Infinitas is not like the project that immediately preceded it in how it handles characters. What most specifically comes to mind at the moment is that, unlike Potentes Limen, there are no “Skills,” something that might seem strange to anyone who knows my taste in games–I love skill lists! What there are instead are “Abilities,” “Powers,” and “Specializations”; the former two represent broad categories of actions a character could do (or rather, categories of abilities to enact certain things) and the latter being closest to what many games call “Stunts.”

Like the roleplaying game Cortex Classic‘s skills system, Abilities and Powers are general purpose–and fixed at lower ranks. Specializations are much narrower in what can be done with them–as I said above, they are like stunts, special tricks that have been honed to a fine edge–but can go much higher in rank. Each rank represents a die that is rolled and subtracted from the d100 roll, to try and bring the result under the Target Number. Lower is better!

The point I want to make is that this taps into what I feel is true of most people–they have some quirk(s) of knowledge, skill, or habit that is (are) honed to a fine pitch, but most knowledge and skills are sort of general purpose, with only the imagination of the user being the limiting factor in how it can be applied. When making Infinitas, that is the sort of feeling I was trying to go for, and in playtesting I saw some of this come out.

Does a user with supernormal power with a Specialization in blasting things with bolts of annihilation, akin to a superhero but in a fantasy setting, need to mark off the resources for a use of his power if he only wants to generate enough blast to stun fish to eat? I ruled not–that falls under the broader use of the Power. That decision likely prevented a TPK due to starvation (darn, and I was so hoping for one, too…), but the whole point of the system is to make it so that you can use power, or more generally skills, without needing to put points into thirty different skills (much as I love all thirty of my little darlings in other systems.)