“You should keep in mind that the Imperium does have some of the top trainers. We even have a specialist trainer for the rare Dark Knight category. You would have to split up your stat allocation a fair bit, but that shouldn’t be a problem given how many points you’ll have. You could invest pretty heavily into Arcanum, Fortitude, Athletics, Holy, Luck, and Charisma.”

Lucas brought up his status screen while she was talking about stats and looked over the options. Although he had never made it anywhere in the game, he still had a fairly solid understanding of how most things worked. Athletics, Arcanum, and Holy were associated with three different resource pools, Stamina, Arcane Energy, and Holy Energy respectively, and they were the basis for different types of attack. Physical-damage classes, such as Fighters, Rogues and Archers, relied on Stamina for their attacks and thus invested heavily in Athletics to increase their Stamina pool. Casters relied upon Arcanum to increase their Arcane Energy pool for casting spells. Likewise, Healers relied upon Holy Energy. Fortitude was the universally-needed stat that increased a player’s health pool, a boost that was more significant with each level.

After those easily trackable stats with definite effects, there were also two other stats that no one really knew how to quantify: Charisma and Luck. The players who made themselves into Bards knew that Charisma was needed, but no one really knew how much it affected their performance—and, if they did, they weren’t telling anyone else. Players had tested everything, of course, hoping to find the most efficient builds possible. They had even gone so far as to try putting together data-mining teams to nail down exactly how and to what degree Charisma would impact their skills. Unfortunately, results were so varied that, while they could tell where correlations existed, there was never any quantifiable measurement of exactly how or why.

Many hypothesized that the stats’ effects were dependent on the sum of the user’s actions and encounters, meaning that it would be nearly impossible to create a perfect control group. Since no two players ever advanced through the game in exactly the same way, it would be impossible to perfectly replicate two gameplay experiences. Even if players followed the same path and took the quests in the same order, there would always be natural differences in their interactions with NPCs.