Creatures and Items

Creatures

A creature is maxHp, attack, damage, defense, a tier of minion, elite or boss, a behavior note under 300 characters, an optional loot list of items, and a harvest list of resources.

The maths is flat and short. The player hits on 1d20 + _might against your defense and deals _damage with no roll; you hit on 1d20 + attack against their _defense for flat damage. A starting Surveyor has 12 HP, _defense 15, _might 3 and deals 5.

Twelve HP is not much, and a stat block does not tell you whether a fight is survivable. Two extra points of defense can double the length of a fight and therefore double the damage taken. make-creatures.js computes expected damage for every creature against the starting character and labels it comfortable / costly / needs a camp / attrition only. Author there and read the table.

The current spread runs from @Missing file at about 5 expected damage to @Missing file at about 23 — deliberately more than the player has, because of what follows.

Wounds persist, and that is a design tool

A creature's HP is written to the tile's creatureHp when the player breaks off. Nothing heals between visits.

This is what lets you author something genuinely bigger than the player. A boss at 24 HP is not a wall; it is three trips with a cook fire in between. Without persistence you could never write a creature harder than one full-health encounter, and every fight in the game would have to be winnable on first contact.

So when you place something over about 15 expected damage, you are not placing a fight — you are placing a project. Put it somewhere the player has a reason to keep coming back past, and make what it gives worth three visits.

Harvest

Every creature should have one. harvest is resources off the body — meat, almost always — as against loot, which is items it was carrying. Two fields because they are two different ideas, and they land in two different places on the sheet.

Harvest is capped by carrying capacity, and a large animal deliberately gives more than a person can lift. That is not a bug to design around; it is the moment the player has to decide what to leave behind.

behavior is where a creature stops being a stat block. Say what it does when it is winning and what it will not do. Note that nothing pursues across an edge — a behavior note promising a chase describes a rule that does not exist.

Tonally: the register instruction says this world is worked, not haunted. These are animals with a reason to be standing on that ground and something on them a person would want.

Items

An item is a slot (weapon, armor, trinket, relic, or none), a value, a rarity, and its bonuses: damageBonus, armorBonus, or a bonusStat with a bonusAmount.

Equipped items feed the computed stats. Four slots, one item each.

Two conventions worth keeping:

Write the effect into the description, in the imperative. @Missing file says "USE: restores 2 HP, then the ration is spent." The GM reads that and does exactly it. An item whose effect lives only in your head does nothing.

Say whether using it consumes it. @Missing file survives; a ration does not. This is prose, not a field, so it has to be explicit.

Ignore minDepth. It is vestigial — there is no depth in Tesserae and nothing filters on it.