| GM Seth |
So we had our first 2 sessions through the Playtest, and it was fun for the most part, however there were a few problem areas.
We took 2 sessions to run through In Pale Mountain's Shadow. They all had a lot of fun, especially with roleplay and with combat. The combat was their favourite part. I don't think they enjoyed the hazards very much, of course, I, being new to this, probably messed them up in a few ways.
Now I decided that, rather than having them come to the forums and post their impressions themselves, since there really isn't a general open survey right now, I decided to write out a questionare and wrote down their answers to these questions I asked. Here are their answers.
The first question I asked was what was their most and least favourite parts of the game. Their most favourite parts were all the fun things they were able to do within the rules, like the grappling. One player used this to wrestle the water elemental and that was fun. They also enjoyed the roleplay, but that's outside the system of the game.
Now their least favourite part, and their biggest problems with the system thus far was resting. After the fight with Zakhav and his minions before the door to the tomb, they were pretty heavily banged up, and definitely not prepared for the elementals at all. And after reading through the resting rules we discovered that they would have had to rest for multiple days in a row in order to be anywhere close to full, and being under that time limit, it definitely wasn't feasible.
Their other issue was with something one of my players found while reading the book at the table. The spellcasting rules, particularly between spell slots and spell points, was too confusing and took him half an hour to an hour to even explain at the table. More complicated than it needs to be, was his take on it.
They also would like to see crafting expanded. Currently we play FantasyCraft and one of the things they like most in that game is being able to customize gear and add different traits to it and such. We could not find a way of doing this in the playtest. I'm assuming this is planned probably for the final release?
Now with the negatives out of the way. The parts of the system they like the most and would like to see go to print as is, would be the combat and the skills system. It felt more fun and more streamlined to them, than even they're used to from FantasyCraft (we've been playing FantasyCraft for 5 years now). So big props on that. Death and dying, we only had one character downed, and he got to Dying 3 before the Goblin Alchemist dumped a potion down his throat lol (the roleplay there was pretty fun. The Goblin seems to be the most fun to play from what I've seen).
Over all, on a scale from 1 to 10, their ratings for this adventure was about a 6.
So that's our take so far. This is our first run with the playtest, and we'll be starting Chapter 3 next week. So I will post here again once we complete that one and we'll see if their impressions change at all.
Thank you,
GM Seth