Hello everyone,
after skimming through the rules, there are some small things that caught my attention and I thought I'd list them here. These is not intended as suggested errata or the like. Most of this is to make certain elements more thematic or balanced (from my point of view). So here it goes:
Tumble Trough
In my opinion this misses a critical failure in the vein of "you fall prone" or "you become flat footed until the beginning of you next turn". Just to give it a bit more of a risk.
Falling damage
This should be non-deterministic. The simple ruling of "damage= half distance fallen" is nice, but this way a PC would know for certain "oh, I'll definitely survive this fall". Falling damage should involve dice in some way. The old system (1d6 for 5 feet, if I recall correctly) should work fine here.
Natural medicine & powerful leap
Why does this cap out at master? Both should get better when you are legendary in the corresponding skill.
Critical hits with bows
The DC 10 check is almost pointless, especially since you don't get critical specialization effects until level 5 (I think). This should either be without a check, or use the class DC of the character who shot the bow.
Reverse engineering
This is too expensive. Writing down the formula should be much cheaper or even free, since you have to pay to reassemble the item anyway.
Heighten spells
This is particularly annoying for the sorcerer and bard, but also true for the other classes: heightened spells should not require a separate formula.
Spell repertoire (bard)
This might be a typo, but the bard only starts with one Level-1-spell (and four cantrips) while the sorcerer starts with two Level-1-spells, effectively always keeping repertoire and spells per day equal (which is really nice and easy to remember, by the way).
The progression appears to be the same, though, which would mean, that the bard only knows two Level-1-spells and three of every other level in the end.
Immunity, weakness, and resistance
The order in which you should apply these should be weakness, resistance, immunity. If go start with immunity and follow with weakness people might think that a creature with "immunity slashing" and "weakness slashing 5" still receives 5 damage. The text clearly states that it isn't so, but this would make it more consistent.
Recovery
The recovery systems seems a bit complicated/fiddly. A flat check against DC 10 + "severity of your dying condition" would be much easier to remember and handle.
Assist action
There seems to be no good reason to use this in an aggressive way. I could rather just strike myself and deal damage, since both strike and assist are compared to the same value. I get the same multiple attack penalty for assisting, since it has the attack trait. I might increase the chance of my ally to crit, but in this case it would still only be worth it if s/he has a better weapon than me. Even it consists for all of his attacks, this hardly seems worth it. Some suggestions to improve this:
- Give it the manipulate trait, instead of the attack trait. That would also give the interesting tactical option of "bating" a reaction from your enemy. Also, this would give low-level characters already in melee a viable option for their third action. Or
- Make the attack against a lower DC (maybe 10+level of opponent) or maybe TAC. Or
- Make the results more meaningful.
Ancestry feats
This has been talked about "a bit" already. In my opinion it would more thematic if you could pick a set of "feats" (maybe call it something different) in the beginning, which then increase as you level up or improve your proficiency ranks. Two examples:
- Weapon familiarity would work like it does now, but in addition you gain critical specialization effects if your proficiency rank with the appropriate weapons becomes master.
- Ancients blood circumstance bonus to saves and reduction in resonance increases as you level up (+1/-0 at level 1, +2/-1 at level 7, or something like that)
This might sound like a lot of complaining, but these are pretty much ALL the little things that I thought could be improved while reading the rulebook. Overall I REALLY like this new edition and if the current ruleset (not format ;) but this has been mentioned to death before...) would be released I would be perfectly fine with it.
Thank you for reading! I hope I didn't make to many mistakes... English is not my first language.
