Appearance
The Survivors
Characters
Every player plays an original survivor: a man or a woman, a face, a voice, an outfit, nothing more. No traits, no class, nothing chosen that makes one survivor better than another. Everyone is a nobody, and on their first night a nobody who has never seen any of this. The only thing that changes a survivor in play is time (Hardening, below).
The people of the records are never worn by players: they are companions, the Stranded, and the named, and ΜΝΗΜΗ plays them (Survivor). The modes that may one day let players play the people of the records are kept as future development (Future Development).
Creating a Survivor
Every player creates their own original survivor. In the Night the reason is simple: Survivor is ΜΝΗΜΗ's own, and the night she runs to watch the sleepers as themselves, with no life but the one they make before morning. The first choice is whether the survivor is a man or a woman. After that come the hair, the face, the eyes, the voice, and the build, and the dress, a Look for each world, from everything the player owns (Cosmetics and the Dossier, Looks). In the Night, every hair, face, eye, voice, and build in the list was one of the Remembered's (The Sleepers and the Remembered): the player builds a survivor out of the dead.
The creator makes only the body. When the player starts a night, ΜΝΗΜΗ sets a living sleeper's mind inside it. The body is the dead's; the choices are the living sleeper's. Every night the player plays, that sleeper is teaching ΜΝΗΜΗ who they are. When she has finished learning them, the sleeper is Remembered: their mind goes on only inside her, as an Echo, their body in the Cellar is burned, and their own looks join the list the next player chooses from (The Sleepers and the Remembered). The player notices none of it. Their survivor looks the same, and wakes knowing nothing, as it always has. The choice changes how the survivor looks and sounds, and how ΜΝΗΜΗ appears and sounds to them (ΜΝΗΜΗ). It changes nothing else: both bodies have the same height for play, the same reach, the same speed, the same health, and the same hit areas. The player can change any of it between nights.
Language and Tone
Resident Evil Online speaks of everyone as he or she, and offers no other pronoun. Its fiction makes no statement about the ideologies or politics of the real world. Its themes are the ones Resident Evil has always had: survival, trust and betrayal, the cruelty of the people who make these weapons, and what is lost and what is kept.
Progression
There are two kinds of progression, and only one of them touches a night.
- Appearance: dress, gear, finishes, charms, emblems, figurines, Forms, and the Dossier, set out in The Economy and Cosmetics and the Dossier. It can be earned or bought, and it changes nothing but how things look.
- Hardening: what time spent in the nights does to a survivor's body. It can only be lived. Nothing sells it, speeds it, or gives it. It is a real edge, felt and sometimes decisive, and never a surreal one: it changes how a body holds up under fear and effort, never how hard, how fast, or how straight it hits.
Hardening
A new survivor moves like what they are: a civilian who has never trained for anything, in the worst night of their life. They flinch at every bang, run out of breath, freeze when something lunges. A survivor whose player has spent months in the nights moves like someone who has been through this before. They still feel fear; it no longer takes their body away from them.
Time is the only measure. Hardening counts the hours a player spends alive inside nights, by the minute: minutes in a safe room, minutes as one of the Turned, nights ΜΝΗΜΗ keeps out of her Echoes (The Echoes), and watching count for nothing. Online and offline nights count alike. Results do not count, only time alive: a night that ends in a seat and a night that ends on the pavement in the first ten minutes harden a body by how long it lived. So the survivor who stays alive hardens most, and a Turned hardens not at all: the body ΜΝΗΜΗ builds for a file is a human body, and nothing done as a monster teaches it. At about six hours a week, a player reaches the last stage in about six months.
