Negative Space: rule previews
- Training points for abilities, skills, and weapons
- Advancing in skills, weapon familiarities, and ability scores might be combined and simplified using “training points”.
- Fields of study
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Gods & Monsters currently has a very flat skill system. Every skill is at the same level, whether it is building a fire, building a bridge, or performing surgery. Besides being somewhat unbalanced, that level of fine detail goes against the rest of the Gods & Monsters system.
- Get your mojo rising
- Mojo points allow players to allocate their characters’ once-random advancements among fields, abilities, and research as they see fit.
- Crosstraining-style fields and skills
- One of the problems with making skills in a Dumasian, space-operaish game like Gods & Monsters is that characters don’t necessarily need them. Skills in such a world need to be as big as the characters.
- Weapon Fields, Psychic Fields, and Thief Fields
- In the new fields and skill system, some fields are restricted to specific archetypes. Thieves have access to skills no one else does, for example, as do Monks.
- Extended character creation
- Starting characters gain mojo which they can use during first level to gain extra skills, money, or other starting resources.
- New, improved experience rules for Gods & Monsters
- Characters in Gods & Monsters will gain experience points for performing difficult archetypal actions, for engaging planned encounters, for conflicts, and for acquiring excess loot.
- Advantage in the fog of war
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An initiative-style advantage system is inappropriate to Gods & Monsters-style play. The recent changes to advantage were an experiment to see if initiative was worthwhile. My next experiment will test whether an initiative-style advantage system is unnecessary.
- Conflicts and Contests
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This is a swords and sorcery game, not a chess and poker game. But if you want to take advantage of your position in the story for non-combat activities—such as card games or sports—you can. You can choose to resolve combat as a contest, or choose to resolve a chess game as a conflict. The rules are the same.
