RPG Stats

Some people in Cosmic Academy choose to represent their characters in fights by using "numbers", which is a reference to doing stuff like measuring their character's wellbeing using HP, and mentioning their attacks doing a certain number of damage. Doing this is 100% optional, and you are neither encouraged nor discouraged from doing so.

This is basically a reference for that kind of stuff, if you're interested in stating your character or are confused about other people doing so.

Hitpoints

Often abbreviated as HP, this is an abstraction used to represent the general state of able-bodiedness, toughness and wellness in a character, including psychological durability and pain tolerance. When a character is reduced to 0 HP, they have fallen in battle. Depending on the nature of the fight, the result can vary. Usually in a spar this is unconsciousness, or can represent death in a "real" fight such as an event.

You may want to adjust your HP based on your character's own traits. Here are some examples! (Not the actual numbers, but examples.) Feel free to make other adjustments as needed, and remember that most characters will indeed be weakened with injuries. HP is an abstraction. If someone breaks your arm, you'll be affected in more ways than just losing some HP. Keep this in mind.
 * Oliver is a Sand controller in the military, and relies on using higher damage than what Sand controllers are normally capable of to neutralise hostile targets. His HP is 3000 instead of 4000, but his attacks deal higher damage than most Sand controllers.
 * Network is an average-toughness kinesis, but Mode chooses to operate as a damage generalist with her techniques. She has 2000 HP instead of 3000, but makes up for this with increased versatility and options in her abilities.
 * Dark is a squishy kinesis and would normally have 2000 HP, but Cryven is a tougher brawler type. While less versatile with his kinesis abilities than a normal Dark controller, he has 3000 HP.
 * Damian is a Blood controller with a focus on taking lots of damage. He has 4000 HP instead of 3000 HP like most Blood controllers, but sacrifices battle strategy and blood crafting versatility for it.

However, we assume some degree of a "Goku effect" or "Hulk effect" in all characters, and we use the very common trait people like of increasing power as a character is more injured to precisely cancel out the realistic effect of being more injured actually making you less capable. In other words, most characters' "my powers are stronger the more angry/hurt I am" trait is enough to exactly cancel out the physical wounds or skill-distraction that should realistically be associated with those states, and this is why most characters would be doing the same damage with their attacks regardless of their current HP.

The HP cap for player characters is currently 6000.

Damage

Damage is also an abstraction, a measure of the harm caused to someone by being a direct target of an ability. Other factors may come into play. For example, Damian deals more damage the more he takes in a fight, so his attacks can reach ludicrous amounts of damage. However, even if his flail does 5000 damage, hitting you in the foot probably won't be enough to instantly kill anyone from full HP. Remember context, and balance your RPG mechanics with some realism.

For a reference on damage numbers: A good, solid punch to the face from a human male in his prime probably does 100 damage, while a handgun shot to a non-organ area like the leg or shoulder from medium range does around 200. Inability to walk or use an arm doesn't count as part of the damage, but bleeding and the mental effect of strong pain does factor into that.

The damage of different abilities varies, and is largely up to you. You can start with a base of low-damage kinesis abilities like water blasts doing 200 damage with attacks, average-damage kinesis abilities like a grave controller striking your soul to deal 300 damage, and high-damage kinesis abilities like a lightning controller's bolts to deal 400 damage. If you want to balance abilities out, you can start with these as a base and then consider how the practical effects of each ability make one worth using over the other in different situations. Perhaps one ability does more damage than a standard one of its kinesis. Perhaps another applies some mark to the foe which amplifies all the future damage you do to them, or another can slow/stun the opponent. Perhaps another is very powerful, but can only be used once per fight, or only in times of great desperation, or at a great cost to the character itself. Consider these things. Or don't, I'm not the boss of you.

Note that if you wanted, you could stop after these two. The most basic way to stat a character is just for them to have HP, and for their attacks to have damage numbers. Everything else just builds on these basic concepts.

Speed

Speed represents both your maximum running speed and reflexes. Keep acceleration in mind. You won’t hit your highest speed from a stand-still, not even close in the case of ones which are only possible by supernatural means.