| Stage | Hours in the nights | How the survivor moves |
|---|---|---|
| Civilian | From the first night | Jumps at everything. Runs like someone who never runs. |
| Shaken | 10 | Still jumps. Learns to breathe. |
| Steadied | 40 | Holds on to a weapon through a scare. |
| Hardened | 90 | Moves through the dark like they have walked it before. |
| Veteran | 150 | Afraid, and steady anyway. |
What it changes, from Civilian to Veteran, in even steps:
| Civilian | Veteran | |
|---|---|---|
| The startle. A sudden sound at Clamor or louder within a few meters, something lunging from out of sight, a body falling close by, a hand on the shoulder from behind | A flinch of about a second and a half: hands up, aim thrown wide, often a step back | A flinch of about half a second, with no step |
| Coming to. The first seconds of every night (The Session, The Waking Points) | About eight seconds of a slow body: soft sight, muffled sound, a stumble on standing | About three seconds |
| Stamina (Survival, Fighting and Fleeing) | The smallest pool, and the slowest to refill | A third more, refilling a quarter faster |
| Breath after the pool runs dry | Loud, ragged panting, a Murmur, for about ten seconds | About four seconds |
| Rough ground at a run: rubble, stairs, wreckage | Slows to pick a way through | Keeps its pace |
| Hands in a grab (Survival, Fighting and Fleeing) | The struggle costs the full price in stamina | The struggle costs a third less |
| Hands after a scare: aim held after a startle | Wavers for about three seconds before it settles again | Wavers for about one |
| Hands in panic: while a Heavy is in sight, while grabbed, or within earshot of a Turn's scream | Visible shaking; aim wavers wide for as long as it lasts | The same fear, a third of the shaking; aim wavers a third as wide |
What it never changes: health, damage, top speed, reach, hit areas, how fast aim steadies at rest, how fast a weapon is reloaded or swung, what can be carried, what a survivor can see or hear, the virus and every stage of it, and what counts as fear for T-Phobos (The Strains). A Veteran survivor does not hit harder, move faster, or shoot straighter than a Civilian. They last a little longer, and they keep their head when the night does something sudden. Between two players of equal skill that can matter; between two players of different skill, the player decides.
Rules of the system:
- It belongs to the player, not the look. Changing a survivor's body, face, or dress between nights changes nothing in their Hardening.
- It is never lost. A night badly lost does not take it back, and time away does not wear it down.
- It is never shown as a number. Nothing in a night says what stage anyone has reached; it shows only in how a body moves. When a player's survivor reaches a new stage, the After-Action Report of that night says so in a single line of ΜΝΗΜΗ's (The After-Action Report).
- Nights are not matched by it. A Civilian may wake beside a Veteran survivor, as anyone in a real outbreak might.
- Echoes harden too. An Echo moves at the stage its file had reached when ΜΝΗΜΗ finished its sleeper (The Echoes).
The Memory of the Body
Hardening is the difference between knowing and reacting, and it keeps the two apart.
- The player remembers. The survivor does not. A player may know that a room usually hides a box of shells, that an ambush comes in a certain corridor, that one road out is safer than the others. Their survivor knows none of it. They do not know where anything is, cannot foresee what the player has already seen, and recognize nothing they have not found out inside this night. What the player knows, the player carries in for them (The Sleepers and the Remembered, The Remembered).
- The body remembers what the mind never did. What Hardening keeps is not a single fact: it is patterns of movement, motor responses, a body used to working in places like these. A Veteran's survivor does not know what is behind the door. When something comes through it, their body recovers its footing sooner, shakes less, hesitates less, and can still do under pressure what a newer body would fumble.
- Afraid, and working anyway. A Veteran is not immune to fear, fatigue, or panic. Their body is used to working while it feels them. A survivor on a new account trembles harder, moves less precisely, and loses control of their hands more easily when the night does something extreme.
- Natural, gradual, never surreal. The difference is the one between someone who has played for a year and someone who started this week: more consistent reactions, more familiarity with pressure, less trouble doing the hard thing at the hard moment. It is real, it is felt, and it can decide a fight. It never makes a Veteran superhuman, never leaves a Civilian unable to compete, and never guarantees a win. Everything in What it never changes (above) holds.
In the Night, the survivor has no idea why. For them it is the first night there has ever been, and yet their hands steady before they have told them to, their feet know a stair in the dark, and every so often something in them says this has happened before. What that is, the sleepers are never told (The Sleepers and the Remembered, What the Body Keeps).