First impression.

By Moriden, in Balance Issues

Posted at

While at first glance it looks vaguely interesting i can say with surety that there is 0% chance that my play group will have any desire to use this system... ever.

I mean we like 3rd ed pretty strongly already so it would have had to have something really compelling to pull us in but it seems like they went out of the way to just make it a big flowery complicates mess that will piss of new players for no discernible reason.

Marks against it

Special dice

In built mechanic forcing characters to react emotionally even if the players don't think they should.

Incredibly complicated new system that is also highly narrative driven? Seriously that should be two checks. Highly complicated is fine sometimes even good but never while also being so narrativistic.

Also a system that so heavily favors narrative over crunch is a black mark in my group.

Tattoos are super generic now, i really miss the 1st ed ones. Similarly advantages are all really generic and boring.

getting rid of traits and allowing basically any ring to be used for any action. This alone is a game breaker. If every other thing wasent an issue this would make the system unplayable for many groups.

Positives

On the other hand giving rituals and specifying exactly which groups get kiho etc is interesting.

The charecter creation process seems compelling.

The heritage results are actually reasonable good as opposed to 3rd and 5th where they seemed like an insult.

Not really anything else to say. i was expecting to not be thrilled but im honestly impressed with how much of a mess this system is going to be to try to teach to new players and thats the real kicker. Even if everything else about this system was flawless its going to be a pain and a half for people to really grok. Its just radically different from most other systems. Especially completly new rpgers will look at the dice, the charts for what the dice symbols do ect and just give up before even finishing the whole system chapter no less ever actually try this.

Posted at

Your last point I don't necessarily agree with. I have found that new players really easily understood edge of the empire... it was long time rpgers (who played pretty much only old school style games) that had a hard time adjusting to it.

Edit: I played very little of 3rd edition, most of my l5r was 4th edition or larps. But I am ALL for anything that tones down tattoos.

Edited by mortthepirate
Posted at

maybe shoulda posted this in general forum. This one would be for feedback on a specific rule.

Anyways... mort is right, new players wont have previous editions bias so may be more flexible to accept custom dice.

Posted at
16 minutes ago, mortthepirate said:

Your last point I don't necessarily agree with. I have found that new players really easily understood edge of the empire...

Seconded. I've run tons of the FFG Star Wars game, and most issues are "previous edition bias" and/or "mental muscle memory" problems, where people want to impose things from previous games on the new system (Oddly, D&D 5 sees a lot of that, too...). New players don't suffer from this problem.