The misenchanted earring shaped shifted, sliding off her ear, and turning into a full size coral snake. It hissed an ignored warning as the three approached.
While Atevi could see right off that she could handle any one of them in a fair fight, the three of them, cornering her into this arena like room, was going to be a challenge, even with her earring...
If Atevi has a 20 warfare, and the three bruisers have Amber level, just how good an attack can they mount together? What if they were Chaos Level? A warfare of 19? And what of the stats of the misenchanted earring? How do they fit in?
While what is good for story is almost always the overriding factor, many people like concrete justifications for things happening. GMs AND players included.
Thus, I have decided to explicate matters.
The Table below illustrates the extended system from the book. While I do not have explicit stat ranks in Strange Bedfellows, it is often useful to compare stats between a PC and NPC, or between two PCs.
Mortal is simply human rank. As you can see, there are now secondary ranks both greater and lesser than Mortal. An analogy might be in biology, where a taxonomic rank like "phylum" can also have variants larger ("super phylum") and smaller ("sub-phylum").
Even if you don't like the names, notice that this rather reduces the steepness of the ranks below Amber. Instead of dropping to Chaos and then to Human, there are intermediate steps.
The ranks above Amber, on the other hand mainly exist as benchmarks for the last two columns, item power and story value.
Item Power cost is what you think it is. With the exceptions of Intelligence, and Psychic Defense/Quality, this table holds for all of the basic atrributes of an Item. Of course, the names in the book differ from item to item, but that is all right. You can see, then, from this table that, for example, the rank above Aggression: Combat Mastery ( 4 points), would be an 8 point item stat...and that stat would be equal to a rank of 15. The same is true of the item stat rank above Immense Vitality...it would be equal to a Strength of 15.
The last column is story value. This is used to determine just how 2 stats relate to one another. How much better is a 15 in Warfare versus an Amber in warfare? The ratio, thanks to this table, can be seen at 6 to 4. Double the stat is NOT, you can see, double the ability. Still, a 60 Psyche, for example, is triple the effectiveness of an Amber Psyche...
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| Mortal sickly | -45 | 0.50 | 0.50 | ||
| Mortal feeble | -35 | 0.75 | 0.75 | ||
| Mortal | -25 | 1 | 1 | ||
| Mortal notable | Chaos feeble | -15 | 1.5 | 1.5 | |
| Chaos | -10 | 2 | 2 | ||
| Chaos notable | Amber feeble | -5 | 3 | 3 | |
| Amber | 0 | 4¤ | 4 | ||
| Amber notable | 15 | 8§ | 6 | ||
| Amber luminary | 30 | 16 | 8 | ||
| Amber legend | 60 | 32 | 12 | ||
| Amber paramount | 120 | 64 | 16 |
A quick perusal of the books shows that Psychic Neutral, for example, gives "Actual defense is equal to someone with someone of a Amber Level in Psyche" for 2 points. By the chart above, it would seem to cost 4 under this system.
The ADRPG is right...Psychic Neutral does cost 2 points Notice that the level above Psychic Neutral is not truly represented in regular psyche, since it is a barrier. I would say, however, that you would need a minimum 30 Psyche for that high Psychic sensitivity to detect the barrier. It still costs 4 points.
The other discrepancy is in intelligence. Here, it seems that it takes 4 points to get a human level of intelligence. (where the chart above shows it should take 1) While the idea of super powered intelligent items might work, I have decided to keep the Intelligence and Communication Skills as they are.
For all other item abilities, the chart and book are more or less in agreement, and as you can see, the chart above lends itself to more possibilities for items! You can have, for instance, items with a greater range of possibilities. Hellhounds with a -5 in Warfare (3 points in Aggression).
No player's items or stats actually will have to change or need to change with this expansion. This merely provides additional material for items, stats, constructs and other paraphrenalia....and it eliminates the Demon ranks in the worksheet in Shadow Knight. For an example of a Demon built under this new system, please check out Phosis.
For even more examples and explication of the concepts, please See The following pages, hosted by Arref: