| zlefin |
first, I wish there was just a generic megathread for people posting their reactions; cuz I'd rather post there than making a thread for it. But I see a lot of other reaction threads; and it'd seem odd to respond to one of them with my own reactions.
haven't gotten to playtest yet, just read through most of the manual.
On the whole feeling unimpressed; it's not terrible, but it doesn't seem great either, not sure it'd really be worth switching to/learning a new system.
It feels like level matters too much, or at least in too direct a way. Basically everything that matters has scaling = level. A lvl 15 Legendary skill roll is the same as a lvl 20 untrained. That just feels weird; it means levels give you a HUGE jack of all trades effect, no matter what your class is. While I get that it helps with keeping certain things balanced at high levels it feels weird. And because in every case it's just +your level, rather than being individual tables that varied somewhat like the old save values; it feels like when you levelup, the improving everything due to the +level itself is simply more important than whatever other abilities you get; all those other feats and such seem insignificant compared to the +1 to EVERYTHING from leveling itself. The difference between something like Expert and Trained is very minimal, EXCEPT for gating effects wherein if you don't have it at a certain level you're just not allowed to do stuff. That kind of hard binary gating is weird when the difference is otherwise very tiny (i.e. just a +1).
Organizationally, I feel like Chapter 9 should appear earlier; or at least some parts of it should. There's a lot of basic framing stuff in there that, if you haven't read yet, makes it harder to understand what's all happening. Alot of keywords defined there and such.
It should be possible to read through the book in order, and still understand stuff pretty well; but right now that doesn't work so well.
More examples are needed; there's a lot of places where I wasn't quite sure how things worked, and it'd have been helpful to see some examples to look at.
Some of the classes feel a bit too samey; in many ways some feel less like distinct classes than different subgroupings of the same class. Like Druid has those various paths: leaf, wild, and whatever.
Some of the classes have so muhc overlap in when they get various upgrades and in their feats that they could have all been made as just one class, with a lot of specializations.
I dislike that there's still a lot of unrealistic nonsense like armor automatically making you walk slower and max dex; but I'm not surprised that was kept in.
While the existence of more defined downtime and exploration phases theoretically opens up options; in practice it seems like there's very few feats (especially class feats) that interact with them. It feels like they're really given short shrift.