Zarick fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Mar 22, 2010

• The three action system. I definitely like how the scaling cost of some actions and the simplicity of this is very easy to grasp and it makes the game flow a lot smoother than "wait, do I have a move action or a minor action or a bonus action left?" You just have x actions left. This also interacts really well with the quickened/slowed/stunned conditions in a way that feels natural and most of the time, my players don't get really bummed out like getting dazed in 4e since the most typical value is stunned/slowed 1 and two actions is still enough to cast a spell or move and attack. I wish they had done more things with scaling action costs (Magic Missile is a neat example of this, as is Ki Blast), but the potential is there for more and that's still a pro for me.
  
• The critical success/failure +10/-10 system. Again, it's mimicing something that's been in previous editions but in a way that's super easy to grasp and works consistently across things. It also gives you a way to make players feel really powerful (when they're fighting lower level enemies, they critically succeed more) and monsters feel dangerous (when fighting higher level enemies, the enemy critically succeeds more). This lets you get pretty granular with the effects in a way that just seems like it works really well.
  
• Giving basically every class some kind of "evasion". Nothing makes my players feel better than seeing the save their class is good at come up, rolling a regular success and proclaiming that the wail of the banshee didn't affect them at all. It also lets them make some classes tougher than others in ways other than just boosting hit points. (For example, the fighter gets at least a limited version of this for all three saves, monks' previous extreme save proficiency is represented by them getting to pick one legendary and one master.)
  
• The fact that the Medicine skill is a viable method of healing, and you could totally play a whole campaign with no divine spellcaster. My party's healer is a Wizard with a decent Wisdom score, and aside from scary long-term magical effects as I mentioned in my post above, he does an excellent job of keeping the party healthy.
  
• The proficiency system. I was suspicious of it at first, but since small bonuses have decent effects due to the +10/-10 thing, the proficiencies for attacks/defenses makes some classes feel pretty different. The fighter hits more than even the other martials because of his starting expert proficiency, and the high-level champion or monk gets hit less than anyone else can. Skill proficiency levels offer a good way to gate feats and other things that is easier to remember than "level x" or "skill rank x".
  
• Everyone gets Perception at varying levels based on class. This way you don't always have to make the "decision" to pick the obviously most important skill, you just get it.
  
• The Foundry integration people mentioned above is really great and saved me a ton of prep time -- I basically just imported the PDF, set up monster tokens, and then added them to maps. Sometimes I had to do little corrections but for an entire book of Age of Ashes I typically had to do 2-4 hours of prep time, which is nothing compared to what it would take to do it all myself (especially the maps, that's always a pain in the rear end).
  
• This is pretty minor but I like that all of the combinations of armor potency + resilient and weapon potency + striking add up to nice, even, easy to remember numbers for prices.
  

• Skill feats are one of the biggest ones for my group. You get a decent amount of them, and while some of them are very good (Athletics, Intimidation, Medicine), there are many skills that don't have any interesting skill feats worth writing home about (most of the magic skills are the biggest culprits). Also, some gate things that feel annoying to be behind skill feats or feel like "feat tax" just there to justify having something to use a skill feat on (like Intimidating Glare or Group Impression). Skill feats are probably overall the thing my players liked the least, even though some specific skill feats (Scare to Death, Cat Fall) they love. They definitely needed less of these with more impact.
  
• The Divine spell list I've complained about previously here, so I won't repost it all here. But the short version is that it is very focused and way less versatile than the others, and many levels don't have very many "fun" spells. Two of my players tried playing a Divine spellcaster and didn't like it, and I also looked at it and thought it didn't seem great.
  
• A lot of the martial classes have pretty dull feats in terms of not having effects that aren't "attack, but better" or "attack, but more times". They have plenty of mechanically useful feats, but it still feels like the (non-4e) D&D fighter problem is intact. The wizard gets tons of agency and neat, weird things he can do, and the fighter just swings a sword really hard. At least in some cases here you have some decent mechanical effects, but I'm still disappointed by it.
  
