Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Apr 14, 2017

Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Apr 15, 2017

• Group chargen is suited towards making everyone in the group uncomfortable due to the fact that if you take a Skill, the person next to you has to take that exact same skill as a negative. This doesn't strike me as fun. This strikes me as a mechanic perfectly designed to create legitimate Mario Party-style hostility amongst everyone at the table dedicated at the person next to you. It is incredibly reminiscent of Wraith's chargen but with actual mechanical weight.
  
• Speaking of mechanical weight, pretty much everything that's new (DAIVs, terrorism) don't really have mechanical weight. Terrorists are just a blank slate problem. DAIVs may or may not exist and only two of them actually give a mechanical benefit in the book. Plus the fact that a DAIV is roleplayed as the person next to you yelling in your ear is just an invitation for assholery.
  
• Tying character progression, equipment, money and refreshing innate benefits to your XP pool is not a good idea and has been rightly abandoned even by D&D.
  
• Substantial cutbacks on Secret Societies and Mutant Powers to the extent that they're just kind of bland. Sometimes you have duties for the former. Sometimes you can use the latter.
  
• The ability to change your skill rankings and stat rankings by burning Moxie Points for good and backup clones is not really a good idea.
  
• The different tones of play have been eliminated and the premade missions are basically half in Zap territory for the most part. Pun names run rampant. Puns in general run rampant. This isn't entirely great.
  
• No real rules for Treason.
  
• Your Fate Points (Moxie) should not double as a Sanity meter and also a Sanity meter is not a great idea.
  
• They make a lot about the fact that you've got a buttload of cyberware in your head and then kinda just leave it really open for the GM to figure the gist of that out. The fact that everyone's constantly livestreaming back to the Computer all the time is really underutilized outside of the idea of dead zones.
  
• Alpha Complex just feels barren and definitely requires GMs to just come up with stuff. As a whole there are no longer any Junior Citizens and most citizens are decanted as fully-grown, vat-educated Infrareds spat out into the world to do stuff. Yes it's mentioned that the youngest age you can be decanted is 12 and then you can get an education. Nothing is really made of this.
  
• Changing the old system of roll-under d20 to a d6 system where you need X successes is certainly an...inspired choice.
  
• Really not a fan of the Computer dice idea which is something you must roll at all times and on a 6 the Computer intervenes and automatically helps and costs you a Moxie point.
  
• I don't have much to say about the card system because I just...really did not find it to be particularly approachable. This new system has the cards take preference over everything else and playing them is basically like playing the card game Bullshit. Cards are burned to attempt to defend in melee. Cards are burned to use equipment. There are Equipment, Action, Reaction and Mutant Power cards. Everything else boils down to "pick a stat and a skill and you do that after everything card-related has been dealt with".
  
• It's really weird when a mission is like "okay so this one item is a card in the deck that the characters get and all of the other items aren't".
  
• There's also just a weird juxtaposition between the editions that is best exemplified by the three premade missions that are linked introductions and the last one which is an old mission that boils down to "your current briefing got hijacked to assign you a different mission (paint a corridor) but everyone assumes you're on the original mission (go Outside)".
  
• Actually in retrospect there's jack poo poo about Outside. The Sierra Club is swallowed up by the Romantics and mixed into an original society that's so boring I forget the name (Alpha Complex Historical Society Something Something).
  
• For real, it feels like they stripped out so much to try to make the game approachable. A d6 system, cards for powers, the fact that it comes in a box with separate books. The result is not something I would call entirely approachable. The result is something I would call "Kickstarted and it shows". Is XP perfect? No. But it honestly does flow faster and better and all of the systems are actually attached and functioning, for better or for worse. I sincerely liked XP's combat approach of "everyone picks an action and they literally all happen at once, no initiative in combat" as opposed to the phases of Card Play.
  
• Oh, one last thing: the negative skill ranks. Normally when you roll a pool of dice, 5s and 6s are successes and the others do nothing. When you roll a negative skill, you assemble a positive pool of dice, roll them, count fives and sixes as successes...and then subtract successes depending on how many dice are 1-4. Considering how normally in a dice pool system you want to assemble a large amount of dice at once, why even loving bother rolling a negative skill ever considering that the odds are substantially weighed against you that you'll end up with zero or less successes?
  

Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Apr 16, 2017

DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Apr 16, 2017

• Damage only goes up to Dead. Vaporization no longer exists.
  
• Their is an abstract Weight and Encumbrance system now.
  
• Free Enterprise uses bartering and attempts to create a new currency from old printing presses. Bartering works better.
  
• There are no rules for the IR Market or for acquiring things illegally.
  
• Rules for being sneaky and sabotaging things covertly don't really exist, actually. There's a distinct lack of actual ability to act covertly and gently caress over other players. Like, the world is stacked against you but the game most certainly doesn't cultivate that same sense of "bite back or sneak around to survive" found in the previous editions.
  
• Damage dealt depends on successes rolled.
  
• Items really aren't classified strictly by Clearance anymore. Instead there are levels Apha-5 with each level encompassing a certain range of Clearances; Alpha is all Red-level tech, level 1 is Orange and Yellow stuff, 2 is Green, 3 has Indigo stuff, 4 and 5 have highly illegal things. The system is incredibly arbitrary and the equipment lists don't actually list level, only the item cards do. It is...kind of a nightmare and because the treason rules don't really work, you can kinda just have a minigun and that's okay as long as you don't have 4 or 5 stars.
  
• In retrospect this game just feels like an attempt to tap into a videogame that doesn't really exist, adapt it to tabletop settings and then put the Paranoia name on it.
  

Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Apr 16, 2017