Note regarding dodge chance: It probably feels a bit low, but keep in mind that the other person fighting you probably also has big boi speed and is making these attacks quite quickly, whether as a swing with little time to react in melee, or with fast-moving projectiles from range. They’re also presumed to have trained for high accuracy with their attacks, so yeah, the fact you dodge attacks from other kineses at all is impressive. Also remember that dodge chance shouldn’t be static and should be adjusted based on incoming attacks. A normal person’s punch will be easier to evade than a lightning bolt. Things like lightning bolts and beams of light are only dodgeable at all because the controller needs to slow them down someone for their brain to keep up with controlling them. It's also worth noting that your evasion chance can go below your speed rating if your character is particularly focused on high speeds without the reflexes accompanying them, or wears heavy armour that might hinder their individual limb speed. Conversely, they may be higher if they use a weapon—or even better, a shield—to help them deflect attacks.

For speed, we use a tier system! Tiers are sorted into divisions of Low, Mid, High and Very High. You can consider these to correspond to fractions within the number: Low Tier 1 is 1.0, Mid Tier 1 is 1.25, High Tier 1 is 1.5, and Very High Tier 1 is 1.75. Low Tier 2 is 2.0, and so on. The system was deliberately created with Low Tier 1 to be 10KM/H, the base speed for a mundane human who isn't particularly athletic. From one division to the next, the division’s associated travel speed is multiplied by 1.5, and dodge chance is slightly increased. Rounding done where appropriate.

IN MOST CASES, if a character’s speed is at a division, then their prolonged speed is the rating 1 below them, their running speed is their number, and their short-burst sprint is 1 above it. For example, a standard person is Low Tier 1. They can do a prolonged speed of 6.66 KM/H, which is just a little faster than the speed most of us walk. Their running is 10KM/H, which is indeed average, and their short burst speed, I.E. sprinting, is 15KM/H. Some characters may go much faster than the numbers they’d be capable of here, such as certain lightning controllers being capable of reaching 1% the speed of light to travel across continents. Such abilities are still possible but only out-of-combat, when you have enough direct-line space to accelerate up to your stupidly OP fastness. Also note that the speed associated with each division is the highest one can go while remaining within that tier. Even a single additional KM/H, and you count as part of the next division up.

So, the way to read the following the section is that tiers are listed, and within each tier the pattern is:

Division (speed's numerical value): KM/H speed (Point of comparison goes here. Suggested evade rate: N%, or X/Y.)

The numerical value is for balancing purposes and terminology, like how we say increasing by any stat by .25 is a balanced upgrade can mean either 250 more HP, or 25 higher average damage-per-attack, or .25 higher on the speed scale.

- - -

Motionless (N/A): 0. (DISHONOUR ON YOUR FAMILY! Suggested evade chance: 0%. The same should go for anything slower than Low Tier 0.)

Tier 0:

Low (0.0): 1.97 (Crawling? Suggested evade chance: 1%, or 1/100.)

Mid (0.25): 2.96 (Slow walking speed. Suggested evade chance: 2%, or 1/50.)

High (0.5): 4.44 (Casual walking speed. Suggested evade chance: 4%, or 1/25.)

Very High (0.75): 6.66 (Average person's brisk walking pace. Suggested evade chance: 5%, or 1/20.)

Tier 1: 

Low (1.0): 10 (Average person's jogging pace. Suggested evade chance: 8%, or 1/12)

Mid (1.25): 15 (Average person's sprinting speed. Suggested evade chance: 10%, or 1/10.)

High (1.5): 23 (Sprinting speed for more athletic people. Suggested evade chance: 13%, or 1/8.)

Very High (1.75): 34 (Sprinting speed for the fastest NFL players. Suggested evade chance: 15%, or 1/6.)

Tier 2:

Low (2.0): 51 (The fastest non-magical human sprinting in the world. Suggested evade chance: 20%, or 1/5.)

Mid (2.25): 76 (Faster than the fastest horse ever recorded. Suggested evade chance: 25%, or 1/4.)

High (2.5): 114 (Slightly above the speed limit on most highways. Also the speed of a cheetah! Suggested evade chance: 30%, or 3/10.)

Very High (2.75): 171 (The high end of what most commercial cars are capable of. Suggested evade chance: 33%, or 1/3.)

Tier 3:

Low (3.0): 256 (The limit of what most commercial cars are capable of. Suggested evade chance: 35%, or 7/20.)

Mid (3.25): 384 (Sports car speeds. Suggested evade chance: 38%, or 3/8.)

High (3.5): 576 (Faster than the fastest land vehicles. Suggested evade chance: 40%, or 2/5.)

Very High (3.75): 865 (Commercial airline speeds! Suggested evade chance: 42%, or 5/12.)

Tier 4:

Low (4.0): 1,297 (MACH! Suggested evade chance: 45%, or 9/20.)

