Battle System

Section 1: Stats
These work on a Ratings System. So, we don't have numbered stats, we instead assign a raitng to each stat to show what your character is adept and inept at. Here are our five stats:

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Strength (STR): You character's general strength attribute. A strong character can swing harder, lift more, etc. This affects how powerful your basic physical attack is, as well as the power of any physical skills.

Magic (MAG): A character with high magic is adept with offensive magical abilities. The higher your magic, the more damage your magic skills will do. This also affects how much Spiritual Power you have, meaning that the higher your magic stat, the more spells you can cast before becoming mentally fatigued.

Endurance (END): A character with high endurance can take a lot of punishment. The higher this is, the more damage you can take before going down.

Agility (AGL): How fast your character can move. A character with high agility dodges more, and tends to react faster in battle. The higher your agility, the more likely you are to move first in a fight.

Luck (LUK): This affects many things by a little. In battle, this manifests itself as you getting hit less with ailments, or slightly higher skill activation chances. Outside of battle, you may just find that things go better for you, with a high Luck.


 * Ailment chances: For each point of Luck difference between yourself and the enemy, add or subtract 5%. If you have 1 point of Luck higher that your opponent, your chances of landing an ailment is 5% higher, and the chances of your opponent landing and ailment on you are 5% lower. So, Luck 5 casting Poisma on Luck 1 gives us 40%+(5% x 4) = 60% chance.
 * Criticals: Everyone has a 5% base chance of landing a crit with their physical attack or physical skills. This is further affected by Luck. It works similar to ailments. For each point of Luck you have above your opponent, add 2%. For every point below, subtract 1%.

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Each stat is rated for a character from 1 (very bad) to 5 (very good), with 3 being neutral.

You are given a pool of 15 points with which to assign ratings. This allows for you to make a character with 3 in every stat, if you so wish. So, someone who is very fast, very strong, but very weak with magic may look like:
 * It is important to note that these are relative: a character with STR:5 is about as strong as someone who is also STR:5, and around the same power level. However, someone who is more experienced or possessing a more powerful persona may also have STR:5, and be stronger that those less powerful characters. So someone who got their persona just the other day, with STR:5 will not be as strong as someone, with STR:5, who has been fighting their persona for 10 years.

STR:4 MAG:1 END:3 AGL:4 LUK:3

As you can see, all the ratings add up to 15 total. The minimum is 1, and the maximum is 5. These of course, can change with buffs or debuffs. So the above person, when buffed with Rakukaja (increases defense) will go to END:4 temporarily.

These ratings never increase by themselves, however. There is no stat progression under this system.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">If you ever want to change your character's stat ratings, make sure you notify the mods first.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">You also get to pick a resist and a weakness, or two resists and two weaknesses. No tripling; that just gets silly.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">

Section 2: Starting Skill Selection:
<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Each character has two specialties. Your choices for a Specialty are: <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">You can have these in any combination of two. This also means that you can have Two Physical or Two Elemental, for example.
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Physical (Slash, Strike, OR Pierce)
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Elemental (Fire, Ice, Elec, OR Wind)
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Healing
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Support(Buffs OR Debuffs)
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Ailments

