanting was over and the portal started opening, but also took a few steps back since the first demon had seemed interested in targeting just her.

The portal seemed to be a wider and taller tear in space than before. They waited a tense several seconds for something to come out of it.

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 I didn't really intend for this one to be 90% "nerds talking about skill builds" but a scene like this was inevitable at some point I guess. At any rate, if this part of the story bores you I'm sorry, the next one should be fairly exciting.