| Funky Badger |
Just finished playtesting parts 1 & 2 over a weekend. Thoughts below, mostly on the first experience of P2, rather than specifics about the adventures themselves (although thew were both fun - comments below notwithstanding).
The good:
-3 action combat sytem is excellent. Engaging and quick with enough scope for tactical choices.
-having said that, there are still a few nit-picky annoyances, the rules for putting both hands onto a 2-handed weapon are annoying, and seem needless given 2H isn't particularly better than 1H anymore.
-magic isn't quite as flexible as we were led to believe in the trails (but its still cool). Also cantrips are very nice, and its seems a lot easier to get critically spell results (or crit save failures) than combabt crits.
The ugly:
-lockpicking mechanics are a waste of time, building up (and losing) a bank of successes to overcome the difficulty is an unfun time sink. Especially since there are so few ways to assist a roll
-skills seems much less well defined than in P1, nobody seems to know which is used for which, this just adds to feeling of dissociation
-character creation options are neat within the very limited boundaries. Gating combat options behind classes seems like a terrible choice. Some things you can no longer do: play a longbow wielding ranger, sneak attack with a longsword, power attack as a barbarian.
The bad:
-resonance is just rubbish. I don't see the issue this is trying to fix. Why put a limit on magic item use in a high-magic setting? And if you absolutely have to, why tie it one particular stat? Surely class + primary stat modifier would be more balanced?
-secret rolls are nonsense. Immersion breaking, pointless and heaping more work on the GM. I will literaly (again) never run a game using these rules, and most likely never play in one. BURN THEM WITH FIRE.
-exploration mode seems like a badly thought out excuse for railroading. And self-contradictory from the start (not good design). Casting a spell for more than 10 minutes at a time is fatiguing. Except for Detect Magic, when it isn't. Even though Detect Magic takes *literally* twice as much effort to cast as Shield. Why?
-dying rules are clunky in the extreme. I think with removal of the unconscious condition, or the save to remove it (make it an action to become conscious when on 1+ hp?) these could work. Although given they seem to exist to stop characters getting critted into oblivion, why does the massive damage rule exist - its only point sems to be criting first or second level characters directly to death?
-detect magic. Please put it back to how it was. Its tedious nonsense now. Unfun in the extreme. It could take days to find the magic coin in the treasure chest - why?
I know that's fairly negative, but I'm concerned that the really good combat and magic chassis is drowning under the weight of badly thought-out pointless bolt-ons.