A New Kind Of Grind

I woke up at a weird hour, deep in the night, and after a dose of painkiller, I figured I might as well read some of those books Cecilia recommended to me. The first book was a pretty breezy read, all told; it was short, and covered a lot of stuff I already kinda knew, but its framing tied a lot of the concepts together in a way that made it all come together more sensibly to me. Plus, it did introduce a few new things.

First and foremost, the Delver Classes- your Wizard and Ranger and Paladin and whatnot, as opposed to Rancher and Miner and the like- had an underlying system of roles. Those roles were Warrior, Security Expert, Mage, and Healer, which I felt mapped very cleanly onto the classic Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric party from D&D... because that's precisely how it worked; those four Classes were the basic one-role classes, and were often regarded as the best at performing their individual role, with the downside of broad incompetence outside their role- you couldn't expect a Fighter to cast healing spells, after all.

However, there were a lot more than just four Delver Classes, and in fact, there existed one for every unique combination of roles, except for "all four." That added up to four one-role classes, six two-role classes (such as Paladin, which was Warrior/Healer, meaning that Veronica could, hypothetically, be a fairly competent swordswoman, if she was ever involved in a fight where she wasn't busy un-stabbing me), and four three-role classes (such as Ranger, Security/Mage/Healer, enabling Neloteth to pick locks, set people on fire, and heal them afterwards).

Now for the fun part: those roles aren't an artificial framework that the delvers of Dorn made up in order to make sense of the classes that existed. They were baked into the system itself, because each role was a full-fat set of class features that were shared across every class that had that role. Nel wasn't a Mage because she had a spellcasting ability that happened to fill the same battlefield role as a Wizard's spellcasting, Nel was a Mage because she could cast spells exactly like a Wizard could.

There were, of course, still reasons anyone took Wizard instead of Ranger; just because a Ranger technically had the ability to cast any spell a Wizard or a Cleric could cast, plus all the shit a Rogue could do, Ranger also had stat modifiers that a Wizard, Cleric, or Rogue would point and laugh at. Nel might be able to cast [Fireball], but since her Soul Stats were garbage, it would cost her more magic from a smaller pool and do less damage than if I'd done it. Sure, she also had a Cleric's powerful buff spells, plus the possibility of enchanted items to bring her stats up even further, but everyone had those things.

That then raised another question: why the fuck did anyone take Ranger instead of Wizard? And the answer to that was... most of them didn't. The mono-role classes are the most popular and common, and the three-role classes are the least popular and common. But, just because a Ranger will always be a worse Wizard than a real Wizard, does not mean they aren't damn fine Rangers. And what I mean by that is that having all of those abilities in one person produces some unique opportunities and tactics that you just cannot pull off with a Cleric and a Wizard buffing a Rogue. A Wizard can't sneak past enemies, and a Rogue can't fireball their dicks off.

Also, oddly enough, just because a Ranger already had the spellcasting of a Wizard and a Cleric plus the stuff Rogues got (if I was being honest, I probably would not understand how the Security Expert and Warrior roles actually worked, mechanically, for the rest of my life, simply because I didn't have access to them and they couldn't easily be analogized to a weird flavor of wizardry like Healer spellcasting can) didn't mean that was all Rangers had. Rangers also had a bespoke mechanic that enabled them to shapeshift into small animals, ranging from "a wolf" (which, while definitely bigger than most dogs, was in fact not actually all that big; the average wolf was around ninety pounds, and the biggest (mundane, non-magical) wolf on record was only in the neighborhood of a hundred and seventy; that's forty to eighty kilograms for those of us who use real units of measurement) to "a fruit fly." And they weren't the only class with bespoke abilities like that, either.

"Okay, I... need to get up," I muttered, putting the book back into my inventory and carefully clambering out of bed, hissing in pain as my back protested being upright instead of lying back on that lovely wedge pillow Haruna made for me. "Ugh. Fuck."

I grunted, and started to pace around my room, continuing to review what I'd learned from the book.