• I found it a bit weird that the Rogue is the only base class that gets any extra skills and they get a ton of them. (Investigator also gets these, but I'm going to focus on Rogue because the Investigator is pretty much entirely devoted to skills and so it makes more sense there; the Rogue is more effective in combat.) Other classes get varying amounts of starting trained skills, but every non-Rogue gets the same number of skill increases. It makes it hard for some classes you'd expect to be "skilled" (I'm mostly thinking of Ranger here but there could be other examples) to keep up. With the base number of skill increases you can get a max of three skills to Legendary, which if you go with the classic Ranger you pretty much have to have only Nature/Survival/one other skill. I think Rangers are probably either on par with Rogue combat-wise, or very slightly ahead, so about half as many extra skill boosts as the Rogue seems like it'd be appropriate. The Swashbuckler also doesn't get any extra skill boosts even though their skills are tied heavily into their combat gameplay (though they do get extra skill feats).
  
• There are a few classes that just feel like they're not as effective as others to me. I mentioned the Witch above, but the Alchemist is also another example of this. The alchemist is around as limited as spellcasters are in terms of how much they can use their main class feature, but their effects are weaker. (Later on, when they are higher level they can afford to be a bit more freeform with their reagents and so have a bit more flexibility, but only a bit, and it still leaves their effects much weaker.) They also have some weirdness in that they can't ever really attack with their main stat (since they're either using Dex to throw bombs or Str to hit people with mutagens). I think they did a reasonable job balancing most of the classes, but there are a few not great standouts. Cleric also I feel like fits in this because if you stray away much from their "niche" it doesn't feel like it works very well.
  
• Ancestry feats are a pretty mixed bag. Some of them have great thematics and cool mechanical effects (elf, aasimar/tiefling, dwarf) while the rest are a bit wimpier.
  

• (general, all books) I feel like they do a pretty good job with the story as long as you like generic high-fantasy stuff which my party does. The "scale" of the conflict in the book feels like it scales really nicely from clearing skeletons out of a fort in Book 1 to convincing a gold dragon to let you help prevent the end of the world in Book 6.
  
• (general, all books) There were a decent amount of breakouts from the normal "explore a dungeon" experience, even though there is also a lot of that, and I'll call out some favorites after this. Not all of them worked, but some of them did.
  
• (book 2) My players enjoyed the hex crawl and gaining influence with the Ekujae, as well as finding and deactivating the dragon pillars around the jungle.
  
• (book 5) My players really enjoyed this chapter, with the various events to influence the guilds and the heist here in particular was greatly enjoyed by my rogue player.
  
• (book 6) We haven't played this one out yet, but I know they're going to like it because it gets suitably extreme for the end of the world and feels like a pretty good conclusion.
  

• (general, all books) Fire immunity seems way too over-represented in this. I know it's called Age of Ashes, but there are very few ways around total immunity and so if you choose anything based on fire (I'd hate to be a red dragon barbarian, for instance) you're probably going to have a bad time. Very many of the "boss" enemies in this are immune or resistant to fire; the Book 4 and Book 6 "final bosses" are immune to it. This kind of exacerbates the Cleric problems I pointed out since a lot of their offensive spells use fire (or negative, another common immunity).
  
• (general, all books) Similar to the above, the players fight way too many golems. The Golem Antimagic is a neat gimmick a few times, but offhand I can remember at least three encounters with stone golems, a clay golem, at least two encounters with alchemical golems, one with iron golems, and one adamantine golem (who can only be killed by very specific things -- hope your players have vorpal adamantine weapons or have a 9th-level dispel magic available!). They're not horrifically bad but they do get a bit dull after a while.
  
• (general, all books) Sometimes the adventure gives great guidance on what to do with encounters that are close together and how they interact (like saying "if x hears combat, they'll do this"), but sometimes they put encounters really close together without any DM guidance on what happens if your players initiate loud combat nearby.
  
• (book 1) My players didn't like the opening "fight fire" thing at all, I just let them redo it as fighting a few mephits instead. They also weren't a huge fan of the castle rebuilding minigame.
  
• (book 4) The players were okay with influencing the various dwarf guilds here, but in my opinion this was done similarly (and better) in Book 5, so it's a minor con because it was a bit repetitive.