The Measure of a Thing

Your rank is a number now

A letter was never enough. Two characters both read B and one of them was twice the other; a fight that should have been a slaughter read as an even match, and there was no way to tell from the sheet which one you were.

Rank is now a two-digit number, and the letter is just the first digit given a name.

• The first digit is your tier — 1 is D, 2 is C, 3 is B, and up
• The second is where you stand inside it — a 34 and a 39 are both B, and the 39 is winning

So B 37 says something the letter alone never could. You can see yourself climbing between letters instead of sitting at one for months and then jumping.

Each tier is ten times the power of the one below. Not ten percent — ten times. The distance from D to S is not four steps up a ladder, it is ten thousand times the force, and the number finally says so.

Everyone else has one too

Enemies used to show a level. It meant nothing — it wasn't in any of the maths, it never decided a single blow, and it sat right next to your rank inviting you to compare two numbers that had nothing to do with each other.

It's gone. Creatures and people now show the same rank you do, on the same scale. When a thing reads A 44 and you read B 33, that comparison is real and you should take it seriously.

Your letter may have moved

The game was keeping two ladders and quietly disagreeing with itself. The letter on your sheet came from one, and every calculation that decided a fight came from the other. A character could read SS on the sheet while the world treated them as an A.

There is one ladder now, and the letters were rewritten to match what the world already believed about you. Most letters moved. Some down.

Nothing was taken from you. Your strength and your magic are exactly what they were — the label was wrong and now it isn't. If you dropped a letter, you were being flattered.

What you do costs what it's worth

This is the big one.

Effort used to be priced by how hard you said you tried. Splitting a mountain and swatting a fly cost the same if you described both with the same conviction — so an archmage lighting a candle paid a real portion of their power to do it, and there was no such thing as acting casually.

Cost is now priced by the deed, not the doer.

Every action has a size of its own — lighting a candle, forcing a door, clearing a ravine in one leap, collapsing a cottage, sinking a ship. That size is fixed. What changes is who's doing it:

• Working at the very edge of your power spends essentially all of it
• Working one tier below your ceiling costs about a tenth
• Two tiers below costs a hundredth — a rounding error

Which means power finally feels like power. A B-rank shoulders a barred door and it costs them something real. An S-rank does it without breaking conversation, and still has everything left for what comes after. The same sentence, typed identically, is a feat for one of you and a shrug for the other.

The ladder covers more than fighting. Leaping, climbing, running down a horse, holding a portcullis on your back — movement and feats of body are priced on the same scale as spells and blows.

Reaching past your limit

You can attempt things beyond your ceiling. You should think hard first.

The old system punished you for committing — go all-in and you risked backlash, whether or not what you attempted was reasonable. That's exactly backwards. Spending everything you have on something you can actually do is just fighting well.

Reaching for something you genuinely cannot do is now called overdraw, and it does not take your reserve. It takes your maximum, permanently.

• Reach a little past yourself and something ruptures — you come back smaller than you were
• Reach well past and you are maimed — the loss is severe and it does not heal
• Reach far past and it kills you

Because that's a real thing to lose, you will never do it by accident. Describe something enormous and the world assumes you meant it within your means and scales it to your reach. You only overdraw when you make plain that you are throwing everything past the wall — the desperate, last-thing-I-do attempt. That door is open when you want it. It stays shut when you don't.

What you can and cannot hurt

Matchups no longer show you a ratio. They show you a verdict — an even match, you have the upper hand, dangerous, you are outmatched, suicidal — and you'll see it before you commit.

There is now a floor beneath which an attack does not land at all. Two full tiers below a thing and you cannot meaningfully harm it, and the game will say so plainly rather than letting you chip at it for an hour. Find another way. That is the intended answer.

Above that floor, everything is continuous. Being slightly ahead is slightly better. There are no cliffs where one point of stat doubles your damage.

Enemies are honest now

Two things were wrong with how creatures were built.

Health rose with both an enemy's power and its role, counting the same strength twice — so the largest things in the world had absurd, unkillable health bars while an ordinary guardsman a rank above his neighbour had less health than the neighbour. The curve sawed up and down within a single tier.

Now health follows one curve for everyone, and a creature's role only says how long it lasts: chaff folds fast, a boss is built to outlast a whole party. An enemy at your rank is your equal — the same reach, the same durability, a genuinely even fight. That's a promise the numbers keep now rather than one they happened to break.

Training makes you formidable, not a legend

Milestone rewards used to be flat. The same milestone that moved a modestly-built character four ranks moved a strong one barely one — so the reward you got for the same achievement depended entirely on what you rolled up with, and it punished you for starting well.

Rewards are now measured in rank. A milestone is worth the same climb to everyone. The gap between two characters is the same after training as before it: everybody rises, nobody is overtaken by arithmetic.

Training a full career is worth two tiers. Start at C and you finish somewhere in A — formidable, dangerous, a name people know. You do not train your way into being a threat to nations. Everything above that comes from transformations and from what actually happens to you in the story.

There are still five milestones, and each still grants a skill. That's deliberate — a character carrying thirty skills is unreadable and impossible to balance.

No mortal is SSS

The top of the ladder is not for people. SSS is reserved for the things that made the world, and no race's ceiling reaches it.

Character creation had been promising otherwise. It advertised ceilings it couldn't honour — fairies were told their magic reached SSS when the limit behind it was an S, and in the same breath quoted a strength ceiling less than half of what they actually get. Those figures were written by hand and had drifted from the real limits.

They're derived from the real caps now, so what creation tells you is what you get. Some quoted ceilings went up.

Small things

• Wards, mends and blessings held their value at low rank and became worthless at high rank — a shield that once absorbed three times your health later absorbed a fraction of it. They now scale with you, permanently, at a fixed share.
• Transformations could be expired and taken again for a fresh slot. They can't be removed any more, by anything.
• Experience awards had no ceiling, and a single generous scene could carry you through an entire career. They're bounded.

New to any of this, or want the full detail — the Codex carries the whole scale: what each rank means, what things cost, and what overdraw does to you.

Still to come

Attack costs inside an ongoing fight are the last thing still priced the old way — a swing costs what a swing costs, regardless of who is swinging. Bringing combat exchanges onto the same effect pricing as everything else is the next piece.