As work on the Beta progresses, I thought that it might be a good idea to share some of the changes coming up for it.
Essentially, a few of my playtesters reminded me that I was far from the original Novus, making this into almost a new system. This prompted me to go back and look through things and reassess a number of things that changed from one version to the next and figure out, for myself, whether I had changed them just because I like to tinker, or for actual improvements. And I came up with the following list of changes to bring things back in line.
- Background Options -- Reworking these, so that we are not using points anymore. This means you get 2 Background Options from your Race, you select 2 options. A number of options will require you to also select a DIsadvantage to go with it. Additionally, you can take one Disadvantage to get one extra Background Option (but not one that requires you to select a Disadvantage).
- Dice Rolls -- Changing Explosions so that they are no open ended, you roll a 10 on one die, you get to roll an extra 1d10 and add it to the roll. For Critical Rolls, you roll 10 on both dice (natural 20), and you get to roll 1d10+10 and add it to the original 20.
- Skills -- I went back and took a hard look through the skills. I was never super happy having a "Combat" skill that required you to learn a different version of it (6 different versions), and then having to learn Proficiencies for each Specialty. So what I did was to re-organize the skill into 5 groups (Combat, Magic, Outdoors, Subterfuge, and General). This let have the 6 Combat skills as individual skills with Proificiencies.Magelore is not a Specialty skill (like Crafts and the normal Lore skill). Brought back the Acrobatics skill as well. This gives us a total of 27 skills, and 11 Special Skills. Special Skills are skills that do not follow the standard skill rules. Most of them are single purchase or limited purchase skills.
- Cultures & Backgrounds -- I have combined these back into Cultures, that give 20 ranks spread across skills learned by the Culture. There is some customization within each Culture to allow for variation within each as well.
- Combat Moves & Styles -- I had not realized it, but I lost Combat Moves at some point, so I added them back in and they will form the basis for the Combat Styles.Still working on this, so I am not sure what the final form of Combat Styles will look like, but they will be similar to how they were in Novus 1e, but not identical.
