Part 124: Mechanics Talk 1 - Risk Levels and Damage
Mechanics Talk 1: Risk Levels and DamageWelcome to Mechanics Talk, where I will be talking about a lot of the underpinnings that explain why things happen the way they happen. The first things I'll be covering are the risk levels of Abnormalities, and how damage is calculated.
There are five different risk levels for Abnormalities and E.G.O gear, and they will roughly tell us how powerful things are. They are, in order: ZAYIN, TETH, HE, WAW, and ALEPH. These letters are out of place alphabetically, but lunnrais has a bit of insight as to the order.
lunnrais posted:
I can help out with a little explaining of the jewish mysticism as well, as things come up (Jen X is doing a pretty good job so far). I would like to note that they are using an older style of transliteration that is fallen out of style these days. It's a style that approximates the Ashkenazi style of pronunciation, which notably has a different pronunciation for the tav with or without a dagesh (a dot inside the letter, which is usually not actually written most of the time, with the expectation that you just "know" that the dot is supposed to be there in a particular word or not), while modern and sephartic hebrew does not make a distinction whether a dagesh is present or not. Amongst ashkenazi, the tav can be pronounced "t" or "s", depending on the dagesh, but when transliterating, they want to distinguish a tav from a samech or shin/sin, so instead of writing it as an "s", they write it as a "th" instead. It's why English has the word "Sabbath", when actual ashkenazi say "Shabbos", and modern Israelis say "Shabbat".
This strange older form of transliteration also gives us the letter "waw" instead of "vav", when I'm vaguely sure that no system of pronunciation actually treats it like a "w" (it's either a "u", "o", or a "v"). There are other oddities that pop up from time to time as well.
The letters being out of sequence, alphabetically and numerically, probably has something to do with the mysticism behind the letters themselves. Here's my best guess. Note that because this is mysticism, there are of course way too many possible meanings for each letter, so I could be entirely off base here, or dead on, who knows.
Zayin means "weapon", in particular either a sword or a crown and scepter, so that seems reasonable to be the baseline for anomalies.
Tet means "hidden good", or more specifically, the 9 months of pregnancy. So tet class anomalies are hiding something more, making them more dangerous.
Hei is an entire world/universe, such as heaven, or the material universe, or the entirety of an individual's internal experience. This would be the realization of tet's hidden factor.
Vav literally means "and", and is symbolically used as a bridge to to something even greater, such as making a connection between heaven and earth.
Aleph is that something greater.
As we can see from this screenshot, One Sin is a ZAYIN (1), the lowest Abnormality tier. It deals 1-2 White damage(2). Notably, it deals a random number from 1 to 2, so an Agent could take something like 1.4 damage. While the game only shows whole numbers next to agents' HP and SP, it actually tracks them to 4 decimal places. This is why an Agent will sometimes survive with 0 HP or SP.
We can also see One Sin's E.G.O suit on the screen, Penitence (3). It has a tier of ZAYIN and RWBP defenses of 0.9/0.8/0.9/2.0, respectively. Any damage modifier in Lobotomy Corporation is done by multiplication, so if an Agent works One Sin and wears its E.G.O suit, the damage they would take on each failure would be between (1-2)*0.8= 0.8-1.6 White damage.
Outside of damage resistance, the most common modifier to damage is based on risk levels. An ALEPH attacking a TETH will deal much more damage than a TETH would, because their base strength is that much higher.
This chart shows what the multiplier is for every attack level vs every defense level. There's a slight defender's advantage to how the numbers work, so we want to keep our suits at least one tier below whatever it is we're dealing with in order to keep the damage our Agents take down.
That's it for damage calculations and risk levels. It's basic information, but knowing it means that we can better eyeball how much damage our Agents are likely to take from working Abnormalities, and that comes in very handy later on.