See, the thing about mage spellcasting was that it could, in theory, do anything that the System was capable of... just, not always very well. By way of example, a Ranger like Neloteth had the magical ability to turn into animals. A Wizard could, if they were able to figure out how, potentially cast a spell that mimicked this Ranger ability, allowing the caster to turn into a squirrel or a crow or a garter snake... but where a Level 5 Ranger would spend ten or so motes of magic to do so, a Wizard would have to spend a hundred, because the Wizard had to do everything themselves.

The System handled a lot of things in a black-box sort of manner, and depending on who you asked, it simply had more efficient and specialized methods to use than Wizards had yet developed, or it was cheating on behalf of the people who were supposed to have those abilities; according to the latter school of thought, it should be costing a Ranger a hundred motes of magic to turn into small animals, but it wasn't because the System gave them a discount. A small splinter faction within that school of thought instead supposed that the Ranger's price was the 'real' price, and rather than a discount, the System was instead charging a tariff of those spellcasters doing things they logically shouldn't be able to do.

The upshot of all this "Wizards can hypothetically do anything the System can facilitate, provided they figure out how" is that, aside from the standard library of Wizard spells that came with the Class and was probably as old as the System itself, there were a lot of more esoteric spells that individual Wizards had researched and developed over the millennia, and the Delver's Guild happened to have access to obscene amounts of that knowledge.

This wasn't just neat because it meant I could go to the library and find a spellbook that'd teach me how to turn into a golden-cheeked warbler or a poison-dart frog. For a start, just about every goddamn spell on the Healer spell list- every healing spell, every buffing spell- had been transcribed into Guild-standard Wizard notation, and I could learn to cast them. It'd take somewhere in the neighborhood of a full work day just to learn one of them at my level, and it'd cost me five times the magic that it'd cost a Cleric- and while Clerics were the most magically-capable Healers, their spells still drained them pretty significantly- but I could do it.

Of course, I could also mimic the Cleric's buffing and healing with potions... but that brought me to the most exciting discovery: there already were some spells that mimicked potion effects. It was still a field of active research, with the only publicly-available examples being a few proof-of-concept spells that were more-or-less just less-efficient versions of Cleric spells, being as they were trying to specifically emulate the effects of drinking a healing potion.

I hummed quietly, and came to a stop in my pacing, right in front of my window- an artifice of great enchantment, because our apartment was in the middle of the building and did not have a single goddamn real window. Cecilia had mentioned that a Slotless Class Unlock item for the three-role classes were comparatively cheaper than equivalents for one-role classes, and I had to say... I was very glad for that. After reading that book, and being informed directly that there are four big, complex rules-mechanical toyboxes for delvers, and I only had access to one of them, I found myself very much wanting a Slotless Commander Unlock, so I could get access to the Warrior, Security Expert, and Healer toyboxes. It'd just be the one item, and while I wouldn't be as proficient at those roles as I would if I nabbed Slotless Fighter, Rogue, and Cleric Unlocks, I kind of didn't actually give a shit. I was already a Wizard, and I didn't need to have all of those other roles available to me. I just wanted them because I wanted to play with all the cool toys, and that I very much could do with Commander.

I jotted down a note in the moonlight, reminding myself that I did want a Slotless Commander Unlock, and hummed quietly. I was still tired, and I did want to go back to sleep, but... for some reason, I had the suspicion that wouldn't happen so easily.

So, for lack of any better ideas, I pulled that first book back out of my inventory, and flipped to the section on basic spell design. I'd done this myself already a few times before, like when I made the three-point lighting spell for photography, but the book's framework promised to make this process much easier- to the point that I, a Level 4 Wizard with maxed out base stats and a Sevenfold Necklace, could probably create a new spell in the span of an hour, in the middle of the night, while on painkillers.

Of course, when I woke up the next morning with no memory of having fallen asleep, I found that my optimism had been misplaced.

Oh well. I didn't really need a spell that automagically jerked me off.

I've got Akane.