Tome glossary

Stats

• Strength
  Determines how much you can carry (encumbrance), and how much damage you do with most melee weapons, as well as bows. It is the main prerequisite for many melee weapon talents, and other combat talents.
• Dexterity
  Determines how easily you can hit an opponent, and dodge enemy attacks (see Defense). It also partially determines the damage you do with daggers, bows and slings.
• Constitution
  affects your maximum Life and your physical save.
• Magic
  Affects Spellpower, increases damage when hitting with staves, and increases your spell save.
• Willpower
  Increases or improves several resources, including Stamina, Equilibrium, Mana, Psi, and Paradox (see Resources below), as well as some mental save and spell save. It also contributes to Mindpower, which is used by some unusual talents. Improves weapon damage for mindstars
• Cunning
  For all characters, improves critical hit chance, mental save, and stealth detection. Affects weapon damage with slings, mindstars, and, for some classes, daggers. Survival skills, some warrior skills, and many rogue skills require and scale with cunning. Cunning contributes to Mindpower, and a few mind skills require cunning. In Embers of Rage, Cunning determines steampower and imrpoves weapon damage for steamguns.
• Luck
  Gives small bonuses to many attributes including (but not limited to) Accuracy, Defense, Critical hit chance, Physical save, Mental save and Spell save.

Resources

• Life
  Represents your physical wellness. It works like Hit Points in many other RPGs. Damage done by attacks and spells is subtracted from the Life of the target. Once Life falls below 0, a character dies. Your Life depends on your race, class, character level, and Constitution stat, and slowly regenerates over time (faster when resting).
• Stamina
  Used for many physical talents. Warrior and Rogue classes use this heavily. Stamina depends on class, level, and Willpower, and regenerates slowly over time (faster when resting).
• Mana
  Used in spellcasting and related magical talents. Mage classes and hybrids like Arcane Blade and Shadowblade rely on this. Mana depends on class, level, and Willpower, but only true mages regenerate it over time.
• Other
  There are other resources used by other classes, which must be unlocked (see resources for full listing). However, if you pick up a talent from an escort quest, you may find yourself with a new resource to go along with it.

Combat Terms

The ToME combat system uses the following:

• Accuracy
  Accuracy determines your chance to hit an opponent (versus the opponent's Defense). It depends on the Combat Accuracy talent, and in most cases on Strength and Dexterity. It can also be boosted by equipment. In older versions, this was sometimes called "attack".
• Defense
  Defense increases the chance that an attack from an opponent will miss. It is subdivided into Defense for melee attacks and Ranged Defense for ranged attacks, and both are based mostly on Dexterity and the equipment worn. Some talents also increase it.
  • The chance to hit an opponent depends on the difference between the Accuracy value of the attacker and the Defense value of the defender. If both values are equal, the chance is 50%.
• Damage
  As displayed on the character sheet, the lowest amount of raw damage done if an attack is successful, before taking into account armour, talent multipliers, resistance, resistance penetration, and other penalties and bonuses. It depends mainly on the Stats mentioned in the weapon/arrow/shot description, Physical power, the damage displayed on the weapon, and the user's specific talent with said weapon (e.g., Weapon Mastery or Knife Mastery).
  • This value is reduced by the Armour of the opponent (see below). It is further modified by talents, critical hits, and various other bonuses.
• Armour
  Armour is the amount of raw damage that can be reduced once you have been hit. This value depends mainly on the equipment used, and on the Armour Training talent. See "Armor Hardiness" below.
• Armour Hardiness
  Armour Hardiness determines the percentage of an enemy's raw damage that your Armor (see above) can be applied to. See the Armour page for more details on how this calculation works.
• APR, Armor Piercing, Armor Penetration
  The amount of the enemy's Armor that is ignored by your attacks.
• Critical Hits
  Some strikes may do additional damage. The chance of a weapon hit being critical is indicated by the physical critical hit chance. There are separate values for the chances of spell criticals, and mind criticals. Typically critial hits do 1.5 times the normal damage, but this multiplier may be increased by talents and equipment. The critical hit multiplier is shared by all three types of criticals (physical, spell and mind).

Miscellaneous

• Fatigue
  increases the costs of talents that use most (but not all) resources, like Stamina or Mana. Fatigue depends directly on the armour and equipment worn and is expressed as a percent. For example, at 21% fatigue a combat talent costs 1.21 times as much Stamina, and a spell costs 1.42 times as much Mana.
• Mastery
  A multiplier which is applied to your raw talent level (number of points spent) to determine the effective talent level. For example, at mastery 1.30, a talent in which you have invested 4 points has an effective talent level of 5.20.