The two most fundamental indicators of a character's capabilities are its Ability Modifiers and its Proficiency. Each individually informs most aspects of competent a character is in any area, and when added together they form the core of what a character rolls when attempting most checks during play.
ABILITY MODIFIERS
Realm of Runes uses the six abilities iconic to fantasy tabletop RPGs: Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. During character creation, each individual generates a spread of modifiers for each of them, ranging from -3 to +4. Everyone starts at +0 across the board, then applies boosts and flaws during each until left with a custom spread that represents its physical and mental makeup from then on. There are opportunities to further increase these ability modifiers as a character gains levels, and one can later use retraining rules to move points from one to another if it turns out the spread you have just isn't working out for you.
Besides retraining, your ability modifiers don't change much, and are never permanently altered without that being a choice you make. Ability modifiers are too deeply ingrained into a character's capabilities and resources to boost or penalize them directly. Instead, Realm of Runes utilizes a series of conditions to represent an impairment to your abilities, allowing you to quickly and easily modify checks that use an impaired ability. Conditions such as Feeble (impaired Strength), Sluggish (impaired Agility), Drained (impaired Endurance), and Dizzy (impaired intelligence, wisdom and charisma) influence checks, but don't ever require you to recalculate important character resources like Hit Points or spells available.
Sometimes these abilities are used more directly. Each character adds its Endurance modifier to the Hit Points it gains from class each level and adds its Strength modifier to melee damage, and many feats have a prerequisite ability threshold. Which ability is used for what is also subject to some ability to customize. Any finesse weapon can use Agility for melee attacks instead of Strength, and a hulking brute of a character can use Strength for Intimidation instead of Charisma with a little investment.
PROFICIENCY
Proficiency is separated into five tiers: Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master and Legendary. Each tier provides a small bonus (or penalty) to checks made with that level of proficiency, but this bonus is a relatively minor aspect of what makes proficiency important. Each tier of proficiency also serves as an investment gate. Many feats or abilities require a certain level of proficiency as a prerequisite, and a large number automatically scale up their benefits as proficiency improves.
For example, each skill has a basic suite of activities that anyone can freely use, even if untrained, but also has some that are only freely available to those with training. Most of the time these activities require a skill check (which uses your proficiency with a skill plus that skill's key ability modifier), and these skill checks frequently have different possible results for different levels of proficiency. A master will tend to get more use out of a skill activity than an expert, and so on. Each skill also has a pool of feats available for specializing within that skill. A character must be at least trained in a skill to take feats from it, and some require higher levels of proficiency as a prerequisite.
During character creation, each character generates a suite of initial proficiencies, then has the ability to improve its proficiency as it levels up. While initial proficiency is primarily determined by ancestry and class options, every subsequent opportunity to increase proficiency is entirely free from restriction. Whether permanently altering how a skill works for you or getting the most out of your weapons, armor and spells, every area rewards further proficiency investment - but you are never required to focus on an area because it is typical, or forced to abandon one because it's unusual.
Proficiency also has another important influence on play, and that's to serve as a veil over the inherent math that makes Realm of Runes work. Proficiency includes a character's level as a component, which allows players to choose new and exciting abilities each level instead of constantly having to maintain existing ones. Your competence with weapons, spells, skills, etc., automatically gets better as you do. You're never spending character resources to simply tread water in Realm of Runes. When you improve, it's by adding or altering the ways you can use your abilities. The numbers sort themselves out.
Ability modifiers and proficiency are the skeleton that holds Realm of Runes together. Now that we've laid this foundation, we can start looking at how these tools are used to make interesting choices available, and how each proficiency sets itself apart from all the others. We're going to be covering these mechanical spotlights on Fridays, but the next blog on Tuesday will take a deeper look at Ancestries. See you then!
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