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Skills are one of the biggest defining traits of your character in battle. There are, of course, guidelines as to what you can and cannot pick as a starting skill. Every character can start with up to three skills.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Your first two skills come from your specialties. This must be a starting skill, at the very bottom of your tree. So, if you picked Fire/Healing, you get Agi and Dia. If you picked Physical(Pierce) and Ailments, you get Single Shot and Poisma. Pretty simple.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Your third skills is gained form what we call an Auxiliary Specialty. These are taken form the specialty trees, but are more restricted in which ones you can get. <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">You CANNOT pick an auxiliary if you already have that as a Specialty. So, you can't get Pierce Auxiliary if you already have a Physical Specialty, or Fire Auxiliary, if you already have an element (or two) as your specialty.
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Physical(Slash, Strike, OR Pierce): Up to Medium Single-Target
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Elemental(Fire, Elec, Ice, OR Wind): Up to Medium Single-Target
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Healing: ONLY the Dia line, and only up to Diarama. So, you end with Media and Diarama.
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Support: Pick one of: Attack Buff, Attack Debuff, Defense Buff, Defense Debuff, Agility Buff, OR Agility Debuff. You can get only that skill and it's Ma- variant.
 * <p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;">Ailment: One of: Rage, Charm/Confuse, Silence or Poison. You can learn the single-target and multi-target variants, and also pick up the Boost passive skill associated with that ailment.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Let's say you want to grab a base skill from a tree, but it is not available yet. For example, I want sukukaja as my third skill. I'm not specializing in support, and Sukukaja is seen as a "base" skill, so this is ok. However, Sukukaja isn't open for everyone to take yet. In this case, what I would do is hold off on grabbing a third skill, and deal with only having two. As soon as Sukukaja is open for me to take, I learn it, alongside whatever other skill I would have learned in my normal progression. This ensures that someone can get the skill they want early on, and still maintain the same number of skills as anyone else. But, again, this only works for "base" and starting skills, ie those that don't have any other prior pre-reqs. If you wanted a character to have the confusion ailment skill, but it wasn't available yet, you can forgo your third skill, while still learning new abilities along the way, and as soon as it is available, you pick it up.

Section 3: Skill Progression:
<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Your specialty skills progress fairly easily. The entire tree for your specialties are open to you, allowing you to pick up over time the entirety of ailments, for example, if you have the ailment specialty.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Your auxiliary skill, however, is restricted. You can only go up to a certain amount. For example, if Sukukaja was your third skill, you can only ever get Masukukaja in addition. Tarukaja and Rakukaja (as well as their Ma- variants), as well as Sukunda and Masukunda, are closed off to you.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">For elementals and physicals, we can use Chie from Persona 4 as an example. If one were to try and build a character similar to her, You could get a Physical and Support(Buffs) as a specialty, and then Bufu as a third skill. So, you would have access to the entirety of a Physical and Support(Buff) tree, but your growth in the Ice tree would be restricted, allowing you to only go up to single-target medium damage.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">We'll be learning a new skills about twice a month of in-game time, on average. It'll be on major event dates, so New Moons and Full Moons. So, you learn a new skill, how do you decide what you get?

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">The first thing to make sure of is what skills have opened up for you to get. Look a the calendar (to be posted later) to find out what skills are available. For example, on the Full Moon of April 21st, Re Patra, Sukukaja, Sukunda, Marin Karin, Poison Boost open up for acquisition. So, if you had access to one of those trees, then you could grab one of those, or any other skill that opened up before. So, as time goes on, the pool of possible skills opens up. You must meet all prerequisites for the skill before you learn it. You can also learn any skill that opened up on a previous date. You never lose skill selection options, only gain them.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Note that these open up after the events of that full or new moon, so you could not have Sukukaja going into the Full Moon events on April 21st.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">If you can't find one, however, then what you can do is reserve a skill slot rather than learning a skill. This requires a free slot, and no other skill can be learned. You can hold onto that reserve slot for up to a month. The moment the skill you wanted becomes available, it goes into that reserve slot. You can only have one reserve slot at any given time.

Section 4: Custom Skills:
<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;font-size:small;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;line-height:normal;">The idea was presented that everyone would have the capability of creating their own custom skill; one that exemplifies how your persona or character works. When the custom skill option opens up, your persona can learn it.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;font-size:small;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;line-height:normal;">This is a skill you create. Of course, it needs to be in line with the general power level of other skills at that time, but is allowed to be a bit more powerful or more useful. Otherwise, there are not very many guidelines, and all of them will need to be presented and looked over for balance before they can be put into use.

<p style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;font-size:small;color:rgb(221,221,221);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;line-height:normal;">Ultimate Skills are the very last skill your persona will likely learn. This skill is the most powerful one you know in some way. Maybe it does severe damage to all enemies, or has some other effect. Either way, this is the skill that represents best what your character and persona are capable of. Like Custom Skills, these will be looked at on a case-by-case basis. The time for these to open up is still yet to be decided