Armor as Actor Attributes (AKA The Character Chip™)

I am kicking around a classless system where an actor would have very clearly identified and showcased "attributes of varying parameters" (For example things like HIT would be made apparent right alongside ATK) and forgo levels in favor of increasing their effectiveness via earning/learning as they see fit (not stat points, more so books, training, mentors, in game use of said equip, etc) to probably be awarded via permanent states.

Nutshell out of the way, in order to achieve and manage this in editor (no plugins for now as I'm in a hardcore self imposed learn the source first mode) in a much more straightforward way for my limited brain capacity I was considering imbuing all of the desired attributes/values for each of my characters nice and neatly into a dummy armor that Locks to the actor. It could even have beginning skills and equippable (holy crap that's not a real word?) armor/weapon types attached to it. So figuratively sort of a chip you plug into an actor to give him all of his game defining characteristics. And to be clear I am envisioning these in my minds eye as having the same form and function (and sound... that glorious sound) of the cartridges on a TRS-80 CoCo because it helps me through the day.

One of the reasons I was considering this approach was because I love the fact you can pump flat numbers right into the base stat boxes of the armor tab, while managing the ex/sp params via traits.

But one unexpected unknown I've come across, when considering bypassing class and level for my character chip... is that I don't know what the default base stat values are of an "actor with no class". (No I don't mean Bruce Willis). So if I set ATK to 10 on my character chip, I am not sure what that is adding on top of from the actors inherent stats, and quite honestly couldn't find it after a fair amount of digging.

I would love for the answer to be something like "an actor has no base stats until you give him a class" because then I know my chip would be solely setting the actors base stat as desired, but I have a feeling that is not the answer.

Anyway that's all I got, thanks.

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The default for the regular parameters are set in class - if you set the parameter curves to 1 for every level it remains there even if you use levels. And you can not have an actor without a class, you'll always have a default class selected in the editor.

As for the other parameters, there are two possibilities:
If it is an additive parameter, the default is 0% (which is why actors always miss if you remove all HIT traits)
If it is a multiplicative parameter, the default is always 100% (which is why nothing changed if you don't add Trakts for those).

And you can identify that by checking the mathematical sign before the number in the trait Windows.

So since there is no way to have an actor bypass class, I would set up a dummy, or more so stagnant class with each param curve set to 1 because this will in effect lock the base stats at whatever flat rate I put in the Value there. Assuming I can't set value to zero (0/0=crash) I set them all to 1 close that puppy and never think about it again as I manage all the actors vital bits via my proposed locked dummy armor tab (my preferred UI) from there on out.

Am I warm?

Yes good to go on this through other conversations and research. Easy to manage these from the traits>param tab on the armor in my scenario.

This gets my head good and straight. Thanks A.

P.S.

Fascinating that an Actor can't have independent base params but can have independent ex/sp params and can modify regular params from the backseat. Oh the interesting choices that were made.

EDIT:
And as a quick check...
"every level" is the value actually set back on the actor (initial level & max level), correct?

If so then I just make the actors init and max both = 1, then over on the class tab I should only have to define the param values once, for one level (1).