#05 – TRAITS

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Earlier in this blog, we discussed the stats and the traits, mentioned the skills – and went over the current states of human characters (the mage and his/her disciples). Today, we'd like to take a closer look at the traits they affect almost every aspect of the game, and are an extremely important part of its mechanics.

Let’s start with the summary of what we already know:

Your mage character (and every disciple in the game) is generated with certain ːnotebookː STATS. These do not change through the course of the game, and define the character at the structural level:

• HEALTH
  
• INTELLECT
  
• MEMORY
  
• WILLPOWER
  
• CHARISMA
  
• INTUITION
  

Is your mage smart? Does he have an exceptionally good memory? Is she healthy, with an immune system that will withstand most of the viruses? The same applies to every disciple in the game: they arrive to the Spire with the stats in place, and this is something that will significantly influence your decisions as to whom to accept and whom to reject.

Your mage character is also generated with certain ːnotebookː SKILLS. These will develop over the course of the game, increasing as character gains theoretical and practical experience.

There are multiple skills, ranging from Healing to Monstrology, and we will talk about them in detail in one of the future blogs. Meanwhile let's just note that screening your disciples for skills and teaching them selected topics to increase the skills that you consider essential to the survival and growth of the Spire, is a key part of the game.

When a wounded party returns from a quest, it’s whether or not you have the required medical skills in the Spire, that determines if you keep those valuable characters as a part of your Spire team – or add new tombstones to the Spire's graveyard.

The next group that affects your human characters is the ːnotebookː STATES: things like mood (happy or depressed), current health (sick or full of energy) and loyalty (abandoning the Spire at the first sign of trouble or sticking with you through their last breaths). Character states change all the time.

Current character states are influenced by character traits (what the character likes or hates), game events (a discovery of a horrible undead creature, for example) and your own actions (which to the character actually seem like events, for example arresting someone, or giving them a wonderful gift to keep).

And now, the ːnotebookː TRAITS: these fall with the same group as the stats. They do not change through the game and represent a part of what makes each character special. If you know the Stats and the Traits of a person, you know how to use them most efficiently. Skills and States are the layer that is based on such foundation, and something that you can influence to a great degree over the course of the whole campaign.






There's a pretty large number of possible character traits. On average, in Spire of Sorcery a human has from 3 to 5 traits (but of course, "average" is just that, some will have fewer and some will have substantially more).

Below are some of the possible traits, grouped in pairs:

• Lucky – Unlucky
  
• Cruel – Kind
  
• Inventive – Conservative
  
• Greedy – Generous
  
• Lively – Gloomy
  
• Attractive – Repulsive
  

A character can also be Talkative, Attentive, and so on.

It is important to note that character traits can be Hidden and Revealed, depending on your mage's knowledge of that person.

Some traits, like Handsome or Ugly, are revealed from day one – whenever a disciple with such traits knocks on your door, you will immediately notice them. Some traits will take some time, and effort, to become revealed.

In modern life, banks have a rule that's abbreviated as KYC – "know your customer". In Spire of Sorcery, a similar rule – "know your disciple" – is essential to success: if you send a greedy disciple to extract treasure from ruins, you may lose both the disciple and the treasure, with which he will run away; whereas if you send a lucky disciple to attempt diplomacy with one of the (rare and powerful) supreme magic creatures, your chances of success will be rather high.

There are three ways to reveal character traits of your disciples:

• through events
  
  For example, someone might steal a valuable item in the Spire, and when caught, this will reveal his/her trait that lead to the theft.
  
  
• through horoscope
  
  By building the complete horoscope of a character, you are able to access full knowledge of his/her traits.
  
  
• through a special ritual called Mind Reading
  
  This ritual is the fastest way to reveal character's traits, however it requires advanced skills and consumes valuable resources. So it's more of a late-game tool.
  

Generally, it is the stats of your mage that determine how fast you can reveal hidden traits (it depends on your Intellect and Intuition values).






At the start of the campaign, your mage already has a few disciples. The exact number of followers depends on the way that you complete the character generation quest. You are very likely to know all of the traits of these initial disciples, since they would have a story of personal relationship with you that goes a long way back.

There are three ways in which new disciples may join the Spire:

• by joining your existing party when out on a quest
  
  This is a rare occasion, and happens only when everything aligns in the right way.
  
  
• through the Seek Recruits type of quest
  
  This is more common: you will be sending your disciples predisposed to such quests (e.g. charismatic, beautiful, convincing, lucky negotiators) to settlements (villages, towns) in order to specifically seek out potential recruits and convince them to come back to the Spire with the party.
  
  
• through the Call of the Spire ritual
  
  This is another common tool to gain more recruits: you will be performing a magic ritual, that consumes energy on a daily basis, spread across the world the call that only the magically talented will hear. Think of it as sending "radio waves" through the world, that only the potential disciples can hear.
  

Once the potential recruit reaches the Spire, you have the option to Accept or Reject the character. If you don't have enough living or teaching space, you can Accept via Exchange, expelling one of the existing disciples and taking in the new person. Or you can just immediately add living space (and extra food supplies, if necessary) and accept the additional person (though adding food by magic is a pretty costly endeavour, and it makes more sense to find a disciple who would become a good gardener, and will supply the Spire's food in a regular way).

Before you decide to accept or reject the recruit, you will want to know as much as possible about that character – from stats to traits, and to skills. There are four solutions for this:

• through observation
  
  Certain things will be obvious from the start, for example if the potential disciple is a great-looking tall woman with a strong build, you will already see all of that in revealed stats and traits. Or take a cripple – there, certain things will be immediately clear after initial observation.
  
  
• by looking at the character portrait
  
  The generator that we use to create disciple portraits, associates certain facial features with certain traits. It is not a 100% reliable way to understand the character, however it would be enough to give you a certain "hunch" as to what traits the recruit may possess – and knowing ahead could be really advantageous.
  
  
• by reading character's auto-biography
  
  Sometimes, this is a helpful tool. But bear in mind that characters can, and will, lie about themselves, and so someone who describes his/her great adventures and achievements may have in fact spent all of their life sitting at home.
  
  
• by interviewing the recruit
  
  Conducting an interview takes time, but it's a good way to reveal more about the recruit. Especially if your mage's intellect and intuition are high enough so that you get a lot out of such interview.
  

If at the start of the campaign you're likely to have 3-4 disciples, in the late game this number will be closer to 30-40 (depending on your strategy, of course).

One of the features that we plan to actively test during the Early Access phase is how much of a hierarchy there will be in the Spire.

While initially, your primary focus is in teaching disciples and advancing their skills, later on there will be major events that require your full focus. For the late game, we currently expect to create a hierarchy of disciples, where you are able to appoint several advanced characters to the Council of the Spire, and to delegate to them day-to-day management of activities like teaching and supplies.

In terms of user interface, the settings for such delegated operations will require actual live tests to find the level of automation that allows full control over the major events – while taking off your hands the minutae. In just a few months, we'll see how it goes! We'll start with the closed beta, and then progress to Early Access as we confirm more and more of the UI solutions.

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With this, we wrap this week's blog – and welcome you to join the game's official Discord server, which already has a population of 300+!

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