Hi there. This is your author Polydeuces.
In Guide to MMO (MMO for short) you’ll see a few “Author’s Guides to Understanding” which will no doubt make you confused if you’re just scrolling, pressing next, and all of a sudden it ain’t the story anymore. Chances are it’s a Guide to Understanding.
What is a Guide to Understanding?
In short, it’s a chapter dedicated to doing one of two things: explaining concepts (to varying degrees) or summarizing events/characters for convenience/memory sake.
How can you tell it’s a Guide to Understanding?
This is where the title comes in to the rescue: It will be titled, “([#]) Author’s Guide to Understanding: [Topics]”, and not in all uppercases. For example, this Guide is titled “(1) Author’s Guide to Understanding: Formatting, Abilities, and Colors”. The one means it’s the first Guide. This is just one of the many examples of formatting in MMO, from the story to the actual visual interest and MMO’s organization in general.
Why isn’t this spread out into the rest of the story? Doesn’t this completely ruin the immersion factor?
Well, yes. But Guides will only appear BEFORE or AFTER any sort of tense or hype events, so if you come across one chances are things aren’t so intense in the story. All of this stuff would be impossible to sprinkle throughout the chapters without pulling readers out of immersion (I mean, the explanations) as it would make your reading experience a whole lot more confusing. That’s why this Guide is here. Think of it like an info dump or instruction manual that you can always come back to.
Starting things off is a Glossary, basically anything that isn’t going to be thoroughly explained about in this chapter besides now.
Info section: This is the segment of text that appears at the beginning of every chapter or after every scene change (aka perspective shift) that gives information about the scene. There are 5 main pieces of information in the info section: Time, Date, Location, Starred Character (Character perspective), and Featured Characters (character appearances). It looks like this:
//
[Time] // [Day] - [Month] - [Year] // [Location]
Starring [Name]
Featuring [Names]
//
Starring means the character whose perspective we as readers are looking through. Featuring means the characters that appear in that particular scene. As an example when it’s filled out:
//
10:12 A.M. // 5 - 25 - 2021 // Courthouse — Havana, Cuba
Starring Jimmy Jones
Featuring Mary Jane, Joe and ???
//
???: It hasn’t been revealed yet.
Targets and Allies: Everything will be considered either a target or an ally. A target is the receiver of any harmful abilities, and an ally is the receiver of helpful abilities. An easy way to think about them are enemies and friends. You hurt enemies and you help friends. It is mainly used to differentiate between good guy and bad guy in ability descriptions (e.g. ally receives heal, target receives damage)
Italicized: Anything italicized and capitalized is either a Keyword or a name/location in the info section
Keyword: A keyword is basically a word that sums up all of its ‘parts’ in a single word, a variable so to speak. For example, the keyword for this section of the Guide would be Glossary. Keywords are also usually defined if they are in an ability (e.g. Targets marked with Shimmer deal 20% less damage. Targets marked with Shade take 40% more damage.). Keywords are also usually colored and darkened to make them stand out in the text.
Cooldown: An amount of time that passes between after an ability is used and when it is available to use again.
Health bars and mana (cost) will be covered in a later Guide.
Let’s move on to Active abilities. Looking at Ben Roswell’s Active ability from last chapter, when he activated his ability, a box appeared:
We’ll get to the colors and rankings soon. When you see this box, you’ll know immediately it’s an ability, as it has all four components.
In an Active ability, there are four main parts: the Ability Name, the Cost and Cooldown, the Description, and the Values.
- The Ability Name is the area in the top left corner of the box above the white line. In this case, it’s called Mountain Rage.
- Next is the Cost and Cooldown located to the right of the Name. This ability costs Ben 120 mana to use (mana will be explained more in depth in another guide, but this is basically your casual “mana” in numerical form). The cooldown is 10 seconds, meaning Ben must wait 10 seconds after using this ability in order to use Mountain Rage again, which would cost him 120 mana to use.
- The Description gives us information about the Grade of the ability (scroll down if you’re impatient), what the ability does, and is below the white line on the lighter left half. This part is pretty self explanatory; however, sometimes Keywords can appear in the ability and may also not be defined in this ability. That means it is probably defined in another ability (it’s complicated, but not really. You’ll see when we get to a full ‘kit’).
- The Values are in the right half below the white line and describe “how much”. Most values are self explanatory. This part is also complicated without having any benchmarks for what constitutes strong and weak (if you want a judgement from me, that’s what the Grade is for in the description box), but that will also get a Guide in the future.
Generally characters only have 3 or less Active abilities for the sake of keeping things fair-ish. It’s also much easier to remember only 3 Actives, or at least the gist of what they do.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Next, we will take a look at a Passive. Passives are:
- Always active and doing something
- Always ready to interact with abilities
In some cases, it’s both. Below is an example of the second case.
When Aythe deals damage to any targets either Shade or Shimmer is applied to them, two Keywords defined as making targets take 40% more damage or deal 20% less damage. These values can be found on the right side in the Values section. It is also a B+, meaning it is well rounded in damage (Shade) and utility (Shimmer) but lacking an “oomph” factor. The Ability Name, Reaver’s Dualescense, is colored light red meaning it’s a damaging-type ability (see bottom of page).
As you can see, Passives only have three components: Ability Name, Description, and Values. It is missing the Cost and Cooldown.
Next, we have Innate abilities. There are no examples of Innate abilities in Ch.2 (Chocolate Eyes), so below is a made up ability which will never appear again for the sake of demonstration.
Innate abilities can be described as a talent of sorts. In this case, ??? has 2 Innate abilities being the ability to walk fast and be unaffected by anything that could make them smarter or stupider. Innates are given to characters from birth, so everyone in MMO has an Innate ability, and sometimes they could have multiple.
As you can see, there are only 2 components in an Innate ability: the Ability Name and the Description.
The last part of an ability kit is the Ultimate ability, which will not be covered in this Guide.
Lastly are the grades and the colors. The grading system in MMO is very lenient/generous compared to other grading systems in the genre, and the exactness of how I as an author judge the ability will be shown below the grades:
T Foundational Ability
F Self-harm; anti-synergy
D- Useless
D Terrible
D+ Situational
C- Unreliable
C One-dimension
C+ Mediocre
B- Solid
B Strong
B+ Consistent
A- Balanced
A Valuable
A+ Bread and Butter
S- Dynamic
S Nuclear
S+ Overpowered
V Equally Affects All
Here is an ability that can be found in any generic LitRPG fantasy in the MMO format (this is how I envision another person would grade it:
The reason people do it like this is most likely because this ability has an upgrade that is significantly better in their version of it.
However, if I was to rate it, it would be an A. Like, a potential 600 damage per cast on such a low cooldown and costing hardly any mana at all? And because it’s an arrow, it’s also ranged and therefore would be a great way to reliably do damage while maintaining distance. You’ll see more of my odd grading system soon enough, for you readers that are interested about it.
The colors are last. You can find these colors in an ability, highlighting which specific portion of the ability does what, or telling what the general idea of the ability is depending on the color of its name.
Damage
Regen
Shield
Movement
Utility
Stat Change
Multiple Different Effects
Other
Mana
Health
That’s all for this Guide to Understanding.