It came to me in a flash, but I'd like you to bear with me while I lay a little groundwork in this article, because it's going to take just a little longer than a flash to explain it.
As I understand the term, a godling is a warrior who is expected to be superior at all levels of play, but especially once he graduates and reaches the Isle (and thus is safe from death).
When you do a roll-up, you arrange the stats and choose the style, and from these two factors, the computer calculates starting (base) skills. The number crunchers have done a LOT of research on this, and they can fairly well tell you what the normal (mode) base skills for any warrior are, given his starting stats and his style. But sometimes, a random factor will kick in, and a warrior may be bonused over the skills that would be expected and have more than expected, or, of course, the reverse. This you can't know until you get the overview and compare the statements on it to one of the charts produced by a number cruncher.
Note that this means that if you send the warrior directly to the Dark Arena at the same time you send in the roll-up, you won't know about any possible bonuses until it's too late.
A warrior increases skills over his base during fighting by a) training skills and/or b) training stats. By training nothing but skills, you can learn twenty in each of the six skill areas; then you're "maxed." But you can also gain skills at some points in the stat-training sequence, and if you train stats and gain skills that way before you max skill trains, they will be counted against your twenty for the skill in question. So you still get twenty skills, what's the difference? Ah, but if you max the skills and THEN train stats, you get MORE than twenty! This is the argument behind all those admonitions not to train stats early in a warrior's career. The skills earned by training a stat to, say, 17 are calculated on exactly the same chart as the skills earned by having a starting stat of 17.
If two warriors, both of the same style, both entirely mode, start out as Abel: 7-8-8-17-17-12-17 and Baker: 17-17-8-10-11-12-9, by the time they have maxed skills and trained all their stats up to 21, they will be exactly identical in skills! Where's your godling then? Abel may have been more exciting to run, he may have taken off faster and had some rather spectacular wins, but he is equally likely to be dead. So what's the big deal with the trip-17? Instant gratification, maybe, or maybe just muddy thinking.
But wait, there's more!
Each warrior has a favorite weapon, a favorite rhythm, and sometimes a favorite tactic, and THAT makes a lot of difference...but you don't find out (for sure) until the warrior graduates. Suppose you had two warriors with Abel's stats as given above, both slashers, let's say, and one had scimitar, high/low favorites and the other had hatchet moderate/low favorites. The one with the scimitar is most likely to do better than his twin.
So that makes two things you can't possibly know when you send in your roll-up sheet: bonuses and favorites. Both of these are critical to the state of being a godling, and my heretical opinion is that any reasonably good warrior should be given a chance to demonstrate the presence or absence of bonuses and allow at least an intelligent deduction as to favorites before being declared "worthless." It seems to me that the managers who engage in the wholesale use of the Dark Arena on unproven roll-ups are missing a good bet. If they're only interested in high-end play and don't care about their win/loss record in Basic, why don't they give the half-way decent roll-ups a chance?
For a few examples of the things that might be hiding behind an untried set of numbers, I'm going to give you the facts on some real warriors. These are decent but not extreme, ones I've graduated and have the numbers on. All are slashers, so there will be no style-based differences.
A: 16-10- 9-15-17- 7-10 G: 13-17- 9-17-10- 9- 9 B: 9- 8-13-17-17- 9-11 H: 9- 8-13-17-15-11-11 C: 9- 5-14-15-17-11-13 I: 10-12-12-15-13-13- 9 D: 9-12-13-17-17- 3-13 J: 9- 9-13-15-15-11-12 E: 17- 9- 7-11-17-13-10 K: 9-13-10-15- 9-15-13 F: 12-13-15-13- 9- 9-13Here's the rest of the facts--
A: 16-10-9-15-17-7-10, favorites are scimitar, very high/very low. +1 init, +1 def, +4 dec. Good potential. A lot of skills waiting for an increase in DF.
B: 9-8-13-17-17-9-11, favorites are broadsword, high/low. +2 rip. Good potential.
C: 9-5-14-15-17-11-13, favorites are hatchet, high/low. +4 init, -4 rip, +1 dec. Junk, because of the favorite weapon.
D: 9-12-13-17-17-3-13, favorites are longsword, moderate/low. +1 init. Same as C, junked by his favorites.
E: 17-9-7-11-17-13-10, favorites are scimitar, moderate/moderate. +2 def, +4 dec. Rhythm and weapon are excellent, but he'd have been better with a bonus in attack. Still, there are a lot of skills just waiting for the stat raises in DF and WT.
F: 12-13-15-13-9-9-13, favorites are great axe, moderate/moderate. +1 rip, +3 att, -2 def. Mediocre, the penalty in defense offsetting the bonus in attack. Raising stats will be hard, too.
G: 13-17-9-17-10-9-9, favorites are great axe, very high/low. +1 ini, +4 rip,+2 att, +2 par, +2 def, +1 dec. An interesting oddity (bonuses in ALL skills), but basically mediocre, and the low WL will give trouble when it comes to raising stats.
H: 9-8-13-17-15-11-11, favorites are broadsword, high/very low. -1 rip, +1 par, +4 def. Not bad at all.
I: 10-12-12-15-13-13-9, favorites are battle axe, high/very low. +2 dec. Not bad, but not great, either.
J: 9-9-13-15-15-11-12, favorites are scimitar, moderate/very low. -1 rip, +3 par, +3 dec. Possible.
K: 9-13-10-15-9-15-13, favorites are shortsword, very high/low, slash tactic. +1 init, -4 rip, +2 att, +3 def, +3 dec. Unfortunate weapon, but otherwise quite possible. Favorite or no, I'd give this one a scimitar to fight with.
I forget off-hand which ones I'm actually running of these, if any, but just looking at the list, I'd pick E and probably H. But you see what I mean about not being able to tell the warrior's potential from the initial roll-up sheet? These warriors weren't sorted by anything except style; they're simply the first eleven slashers on my list of graduates. None of them have "great" numbers. None of them DIED. Not ONE of them is mode. There's variation in favorite weapons and rhythms. My recollection is that all of them did reasonably well in Basic.
I'm not advocating running every rotten replacement that comes down the pike (I do it, but that's a different story), but give those so-so roll-ups a chance to show their stuff. They might surprise you.
Jorja
The Middle Way 3