Player's Option: Skills & Powers - Contents

Contents

Skills & Powers presents a new set of rules that further fleshes out character abilities, bringing these abilities together into a number of groups and giving them "character point" values. Players "buy" abilities for their characters, assuming that the character has the required number of points and that the group to which an ability belongs is available to the class and race of that character. For example, a player could choose not to take an ability standard to the character's class in favor of spending points on a proficiency, or the traditional limitations of a class could be overcome by spending points. Skills & Powers presents several new ways of rolling a character's six ability score statistics, and then provides extra rules to enable the player to alter them. Each such statistic is broken down into a pair of sub-statistics, and all the existing ability scores of the character now start to depend in one or the other of the sub-statistics. Once the value of each ability score is determined, the player also assigns that value to both sub-statistics and can then tweak them by lowering one to raise the other. The book contains options to further focus a character's abilities and background. One table is used to determine what event sent a character into the world to adventure, and there is a collection of different "character kits" that a player can use to determine social rank and to influence abilities. Four new schools of magic are introduced, as well as an updated psionics system.

The book begins with a one-page foreword by Niles and Donovan. Chapter One (pages 6–11) describes the character points system for Player's Option, which are used to improve the abilities of player characters. Chapter Two (pages 12–21) describes ability scores, each of which is divided into two subabilities. Chapter Three (pages 22–45) describes the racial requirements for each character race. Chapter Four (pages 46–63) presents details on how the various character classes work in the Player's Option system. Chapter Five (pages 64–85) provides 30 character kits, various character packages. Chapter Six (pages 86–111) details how nonweapon proficiencies work in play. Chapter Seven (pages 112-135) details weapon proficiency and mastery. Chapter Eight (pages 136-141) provides five new schools of magic. Chapter Nine (pages 142-175) details psionics in the Player's Option system. An appendix (pages 178-187) compiles the tables presented in this book. Pages 188-192 are an index to the book.