Ennead


 * From Greek, a grouping of nine.

Named after the Greek word for nine, Ennead is a roleplay statistical combat system targeted at PC gaming. The system takes many of the bolder ideas in the history roleplaying systems and selectively combines these unique concepts to create a new breed of organic engine for spawning the most diverse characters.

Introduction
The goal of Ennead is to create an environment in which players have the most control over how their character works. This will be accomplished by complex and carefully woven mechanics which are based on nine ability scores. Also, the system will have no classes. Classes will be spawned from discovered archetypes of skill and ability combinations. Players will be free to build their own version of the class in which they envision their character. In essence, no two characters should ever be exactly the same. Experience will work rather differently as well. There will effectively be no experience in the classical sense. Instead, the level of skills is reflective of your overall level. The level of mob you kill has no effect on the experience you receive. All mechanics will be subtly interdependent creating an organic yet balanced system.

The bottom line is a system allowing for the most possible freedom of character creation and development.

Abilities
Ennead is named after the nine ability scores which form its core. Three groups of three stats create a balance of three primary categories. They are the strength, endurance, and grace of body, mind, and spirit. As a character grows in power, they will gain experience points which they can spend on these ability scores. Characters will gain some points that are category specific and can only be spent on the three abilities in that category.

Body
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Strength

 * Represents the physical strength or power of a character.

Endurance

 * Represents the physical endurance of a character like toughness, resistance, or hardiness.

Grace

 * Represents physical grace or fineness of a character. This could be equated to dexterity or agility.


 * }

Mind
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Intelligence

 * Represents mental strength or power of a character.

Concentration

 * Represents mental endurance and toughness.

Wisdom

 * Represents grace of mind.


 * }

Spirit
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Essence

 * Represents potency or strength of spirit.

Will

 * Represents determination and endurance of spirit.

Luck

 * Represents grace of spirit or karma.


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Skills
Skills are the main way characters are shaped. Skills represent mastery over weapons, schools of magic, and combat techniques. They will be setup in a tree so that mastery of certain skills enables the learning of new skills. The simple act of using the skill dictates its growth. The more you use a skill, the higher level it becomes. Skills will also have an associated ability category. The more you train a skill, the more experience points you will earn to spend on that skills ability category. The skill tree may also contain secret hybrid skills. These are hidden skill trees consisting of skills that may have multiple associated categories and require mastery of trees from unrelated disciplines. For example, this might be how a spell blade character is born.

Leveling up a skill takes repetitive use of that skill. The number of repetitions until the next level will go up exponentially based on the level of the skill. As a hypothetical example, it may take five repetitions to reach skill level one, ten more to reach level two, the fifteen more to reach level three. The level of a skill will be theoretically infinite. It will just take more and more repetitions to gain the next level. A character's actual level will be based on the total number of repetitions over all skills performed. This means two characters of the same level could have a radically different number of skills. One character could decide to specialize their skill set and another could decide to generalize. One would have very few skills and one would have many but they would have both gone through the same total number of repetitions and thus be the same level.

Mechanics
There will be three major point pools; hitpoints, stamina, and mana. The maximum points in these pools along with other statistical mechanics such as accuracy, damage, dodge, and resistance to damage will each be influenced by nearly all ability scores only some will have more weight than others. By having all abilities have at least a small influence in most mechanics, characters grow to be more balanced. For example, a mage who specializes in magic related skills and abilities until they are very high level can never get stuck with level one hitpoints.

Any mechanics requiring random chance will use a weighted probability modified by ability scores and skills. A maximum value for the roll will be calculated and a weighted probability curve centered on 50% of the maximum value will be used to determine the outcome.

Another way in which characters can alter their combat style is by choosing how much stamina or fatigue they want to spend when they use a skill. The more power put into the skill, the larger the effect. Different skills would be more efficient spending smaller amounts of power many times during combat due to diminishing returns whereas others would have exponential curves favoring those with lots of excess power to dump into a single effect.

Weapons/Spells
Any item in the game from the lowliest n00b stick to the uber Falchion of the Damned can be used at any level. The restrictions are more subtle than simply a required level. Different components such as damage and accuracy a character can do with a weapon or also magnitude and duration of a spell cast by a character will have different ability scores which influence those values. For example, strength will effect damage dealt by an axe. However, the influence of these ability scores will vary from weapon to weapon. Lower level weapons will have a greater static bonus and a very low or more linear influence from a related ability score. Higher level weapons will have less static influence and more exponential influence based on ability scores. This means that a low level character is going to be more effective with a lower level weapon because having a static bonus to compensate for the characters low ability scores. However, as the character increases their ability scores, they will reach a point of diminishing returns with their low level weapon and want a weapon which gives them a bigger bonus for having a high ability score. The same system would apply to spells as weapons.