RWBY: Remnant's Blond Bard

Chapter 30

"Your Semblance makes no sense."

Jaune had known that since the moment he unlocked it, but it seemed Pyrrha was finally starting to realise how illogical his Semblance was. He'd put the five attribute points into Constitution as he'd told her he would, bringing it up from 21 to 26, and then they'd taken back to Pyrrha's private gym to measure his progress.

"It doesn't make any sense," she said, head in her hands. "Your stats have gone up close to 25% - a little less, but close enough – so, mathematically speaking, you should be able to go for 25% longer. But the improvement to your fitness is closer to 5%. Why isn't this adding up?"

Because his Semblance didn't make sense.

Jaune had considered the maths before and given up as just not understanding it. His stats had started around 5 across the board from what he recalled, which meant that allocating any points in them should have been a huge jump. If he'd gone from 5 to 10 Strength, that should technically be a 100% increase in his physical prowess. The same for the other stats. He should have been doubling them, but every point of Constitution seemed to add 10hp, and that meant 50hp for 5 levels, which was far less than double what he'd had at the time.

There were explanations for it. The first was that he had "base stats" under the attributes themselves, like how certain classes in RPGs had different hp pools even when they were all at the same level. Perhaps the mathematics was +10hp per point of constitution, but it also factored in a base amount of hp that was just his.

Another angle was that maybe the stats had started at 5 when he unlocked his Semblance, but that didn't mean they were equal. It would be a little convenient to say he was identically as strong as he had been fit, or as fit as he had been intelligent at the time. Perhaps it was the case that even if Pyrrha herself had unlocked this, her stats would have started at 5 as well, even when she was obviously much faster and stronger than he. So, in a way, the numbers didn't mean what they did literally, and were a representation of an unspecific value.

Or, and just as likely, it didn't make sense and they'd just have to accept that.

Because, even in video games, stat scaling was a weird and inexact science that didn't make a lot of sense if one tried to take a lore-accurate approach. Very few games involved their "level systems" as a real thing in the lore, and you were meant to believe the characters were getting stronger through hard work and training, not numbers. What they were trying to do now was come up with a real-world explanation for what was a meta measurement of character progression meant for a player to see and no one else.

Except that there was no player here, this was the real world, and he had to live with the consequences of the confusing Semblance.

At least those consequences had yet to be harmful.

"I don't think there's going to be any logic to this," he told her. "Maybe we should just accept each point is a 1% increase. It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? My Charisma is so high that it'd be something like a 2,000% increase on how I started out if the mathematics made sense. I'd be a lot more worried for my safety if that were the case."

"And your innocence."

"What was that?"

"Nothing!" Pyrrha pushed away from the computer with a bright smile. "But you're probably right. Assuming a linear progression would mean diminishing returns as well. Putting all your points in Strength would mean a 100% increase the first time, 50% the next, then even less for each level after that. Before long, you'd barely even feel the effects of levelling up at all."