Mid (4.25): 1,946 (Over MACH! Suggested evade chance: 50%, or 1/2.)

High (4.5): 2,919 (Speed of an F-15 fighter jet! Suggested evade chance: 55%, or 11/20.)

Very High (4.75): 4,378 (MACH 4! Suggested evade chance: 58%, or 7/12)

Tier 5:

Low (5.0): 6,568 (Nearly the speed of an X-15, the fastest plane in the world! Suggested evade chance: 60%, or 3/5.)

Mid (5.25): 9,853 (Half the speed of a rocket aiming to achieve orbit! This is currently the highest permitted speed to go in combat, and only as a sprint. No dodge chance since nobody has this rating as their base.)

Further tiers for dodging, if one already has stupidly high evasion and wants to go a few steps higher:

62%, or 5/8

65%, or 13/20

67%, or 2/3

70%, or 7/10

75%, or 3/4.

If you want to evade even more than this, you'll probably be coming off as auto-dodging. Not recommended.

Utility

Kineses also have a utility rating for other factors such as healing, summoning, in-battle crafting, speed, flight, CC effects like stuns and slows, AoE, regeneration, armour and so on. The average Utility rating is 3. Obviously, utility can manifest in a number of different ways, but a higher utility rating generally indicates less of a focus on their base stats to use more complex and situational tools to win, as well as passive abilities that make the character more powerful while using a specific combat style, while a lower utility rating usually means sacrificing versatility for being able to statcheck people to death with just your superior HP/speed/damage. 1 Utility is worth the same as 100 average damage or 1000 HP, in a vacuum. Individual experiences may vary, and remember of course that this is a model and an abstraction.

A very, very generalized rule is that your utility is your number of practically-different abilities, divided by 4. A standard user of a kinesis here has a number of abilities equal to four times their utility score. But this is far from a hard rule: this number includes passive abilities, and a bunch of weaker passive abilities could add up to the power of a single more powerful one.

Crowd Control

These can be other negative effects applied to someone besides damage, including slows, stuns, blinds, shutting down kinesis abilities, knocking the target away or pulling them closer, and so on.

Chance

Some people like to give their characters a percent chance to evade an attack, or a chance for other effects to work. Whether or not it happens will usually be calculated via a random number generator, or rolling dice. You can use whatever method you like, but be reasonable. Auto-dodging is still auto-dodging. Also remember that not all attacks are equally easy to dodge; a spear thrown at you from range is different from a fireball thrown at you from melee at the speed of sound with an explosion radius of 50 feet.

Action

The standard is that, in combat, your character has two actions per message. Basically two abilities, or attacks, whatever. Generally movement doesn't use one up. You might make two different attacks, one attack and a heal or other self-buff, one attack and then spending an action to maintain a defensive stance so your dodge chance is increased until your next turn, and so on.

Baseline Stats for Different Kineses
Remember, stats can always vary for individual characters. These are a baseline, a place to start for beginners to stating their characters. For each kinesis, the average HP of a controller of that kinesis, and the damage for one of their standard abilities with that kinesis will be listed. Average is considered in the range of Sophomores and lower Junior PC characters. Below average could encompass characters like freshmen, NPC students and player characters who do nothing to train and avoid fighting wherever possible. For these characters, depending on their style, you may want to subtract from their HP or their damage. Above average would be characters such as higher Juniors, Seniors, professors and other experienced staff members. For these, you may want to increase numbers.

It's normal that as you train, your stats will become better than this baseline. This is fine, and doesn't make your character busted or anything. Usually we just care about a character's power level relative to the strongest other characters in the RP, though we do also care that characters aren't advancing too fast.

Speed is also included, representing how fast you travel around the battlefield. Some kineses such as paper are only average speed, but have god-tier dodging. Usually speed correlates to dodging ability, but some kineses such as Paper may be considered to have higher dodge chance than normally comes with their speed, while others like Missile may be considered lower. This is the sort of power that's not reflected merely in the citation of HP, speed and damage, which is what utility is meant to cover: stuff like Paper's higher dodge rate than their speed would lead you to believe, the passive regeneration and active healing abilities many blood controllers possess, the almost-undodgeable nature of Light user attacks, and so on.

Damage is not counting damage done by summoned creatures, which can vary widely from controller to controller as well as the exact thing summoned or created.

Average Normal Person

HP: 1000

Damage: 100

Speed: 1

Utility: 1

Stats for Each Kinesis
Remember that these are averages, and reflect the "typical" or "default" fighting styles of each kinesis. Individual characters are fully within their rights to make their kinesis's pros and cons more or less extreme in their particular case, or even have a different arrangement of strengths and weaknesses altogether.

