Lineage & Skills

I wanted to touch on some of my reasoning behind the way I designed Ancestries and Skills in this project;

Lineage

I didn't want to design Lineages in a way that made them feel good both for the player and for the party as a whole, so instead of the standard ability score bonuses and individual abilities I gave every lineage one bonus just for them (their PC bonus) and one bonus that applied to the entire group (their party bonus).  

My hope is that going forward this will make designing more lineages pretty simple, and keeps the entire ancestry pool flexible to allow players to mix and match them as they want to make their own mixed lineages without them being manually baked into the system. As of right now, there are 6 base Lineages with 36 possible mixed lineages. 

Skills

Skills groups was something I wanted to do for a while, I don't really like the d20 style of picking preset skills and hoping they will be relevant during the game. Skill Groups are intentionally broad categories, letting players get a small bonus to any skill check that is related  to that group.

But, within each skill group are player created skills that allow them to further specialize and gain a bigger bonus to a skill check when that skill is relevant. Skills are also allowed to be broad categories, but they can't extended out of the reach of their respective skill group. I think this will let players make flavorful decisions without feeling like they've sacrificed usability in the process.