Chapter 5: The End of Childhood

The next two weeks I spend doing everything I can to gain experience. I increase the number of lessons I give to George about history, storytelling, and anything else I can think of. I also try really hard to figure out how to determine people’s power levels.

We have a pretty steady stream of customers coming through the inn this time of year. With the winter over, the passes are all clear, and so there are more merchant caravans passing through our little town. And where there are merchant caravans, there are guards and there are adventurers, either tagging along or taking jobs as guards themselves. So I get to see a lot of different people at a lot of different ages and places in their careers.

My first attempt to gain the skill is to guess what people’s classes are. Some of them are obvious, which is actually helpful. That one looks like a merchant, and he is a merchant. So that’s a gimme. But is that guy in the armor a soldier, a warrior, a fighter, a paladin, or something else? And the blacksmith is a blacksmith, yeah. Duh. But is the guy in leathers selling furs a hunter, a furrier, a ranger, a scout, or something else?

I am able to at least break things down into categories. Front-line fighters, ranged attackers, artisans, workers, support, and magic. But that isn’t as useful as I’d like. So I move on to my second tactic.

The second tactic is to spend a lot of time talking to people. It’s a trick I’ve learned in both my lives: most people want to talk about themselves, and if they are given an excuse, they will do so at length. So I use a rhetorical trick that seems to work really well. When I’m not required to be somewhere, I sit down with someone, smile at them, and say “So tell me, what do you do?”

I ask a guard from one of the caravans, and he tells me very gruffly, “I’m a guard.”

“What does that entail?” I ask him. “I’m about to turn fifteen, and I want to know all the exciting things you do. I’ve always wanted to be a guard, but I want to make sure my eyes are open.”

Whatever they tell me they do, I always tell them that I’ve always wanted to be that. I show interest, which is genuine, and ask leading questions. What kind of training do they have? What weapons were they trained to use? What do they do on a typical job? How much free time do they have? Is there a lot of advancement?

That last one turns out to be the best question. The guard says, “There’s some, but it’s limited by your class. If you’re just a guard, you can’t really expect to go any higher than squad captain. But if your class is something like soldier, you might get into higher command positions. And if your class is warrior, like mine, then you can become a body guard or even an adventurer.”

“Do you ever think about being an adventurer?”

“It’s where the money is, kid. Your parents run this joint, right? How much do you think they make in a year, profit wise?”

I don’t have to guess; I’ve seen the books. “Usually about five to ten gold,” I say. That’s not true; they make about triple that. But you don’t tell people how much money is in something as easily rob-able as an inn.

“An adventurer can expect to make ten times that amount,” he says, “in a single dungeon dive.”

“How is that possible?” I ask. I know the answer, actually, and I’m incredibly proud of it. Economics in fantasy games, generally speaking, does not work. One adventurer will incredibly quickly change the economic balance, flushing the town with a ridiculous amount of money, and inflation will rapidly become a problem.

You can try to solve this by making everything cheaper and lower rewards to a more reasonable level, but then there isn’t a reason for people to become adventurers. Adventuring is supposed to be incredibly dangerous. Human players notwithstanding, the world is supposed to have a pretty high death rate in dungeons, so that adventurers don’t last all that long and thus can’t amass an insane amount of wealth. But then they find the level of a dungeon that they can safely grind on, and the money problem gets even worse because soon they can buy anything they want.

You can also try to solve it by taxing the earnings, but that just leads to anger and rebellion, and eventually an attack on the people collecting the taxes. You can raise the prices of everything an adventurer might want, but that just moves the problem. If my sister makes a sword and it sells for twenty thousand gold, then she has that money to spend on anything she wants. With that kind of money, she could buy most of the town for herself.

So we have a system that gets money out of circulation just like most games have systems to get it in. Gold converts to experience for adventurers. Most of them will spend the gold they have to resupply, at the prices that won’t cause inflation, and then they spend the rest to improve their levels. It’s especially effective if they have more than one class, as gold-experience can go to any class you want it to. There are even classes that can only gain experience from gold.

So yeah, an adventurer could make, in theory, a thousand gold a month. But after spending ten of it, they’ll get rid of the rest. And the economy survives.

“That’s a lot of money,” I tell the guard.

He nods. “Yeah, but it’s a really dangerous lifestyle. Most adventurers don’t survive to see their first anniversary of dungeon delving. Not unless they find a really good crew to delve with.”

A few more conversations with other people lead me to learn that the guy selling furs is a Ranger, the guy with the two handed sword that is too big to have been practical back on Earth was a Marshall, and the woman in the black silk robes was a Warlock, not a Wizard. It takes a few days, but I get the skill Detect Class.

Determining people’s power level is a bit harder. You can’t just ask people to tell you what level they are. And you can’t guess based on what they tell you. I mean, there are a few of them that I manage that with. I persuade an adventurer to explain how the local dungeon works. Apparently, you have to be at least level 20 to go in. Then each dungeon floor after the first one gets more powerful, though how much so is different at every dungeon. The nearby one has fifteen level jumps, so the second floor is based for level 35, the third for 50, and the final floor for 65.

There are dungeons that have smaller jumps, and dungeons with fewer floors. I know there’s one out there that has only three levels between jumps and has a full fifty floors. But that’s a secret dungeon that most people don’t even know exists.

As I think about that, I get the ping that tells me that I’ve gotten another skill. Dungeon Lore, and already at 10. Which is also worth 550 xp. I’m so close to level nineteen, I can taste it.

Anyway, since I knew that the adventurers had to be level twenty to go in, and level 35 to go to the second floor, I could usually get a good idea of an adventurer’s level by asking them how many floors deep they’ve gone. I also find that as I’m talking, I can generally get them to give me an idea of their level through some basic conversation strategies.

“That’s interesting. Just last week I was talking to this one adventurer, he was a warrior around level thirty, and he said that the second floor was almost impossible to survive.” Or, “The mage I was talking to yesterday said that they don’t get any healing type spells of their own until level forty, and usually they have to try to learn from healers just to stay alive.”

I found that once I’ve broached the topic and named a specific level, they tend to let their guards down. I think they forget that I didn’t tell them my level, but on some level they feel like they aren’t the first to reveal it, which makes it okay.

I also make sure everyone knows that it’s common practice among adventuring parties to share their levels and classes with one another, so that everyone on the team knows what everyone else is capable of. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It makes sense, which is why it’s so believable. But no one told me that it was a common practice. I just kind of decided that it was.

Who knew Deception and Rhetoric were different skills?

Once I had Sense Level and Detect Class, I felt pretty good about being able to inspect people, and made sure to use it on everyone I saw. Found out that my dad is a level 43 Innkeeper, my mother is a level 51 Chef, and the guy who bartends is a level 33 Tavernkeeper. I also learned that my sister Jenna is a level 19 Baker, Inga is a level 17 Silversmith, and George is a level 7 Child.

I also know that I’m less than a thousand points away from level nineteen, but I’m not going to make it. It took me most of the two weeks to get these skills, and I haven’t leveled either one up very high. I have to hope that things work out as far as achievements, because tomorrow, I won’t be a child anymore.

Which is a super weird thing to say, by the way.