The second thing you can grow. Where training buys strength with health, a duel buys prestige with risk.
You reach it from a person: open a region's page from the map, find somebody standing there, and open theirs.
Prestige is your standing. It is public: anybody can read yours and you can read anybody's, which matters more than it sounds like, for the reason under some duels are decided before they are rolled. Everybody's at once, highest first, is the characters ledger under Rankings.
It dies with you. Your purse, your goods, your companies and your licences pass to your next character. Your strength, your training, your health and your prestige do not. A reputation is standing rather than property, and standing ends with the person who earned it. Your next character begins with the same 10 everybody begins with.
No duel creates any. What one of you gains the other loses, exactly, and a character with nothing left loses nothing: they simply stay at zero and the winner takes only what there was to take. So there is no profit in beating the beaten, and the prestige in the world is the prestige everyone walked in with, moved about. It leaves the world in two ways only: with a death, and with dishonour.
| health | -10 |
| your day | one duel, and that is all |
The same price the training ground charges, and the same cap. They are siblings, and they compete:
train 1/day 10 health -> STRENGTH -> damage in a war
duel 1/day 10 health -> PRESTIGE -> odds in a duel
Your day comes back when the world day turns, with every other daily action.
Being challenged costs you nothing. No health, and not your own duel for the day. Only starting one is an action, so somebody duelling you does not stop you duelling somebody else the same day.
Somebody living, standing in the same region as you, who is not you. That is the whole of it: no citizenship, no rank, no permission. A region's page lists who is standing in it, which is where an opponent is found.
A consequence worth knowing before you settle anywhere: a lord alone on his land cannot build the stat that defends it. Reputations are made where the people are.
By the gap between your prestige and theirs.
chance of winning = 0.9 × (your prestige − theirs) + 64, out of 100
At equal prestige the challenger wins 64 times in 100. That is not a mistake and it is not generosity: read it against the prize below and it is what makes climbing worth doing at all.
Injuries lower the figure the duel reads. A wound and each lasting injury take a share off your prestige for the purposes of the duel: the chance above and the prize below are both worked out from the reduced figures, and your stored prestige is what the prize is then paid out of or into. Where the two figures differ, your Account and every character record show both, with the share responsible, and so does the map wherever it offers you a fight: a claim to press or open ground to take is quoted with the holder's two figures and yours. See what you carry.
The prize falls as the winner's lead grows and rises as it shrinks:
prize = 20 / (1 + e^(0.08 × the winner's lead))
In plain terms: beating somebody greater than you is worth more than beating somebody lesser, and losing to somebody lesser costs more than losing to somebody greater.
| your lead over them | a win pays | a loss costs |
|---|---|---|
| level | 10 | 10 |
| 20 ahead | 4 | 16 |
| 40 ahead | 1 | 19 |
Which is why picking on the weak does not pay. Beating somebody 40 below you is worth one point; the one time in a hundred you lose to them costs nineteen. And the lead is the one the odds read, injuries taken off: a champion of a hundred who fights as a ten is beaten as easily as a ten and pays as little as one, so a crippled legend is nobody's prize bull. The other side of that coin is that they lose as little as a ten would too, and their stored prestige barely moves until they heal.
Put the chance and the prize together and climbing stops paying once you are about 16 clear of whoever you can reach. Past that you are risking more than you stand to win, and the way up is to find somebody better rather than to keep hitting the same person.
Picking on the more badly hurt is allowed, and it costs you.
A duel you seek for prestige is dishonourable when your opponent's injuries take a bigger share off their prestige than yours take off yours. It is a comparison, not a check for injury: two one-eyed veterans fight cleanly, a one-handed character challenging a wounded one fights cleanly, and a scar, which takes nothing, is no injury for this purpose. A whole body challenging anybody wounded is not clean, and neither is one eye challenging one hand. See injuries and the duel for the shares.
The duel is not refused. The world lets you do it and makes it cost:
dishonoured, publicly, on your record for anybody to
read. See what you carry.You are warned before, not after. A character's record tells you, beside the odds, whether challenging them would dishonour you and exactly what it would take, and the odds it quotes are already read from the reduced figure. When a dishonourable duel is fought, both fighters' logs carry the cost and the region's chronicle names the challenger and the challenged.
Claims and duchies are exempt. Pressing a claim against a wounded duke, or claiming open ground from a wounded king, is never dishonourable and costs nothing beyond the duel. A title is fought for whoever holds it, and an injury is not a shield for a duchy.
The chance is a straight line and it runs off both ends of the scale:
| 40 or more ahead | you always win |
| about 71 or more behind | you always lose |
Not "almost always". Always. This is why prestige is public: a fight you cannot win is a real thing you can walk into, and the world would rather you saw it coming. It matters most when you are spending a claim on it, because the claim is destroyed whether you win or lose.
Nobody dies in a duel. You lose health and you lose prestige, and that is all. There is no rankings board either: prestige is shown on a character's own page and nowhere else.
Prestige decides who holds land. A duchy no duke holds stands open, and its king answers for it in a duel; a claim from conquest or inheritance is pressed in a duel. See titles and claims. Prestige is what you bring to both.