Groveborne

Welcome to the everything-you-could-want guide on Groveborne's stat system. We strove to keep it clear, concise, and comprehensive, but by all means: if by the end you have any questions or concerns, hop over here and let us know, or drop a line on Discord! We'd be happy to help.

Stat Overview
Stats in Groveborne function as a quick overview of a character's skills and characteristics, summarizing strengths and weaknesses in six easily distinguished scores. Though interactions here are primarily narrative-driven, events and special RPs may sometimes incorporate 'challenge rolls,' or D20 roll-offs to determine an action's success or strength—and stats can influence their result. Campaigns exclusively use a character's stats to navigate, so while they are not required for roleplay, they are essential if you wanted to participate in campaigns.



Stat scores reflect not just innate ability and talent, but training, experience, and competence, as outlined below:

1. Strength
   Used in brute force or tests of strength. For example, pushing, pulling, lifting, or breaking things.
2. Dexterity
   Applied in feats of speed, agility, and stealth. Involved in moving quickly, quietly, or nimbly. Deftness may also use DEX.
3. Constitution
   A character's defense, resistance, and stamina. Used primarily to reduce or block damage, but also represents endurance and the ability to push physical limits.
4. Intelligence
   Utilized in scenarios relying on logic, education, memory, or reasoning; such as investigating, recalling, deducing, and some technical skills like successfully executing a disguise.
5. Wisdom
   Represents intuition, perception, and will. Empathizing, reading nonverbal communication, observational skills (including some types of survival skills, such as tracking), and determination checks all use WIS.
6. Charisma
   Used when influencing or entertaining others. A CHR check might occur when deceiving, intimidating, persuading, performing, or lying, for example.

Stat Values
Distilling a character's aptitude down into a score can certainly present a challenge, but we weigh stats on a scale to help provide a point of reference. In DRoP: Legacy, a stat can range from 1–30, where 1 is 'abysmal,' 10 is 'average,' 20 is 'exceptional,' and 30 is 'remarkable.'

A character's initial stat value, or starting points, will be rolled by a moderator and included in a character's approval post. Once your character's points are available, you're welcome to assign them however you like, up to the cap of 30 and total value.


For human characters, initial values are separated by age groups and determined by dice roll, from within the ranges below:

AGE | STAT TOTAL
15–20 = 50–80 points
21–25 = 60–90 points
26–45 = 70–100 points
46–65 = 55–85 points

Characters outside these age ranges do not have stats and use a basic D20 for challenge rolls where applicable.


Non-human sentient species such as Companions and Gryphons also receive stats, from a total roll between 80–100. They utilize the same stat guidelines, ranges and caps outlined above. They may also attain Traits and Skills and have just as many starting slots as a human character.

Level Ups
Occasionally, characters may receive additional stat points from Level Ups by participating in special events. When an event has the potential to award levels, it will be documented in its info post (typically its first post).

Levels will be distributed at the conclusion of an event to all qualifying characters by a moderator, and posted in a character's profile as a log post documenting 5 points have been earned. Once a level has been awarded, players are welcome to distribute the points however they like, up to the stat cap of 30.

Applying Stats
Each character receives a blank stat table in their profile. Once their points have been granted, enter your character's stat values into each field, similar to the example below. When your totals have been updated and the page is refreshed, each score can be hovered over (or tapped, for mobile users) for a quick recap on how they impact rolls.

STR. DEX. CON. INT. WIS. CHR.
8--- 12 --- 6 --- 18 --- 14 ---20
Total: 78


Once levels have been gained, earned points can also be recorded here. Add additional points directly into the score values, and their total as +# underneath the table. I.e. Total: 78+5, or Total: 66+10

Roll Impact
But what do the tooltips mean? They update according to the entered value, and show how a roll for that stat would be influenced. We hope the tooltips will mean you'll need to reference this table only rarely, but the full outline can be found here:



For example, our demo character's intelligence is 18. If we were to roll a 12 on an INT challenge, the roll would get a +4 bonus, for a total of 16. Demo's strength, on the other hand, is only 8, meaning a STR roll would get a -1 penalty.

Gift Strength & Usage

When creating your character, you may or may not have selected Gifts. If you did, each one of those Gifts had a 'strength' roll attached to it that ranged from 1-100, where it was broken down into basic categories.

For narrative driven experiences, this description is more than enough. Writers are not expected to calculate anything if they are writing in a normal RP or narrative-focused meta events.

However, a more specific allocation of points is necessary for campaigns. For that reason, we wrote the following section to explain how we calculate Gift Strength and a character's ability to use it.

The 'Well' Theory
Given the definition of 'magic' being life energy, staff has made several assumptions about the nature of Gift usage and how an individual is determined to be 'strong' or not. Basically, our theory breaks down like this:

Personal Lifeforce/Energy = Well of available power
Gift Strength = Ability to handle available power

Using an Adept Herald Mage with a 97 Mage Gift Roll as an example, this character is described as being very disciplined with a strong moral core. For RP purposes, this means that this character can utilize advanced spells and cast them with relative ease.

Moving into the Campaign side of things, we need to place a number on this character's 'well' so we know how many actual spells this character can fire off. (It's no fun if every adept can end every encounter with a mini-Cataclysm, amirite??)

Which brings us to the ---

Gift Strength Ranges
1 - 30: Weak
31 - 80: Average
81 - 95: Strong
96 - 99: Powerful
100: Perfect Score! Extremely Powerful

Narrative-Only Gift Usage
Brief Use: 5
Average Use: 10
Strenuous Use: 20
Extremely Difficult Use: 50
Nuclear Option: 90

Gift Recharge Time (Counted ICly)
Character regenerate 10 hit point for every hour that they rest. (A full nights sleep will regenerate most average Gifts)

Narrative Example
Herald Lyveana has a score of 98 for Animal Mindspeech. This means she has up to 98 hit points to use. During a fight with a really difficult Boggle, she utilizes her AMS to anticipate where the creature will strike. Since convincing new animals to help her is a pain in the butt on a good day, this will cost her 20 points. She still has 78 points. The boggle ends up being really hard to beat, so she uses 50 points to enlist the aid of a pack of nearby wolves to help her fight it. That leaves her with only 28 points left. She manages to defeat the boggle using basic fighting techniques that do not utilize her Gifts.

Now, to actually write this I would use the numbers on the 'backside' of my post and the result in RP would be strictly action that I pre-planned via the Gift Usage chart above. The same could be done in group narratives and quests.

Campaigns will be handled differently, since specific spells and actions will have specific usage points during a fight with an NPC monster or villain.

Personal Lifeforce
We're going to give players the option to decide how large their character's lifeforce is via one of two methods.

First Option:
During initial character creation Gift Rolling, roll a 5d100, keep the highest score.

Second Option:
Use gift strength rolls as flat 'well' amount. Highest gift strength roll equals character's well.

Most characters will have personal lifeforce 'wells' at or near the strength number of their strongest Gift unless writers opt for the first option. The intent is for strong characters to always have enough 'juice' to use their Gifts, while giving writers of characters with weaker Gifts the chance to roll for a larger 'well' so they can fire off more low-level skills/attacks.

In Summary

Armed with the knowledge of stats - go forth and campaign! Or just use the random d20 for a little extra spice during normal RP interactions.

For a full shakedown on the Campaign System, go ahead and Click HERE.

For examples on using stats, traits and skills in normal RP, head over to the Traits & Skills Guide!