Lightning

HP: 2000

Damage: 400

Speed: High Tier 4

Utility: 2

Fire

HP: 2500

Damage: 450

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 2.5

Air

HP: 2500

Damage: 300

Speed: Low Tier 4

Utility: 3

Water

HP: 2500

Damage: 250

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 4.5

Earth

HP: 5000

Damage: 350

Speed: High Tier 1

Utility: 2.5

Light

HP: 2000

Damage: 300

Speed: High Tier 4

Utility: 3

Dark

HP: 2000

Damage: 450

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 3

Blood

HP: 3500

Damage: 300

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 3

Poison

HP: 2500

Damage: 350

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 3.5

Sand

HP: 4500

Damage: 250

Speed: High Tier 2

Utility: 3

Ink

HP: 2500

Damage: 250

Speed: High Tier 2

Utility: 5

Fabric

HP: 3500

Damage: 250

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 3.5

Paper

HP: 1500

Damage: 400

Speed: High Tier 3

Utility: 3.5

Network

HP: 2500

Damage: 300

Speed: High Tier 2

Utility: 4.5

Grave

HP: 3000

Damage: 350

Speed: Low Tier 2

Utility: 4

Gravity

HP: 3000

Damage: 300

Speed: High Tier 2

Utility: 4

Sound

HP: 2500

Damage: 250

Speed: Low Tier 4

Utility: 3.5

Bone

HP: 3500

Damage: 350

Speed: High Tier 3

Utility: 2

Psionic

HP: 3000

Damage: 350

Speed: High Tier 2

Utility: 3.5

Chocolate

HP: 2500

Damage: 200

Speed: Low Tier 4

Utility: 4

Plant

HP: 4500

Damage: 200

Speed: Low Tier 2

Utility: 4

Edge

HP: 2000

Damage: 500

Speed: High Tier 3

Utility: 2

Friction

HP: 4000

Damage: 150

Speed: High Tier 3

Utility: 3.5

Time

HP: 2000

Damage: 250

Speed: Low Tier 5

Utility: 3

Oil

HP: 3000

Damage: 250

Speed: Low Tier 3

Utility: 4

Missile

HP: 4000

Damage: 300

Speed: Low Tier 4

Utility: 1.5

What about people just new with their kinesis?
You could use the following guide for determining the stats for characters who are meant to be weak or inexperienced with their kinesis. It can also be used for random NPC students who aren't meant to singlehandedly go toe-to-toe with other player characters.

For each of the four stats, divide it in half and then add 0.5 of a standard unit to it.

What that means for each stat: for HP, cut the kinesis's listed HP in half and then add 500. For damage, cut its listed average damage in half and then add 50. For speed, find that speed division within the Speed section higher up, cut its numerical value (the number after its name but before the KM/H speed) in half, and then use whichever one has a numerical value 0.5 higher than it. For Utility, cut the number in half and add 0.5.

Let's use gravity as an example. By default, Gravity's stats are HP of 3000, damage of 300, speed of Low Tier 2, and Utility of 4.

A n00b Gravity controller might look more like this:

HP: 2000 (3000 cut in half is 1500, add 500 to get 2000)

Damage: 200 (300 cut in half is 150, add 50 to get 200)

Speed: Very High Tier 1 (The numerical value for Low Tier 2 is 2.5, cut in half is 1.25, add 0.5 to that to get 1.75, the speed value associated with that is Very High Tier 1)

Utility: 2.5 (4 cut in half is 2, add 0.5 to get 2.5)

Survivability Score
Here's a tool I made for people who want to estimate how much damage on average has to be lobbed at their character to kill them. It's not perfect, but it helps to illustrate and predict.

