I’m not making any judgements until I’ve played with the new edition, and by nature I try to look on the bright side.
After listening to the Shadowcaster network podcast, where they talk with Mr. Hardy, I heard a few things that I like.
They set themselves some constraints early in this edition, apparently:
- Rule book no more than 300 pages
- Keep the d6 dice pool mechanism
- Still allow highly varied character creation
I do really like that. Sprawl of the rules, and the words-to-content ratio, of fifth edition were personal peeves of mine. And I think a focus on keeping things shorter and more concise generally forces you to look at the value of pretty much everything you are putting into the rules. That should create a bias toward broad systems and minimize fiddly little extra rules.
Edge (the ‘luck’ system) is gone. Oooookaaaay, . Edge is a super-power in 5th, and its use becomes a meta-game. One that we’ve all gotten used to and mastered and dumped karma into. It sounds like the ‘luck-lord’ build will be gone, which will make converting some characters or character concepts difficult. But any rule version changes creates some issues of this sort.
Edge, a new meta-game currency for situational advantage, is pervasive throughout the new rules. Down side, a new metagame currency. Upside, it seems to roll in everything from light levels to armor to social effects. Apparently all uses of edge are listed on one page, hopefully they are flexible enough to make them useful in a broad range of situations. Well, I did say that I wanted less fiddly little rules and more broad systems. I’ll have to play with it to see how I like it. I have particular concerns about how it works in non-confrontation situations, where the old edge (luck) system helped smooth out a lot of issues. You know, the decker with 3 agility and 2 sneaking was part of the group that had to get past an observer and, the player would either pre-edge the roll or re-roll fails if the roll wasn't great -- yes failure can be interesting, but sometimes you just want to get to the main thrust of the story.
Armor isn’t going to be as effective and getting hit is going to hurt more on average, by the sound of it. This will make Body more valuable, I think (will have to play to make sure), which could make the tougher metatypes a bit more interesting. Will have to see how this plays, but it sounds reasonable. One of those things that will take a bit to get used to, and I may come near to killing characters by accident early on until we get a better feel for threat levels, but overall I don’t see it as a good or bad thing, just a thing.
It sounds like the initiative system is changing quite a bit, probably downgrading the criticality of boosting initiative That may create a big change in character creation/upgrade priorities. Some people love being blazing fast and I think they may hate this – one of their favorite things may no longer be one of the absolutely most impactful options both in games and in terms of getting to do more things as a player. Personally I like the change, as I’d like boosted initiative to be impactful, but as one of several impactful options, not one that you are a fool not to follow.
Actions go from free, simple, complex to minor and major. They haven’t discussed much of what each can do, but I have heard that attacks are major actions, movement takes minor actions, four minor actions can be converted to a major action, and boosted initiative gives extra minor actions. Depending on how flexible and interesting minor actions are, it will help color how I feel about initiative I think.
There is a new rule to support grouping grunts into a single attack roll. That sounds nice!
There are modular spell components, so that when the Magic splat book comes out they will include a spell design section. All spells in the CRB will be built in accordance the spell building rules. That sounds like a win to me.
Combat spells start with a given damage and drain, and you can amp up the damage while casting, by increasing the drain appropriately. Likewise the area of effect can be increased. Elemental effects apparently have much clearer effects, and the modular system could let you add more than one elemental effect (a thunder and ice storm?). These effects cause a status condition, and these status conditions are defined more globally. Healing spells can have the ability to clear various status effects. But no real information about other types of spells, or spirits, or alchemy. So, this is wait and see for me, with still a lot of concern as illusion and manipulation spells tend to be my favorites.
Matrix info has been listed already, pretty much. I’m a bit concerned about the new ‘cyber-jacks’ as they will apparently provide a lot of your matrix defense, with decks being more the ‘offense’ side of things. I’m worried that this will make them de facto necessary for hacking. There had been an ability to make unaugmented hackers in fifth (wasn’t optimal, but was playable), that I rather liked. I’m worried that these new rules are going to kill that off.
Character creation apparently opens up meta-humans more. Still a priority system, but meta-humans can be played at any priority level. Hardy said meta-types may have less differences at character creation, but show their differences more as characters advance. Which may be less good for one shorts and short campaign arcs, but is very interesting for longer campaigns.
On the flip side, opening up gear availability right at character creation should help short arc games more. And the gear section is apparently fifty of the three hundred pages, so no, they haven’t abandoned the gear porn aspect of the game that we know and love.
Overall, some things that I like the sound of but won’t really know until I can play with them, plenty of changes that I really don’t have an opinion on until I touch them, and a few that have me concerned but that I’m willing to wait and see the details on. For sure it all adds to the game changing, but I’m still trying to be optimistic that the changes will be net for the better.
