Role-playing design notes

Random notes on the design of Gods & Monsters, and maybe even Men & Supermen if I can remember what I was drinking when I wrote it.

Gods & Monsters Fantasy Role-Playing

Beyond here lie dragons

Example character errors and clarifications

Jerry Stratton, March 14, 2006

I have a couple more questions about the dynamics of Gods and Monsters.

  1. You didn’t list weapon specialities for any of the sample characters and I was wondering what they were supposed to be? I figured out Toromeen’s from the example of how you created him but I’m struggling to figure out the others.
  2. Does the thief skill search use agility-6 or charisma-6? It is listed under the thief description as agility but in Sam Stevens description as charisma.
  3. Why does sam stevens not have any stat for the thief skill cram?
  4. Perhaps I am misunderstanding how multitype works but why doesn’t Sam Stevens get any warrior abilities since she is a multi-typed fighter thief?

I’m not surprised that all of these questions relate to the examples. I am notoriously bad at updating examples. In general, where the text conflicts with an example, the text is most likely to be correct.

  1. I’m assuming you mean weapon familiarities, since only warriors can specialize with weapons. The weapons listed on their sheet are the weapons that they are familiar with. It doesn’t help, though, that Charlotte Kordé is missing two weapon familiarities. She should have three, but only one (dagger) is listed.
  2. Sam’s character sheet is wrong; it was never updated when I chose to make the Thief search skill different from the general search skill. It should say agility and not charisma.
  3. Sam’s character sheet is lacking; it was never updated when I moved cram from a thief-only occupational skill to the list of thief skills.
  4. There are no obvious warrior abilities to appear on Sam's character sheet. The only ones she could really use is the ability to use unfamiliar weapons at a penalty of two, and the ability to convert attack bonuses into combat bonuses. This doesn't show up except in play. I'm going to note it on the character sheet anyway to make things clearer.

The obvious follow-up question to the last one is, why didn’t Sarah (Sam's player) choose Warrior as her starting archetype and, and then multi-type to Thief? This would have allowed the character to use thieving skills while also using the full potential of a warrior.

Partially this is a choice about how the player views the character, but also it was about the player wanting Sam to get all twelve of the "starting character" bonuses for thief skills. At second level, a thief only gets six points to add to their thief skills, even if that second level character is a first level thief. I've just clarified the description of the Multi-Type specialty to reflect this; it will be in the next version that will hopefully go on-line by the end of the week.

  1. <- Spell Ingredients
  2. Second 2005 Update ->