The Species of Rootless

One idea I had early on for Rootless is to involve a large number of different animal species in the game.  Forests are usually home to tonnes of different kinds of animals, and I didn't want to limit the game to just a handful. 

Unit Stats

Before I dive too deep into the specific species, I should outline what we're working with for stats.  Each unit will have the same 8 stats:

• Might - a measure of strength; directly affects skills like Attack
• Fortitude - how physically sturdy they are, similar to a Defense stat
• Finesse - their ability with items, weapons, or skills in general, similar to Accuracy
• Agility - the unit's skill and awareness of their body, a defensive Evasion stat
• Wits - how clever the unit is, used as an offensive mental stat
• Resolve - the mental strength of the unit; how easy are they to trick, confuse, or distract?
• Stamina - their physical reserves, which directly affect their max HP
• Speed - how fast they can perform actions, which direct affect how quickly they take their next turn

The cool thing about basing the units on animals is that we have existing archetypes we can work with; a frog is faster than a bear, but a bear is much stronger.  We can seed the initial values of all these stats based on their relative species blueprint.

To attempt to balance things the initial stats are based on a "40 point buy"; the sum of each stat's value adds up to 40, to avoid one particular species being better overall than another.  A bear who might incredibly strong (high Might) will have to pay that cost in another stat (low Agility)  That said I haven't put these all through their paces yet so it's likely that we'll have to do some tweaking to ensure one stat's value isn't dominant compared to others.

Species Names

One lore thing I wanted to iterate on was the species names as well; while the animals in Rootless will converse in English (or other languages if/when we support localization), it doesn't necessarily mean they need to refer to each other by their human-assigned names.  I worked with Gemini to come up with some clever descriptive alternates :)

Here are some of the animals I had in mind, along with their potential stats:

Of course this won't be the _only_ thing to decide your unit's stats; we'll have some natural variance baked in, some +1s and -1s so that every single Goose isn't identical.  Not to mention changes from equipment, tags, skills, etc.