Reasonable Rate of Improvement?
For most characters, a reasonable upgrade could be anything from this list. It's also fine if you want to do an underpowered boost one time, or even no boost at all, for one that's better than normal later on. (Please avoid vice versa though, or else it's a really weird power jump for awhile.) Also please avoid jacking any individual stat up to the exclusion of all others since it leads to upward curves that are a bit absurd. This applies to things like HP and damage, but the biggest one is speed.
 * Increasing your base HP by 250. Could be a bit higher or lower based on personal judgement and how much that is proportionally to your max HP. (A 250 increase is pretty big for someone at 1000, but nothing for someone at 4000.) Usual wiggle room would be 200 for squishies and 300 for tanks.
 * Increase all of your damage by 15. Could be a bit higher or lower based on personal judgement and how much that is proportionally to your current average damage. (A 15 increase is pretty big for someone at 100 damage per action, but nothing for someone at 400.) Usual wiggle room would be 10 for low offense and 20 for high offense.
 * Upgrade an existing ability! There isn't exactly a standard for this one, but remember that improvements for an ability you spam constantly throughout a fight, despite being on "only one ability" are a lot bigger than someone else's if it's the same power and usable only once per fight. Keep in mind your character's style of fighting, and how something might get OP or out-of-hand based on their own peculiar traits. Trusting y'all to be reasonable, feel free to run it by Sam, or better Ulysses, if you're unsure.
 * Increase speed by 1 division, and evasion up with it.
 * Learn a new passive ability, upgrade a previous one, or learn a new active ability with a power level just slightly higher than that of most of your others. The key here is increased overall power in the case of passives, and further versatility with new actives to choose from.
 * Gain a small amount of passive regeneration or flat damage reduction. 10 is usually good.
 * When in doubt, weigh how powerful you think your boost would be compared to one of the concrete ones suggested here.

How much damage do headshots do?
Here's where we run into some problems with how a stat system is only an abstract representation of combat. In truth, for highest consistency within the stat system, it's required to adjudicate what happens based on the stats, rather than using the stats to represent what happens.

Sometimes I get asked things like how much damage a headshot should do, and I feel as though I should present the following analogy to show why this is thinking the wrong way about the whole matter.

Consider tabletop roleplaying games like D&D. We have a fighter character against a dragon. The fight has just started, and the player says "I run toward the dragon and try to chop its head off!" He rolls to hit, successfully hits, deals 10 damage. The dragon has 100 HP in total. The DM doesn't say "Good job, it worked. You chopped its head off. It takes 10 damage. Now its turn to attack you back."

That dragon is dead, plain and simple, if this occurs. The problem is that the player described an action which doesn't match up to the sort of damage that the system was allowing them to pull off. Instead, what should be happening in this case is that the dragon takes 10 damage but doesn't have its head cut off. The power of the injury should be weighed relative to how much remaining HP the beast has. An attack that would auto-kill any realistic foe isn't about how much damage it does, it's about whether the damage that you deal can result in an attack that would auto-kill any realistic foe.

In D&D this isn't much of a problem. There's a common acceptance that the DM can dictate the impact of the player's attack on the dragon. If one is using stats, that necessitates a similar approach, though it's also one most combat roleplayers are already used to: the idea that while an attacking character can describe what they're trying to do, it's the defending player who ultimately decides what effect the attack has on their character.

I think it would only be natural that at the start of most roleplay fights that weren't using stats, if an opponent began it right away by trying to shoot your character in the head, you'd have something happen to prevent the intuitive result, otherwise the no-fun result happens and the fight you planned is over so soon. This isn't really different in stat fights. If the incoming damage isn't enough to bring your character down to 0, then there's no need to have it kill your character. If you don't dodge it outright, then it's still valid to say that your character did a "partial dodge," juking in one direction and thus being hit in a different place than the opponent expected.

However, this kind of thing should only be done for cases where such a finishing move is being performed prematurely. The ideal solution is that the attacker properly limits their use of a finishing move, rather than the defending player having to awkwardly make it fail. Perhaps the best way to do this is for the attacker to have this finishing move be treated as an execute, a type of attack which can only be used if its damage would be enough to kill the opponent. There are some cases where an attack having this quality can make sense in-universe, such as the removal of a target's soul requiring them to be close enough to death before it can be performed, while others will be a lot more arbitrary - such as choosing an HP level below which it's fair game for your character to headshot them. However, this is a necessary balancing constraint.

As a final alternative, executes need not even be used. Outright lethal attacks could simply be saved for attacks which happen to deal the killing blow. If your gun shots deal 250 damage, then if they hit an opponent who currently has 250 HP or less, that attack could be treated as a headshot - and you'd probably be justified in saying such as you describe the attack you're about to make. This isn't unlike the DM allowing the fighter to succeed in decapitating the dragon with their 10 damage attack, but only if that 10 damage is enough to finish off the already-weakened dragon.

Just as a final reiteration, I use headshot here for the sake of easy understanding. Some characters actually might not outright die from headshots, and additionally, the term headshot here could be substituted for a number of attacks that are obvious fight-enders - removing someone's soul, banishing them to another plane without being able to return, Thanos-snapping them into dust, even spells that harmlessly render a target unconscious.