Asteria Rising Update 7

Been a while hasn't it? A large part is due to equal parts focusing on Ruination of Bran and my own laziness. Firday August 11, 2017 I did some more work on Asteria Rising though. Specifically the work began with passing time by improving the character sheet. I also began to work on determining a better progression system for skill proficiencies.

Drawing slightly off of videos for Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon role-playing-game, I removed saving throws and base proficiency. Players will now progress their skills by rolling critical rolls [rolling 20 without modifiers]. Personally, it makes more sense as both I and my players have been confused by the proficiency level up tables in the D&D Player's Hand Book before and generally forgotten to increase proficiency before.

The idea is basic, get the critical roll and check the box next to the skill. Once the session is over, increase that skill by one and remove the check. That way players aren't stacking their skill increases during the session, they remember to increase the skill as the spot is marked, and they feel they made progress. I do expect people doing house rules to curb these level ups, but for now that's the current system.

I didn't want characters to start as a completely blank slate though as that removes an aspect of fun in usually tedious character creation process. Ability scores remain, and their modifiers go into the related skills to act as their starting base. Background will also give a +1–2 in some skills. That way backgrounds aren't quite as minmaxable as they are in D&D, as I've found in my Atypical character series. Yet, the backgrounds still give some mechanical weight to choosing them.

There will also be additional skills that go with backgrounds too: vehicle types, languages, hobbies, and so on. I just haven't come up with them all nor added to the character sheet template. One thing I do anticipate are players having unorthodox skills based off their backstory or the type of game the GM runs, so I want one or two columns in the Extra Skills block empty to be filled in as necessary.

I also still need to come up with a better name because having Attribute Skills and Extra Skills may be confuse people or it may not. The names are self-explanatory yet are all Extra skills going to be skills, or perhaps personality traits should be added in? I'm not sure but it is a question that will keep me up at night until fixed.

Left: Soldier Levels Alpha0.08                                 Right: Soldier Levels Alpha0.09

With the change in the character sheet I also modified the leveling system. My greatest trepidation at completing the engineer and creating the leveling process of the agent class was how much needed to be filled in. D&D has a massive chunk of page space devoted to spells and abilities, yet even it falls back on just increasing number of actions, ability scores, or ability damage. My half-hearted research of leveling in D&D shows that most players don't reach level 15+. If that's the case then why bother with struggling to make 20 levels of content, when I can pack it down into 10.

It might seem like the player will have less, but their leveling will be more potent than its current iteration. Getting an ability score upgrade for leveling is nice, but getting a score increase and another ability is better. I also don't think I'll double the xp gain needed, perhaps increase xp per level by 30% at most.