Some remarks on the full rules
Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2014 5:57 am
First of all, a big congratulations to Clay and Niko on the finished pdf, it reads and looks absolutely amazing. I played a first quick session with my brothers (set in a modified avatar-universe with airbending sky pirates and fire nation dragon cultists), and we had a lot of fun. However, I have a few remarks about some of the rules that we found less than intuitive:
- The Attack ability increases DX instead of attack roll. I struggled quite a bit with this one, until I realized that attack roll and DX can be exchanged freely by taking accurate+ineffective or effective+inaccurate. So I houseruled that Attack gives a bonus to attack rolls and allows them to "power attack" to exchange attack dice for DX. To avoid duplication, I then made Combat Specialist give free perks equal to level x5 in endurance cost, this also encourages the players to think about their combat style. I think this works rather nicely to remove the confusion.
- Since the PC's had a rather low TV (average of 10), I decided to start the first fight with some weak extras, expecting the PC's to deal with them quickly. However, when calculating the TV of these extras, I came out 0 (after subtracting the -8)! So the TV did not help me at all in predicting the difficulty. In the end, I used 4 of these extras and I'd describe the fight as moderate to challenging (as I said, the TV of the PC's was on the low side). Maybe it would be better to divide the TV by 2 for extras instead of subtracting a fixed number?
- I think some of the weaknesses really should be flaws or perks instead because they modify other abilities. In particular, I'm talking about endurance use, focus, limited uses, suppressed power, and trigger. I suggest the following:
- Replace endurance use by a new perk: endurance powered (throw 1 extra die for each +5 endurance spent).
- Remove focus, limited uses, and trigger, because they are superseded by the weapon, ammunition, and requirement flaws.
- Replace suppressed power by a new flaw: suppressed power (throw 1 fewer die for -5 endurance cost)