Twilight Heroes Game Manual

Character

In this game you play a superhero character. First and foremost, characters are primarily defined by their class. Each superhero is one of four classes: Elemental, Naturalist, Gadgeteer, and Psion. Each class has a distinct set of abilities and weaknesses, and will tend to have a different method of approaching and solving problems. (See more on classes on that section of the manual.)

Your character is described and defined by a variety of numbers and statistics. Foremost in importance is your character's Level, which is a rough indication of how powerful your hero is. A level 1 hero is just a beginner, while a level 11 character has quite a bit of experience.

You gain levels by collecting Experience Points (XP), which is a measure of how much your hero has learned from his or her adventures. When your hero has gained enough experience, he or she can get training at the Heroes' Guild and go up a level. Training will cost you, but it's also an important way to advance your hero. Gaining levels gives you new skills to use, and makes your hero better at hitting foes and dodging attacks, and in general he or she will be tougher and more powerful.

Besides their level, each character has three main stats which help to further define their abilities: Strength, Intellect, and Reflexes. Strength is a measure of physical power. It primarily helps as a factor in dealing extra damage in combat, in hand-to-hand combat (but not ranged). Intellect represents smarts, focus, and your ability to observe the world around you. High intellect can increase the damage that most spells deal in combat, and also can affect whether you're surprised by opponents, or whether you surprise them. Reflexes represent agility and reaction time. Reflexes play a part in determining how well you can dodge opponent attacks, and how well you can aim your own attacks. High reflexes also allow you additional shots with ranged weapons. All three of these abilities modify how your hero performs in combat, but for the most part they're secondary to level and skills in determining your success.

Each character also has two other important stats: Hit Points (HP) and Power Points (PP). HP represent how much damage you can take from opponent attacks before you need to rest or heal yourself. PP reflect an amount of superhero power that you can tap into in order to use your hero's special abilities. The game tracks both your current levels and your character's maximum—for instance you might see HP written as 5/10, meaning that you have 5 Hit Points left out of a maximum of 10.

Chips

Your hero also has money, in the form of chips.

Time

And finally, the game tracks what time it is. Each day begins at 6:00 p.m., after you've gotten out of work. As you patrol town and have adventures, the night grows later. Once you hit your bedtime, you've used up your turns for the day and have to wait until the next day to get more. There are ways, though, to extend your bedtime and thus get more turns, usually by drinking coffee or finding other sources of energy. (See more in the Time, Turns, and Adventures page.) For practical purposes, each "day" is actually reset at "rollover," which occurs at roughly 11:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern time (3:00 or 4:00 AM GMT, depending on Daylight Saving Time). Right now rollover only takes a very short time, but if you're online when it happens it will log you out of the game to make sure everything is reset properly for the next day.