Andor
First Post
I had a read through the book at a B&M store but sadly lack purchasing funds as much as I would like to throw dollars at it.
All of the classes looked interesting, although the Solarian seemed like the most iffy perhaps? They seem to be a sort of Star Monk with a dash of Jedi. They get to manifest stellar power as either a weapon or suit of armour. The weapon looked solid, the armour looked like, how can i put this charitably? Underutilized design space.
The mechanic will never run out of interesting options, and the soldier is an extremely flexible class with lots of interesting choices as well although you will make one big choice of combat style at 1st level that will shape the rest of your play style. Envoy and operative both seemed interesting, and the casters as well.
In addition to race and class each character gets a theme. These are character defining, making you very good at something. In effect your theme is what you do, and your class is how you do it. (There is an undecided option but it is very weak mechanically compared to the others and they even call it out for being weak in the book.)
In addition there is an archetype system that lets anyone swap out some class features for abilities from the archetype. However since there are only 2 in the book I'm going to label this too as underutilized design space. Although it's probably going to see a lot of expansion in the future as one of the things you can use it for is to represent membership in and training from an organization.
As GamerPrinter said a lot of your characters power is in their gear and that gear is not level gated (although every item does have a level suggestion,) and are priced about like magic items with a cheap gun costing a few hundred credits and a top end gun costing maybe a half-mill. Campaigns that don't adhere to the level guidelines will probably go off the rails rapidly.
There is some definite 5e feel to the damage/hp inflation although it's also paired with to hit bonus and AC inflation, so I don't know how that will work in practice.
All in all I'd love to play a game and see it in action.
All of the classes looked interesting, although the Solarian seemed like the most iffy perhaps? They seem to be a sort of Star Monk with a dash of Jedi. They get to manifest stellar power as either a weapon or suit of armour. The weapon looked solid, the armour looked like, how can i put this charitably? Underutilized design space.
The mechanic will never run out of interesting options, and the soldier is an extremely flexible class with lots of interesting choices as well although you will make one big choice of combat style at 1st level that will shape the rest of your play style. Envoy and operative both seemed interesting, and the casters as well.
In addition to race and class each character gets a theme. These are character defining, making you very good at something. In effect your theme is what you do, and your class is how you do it. (There is an undecided option but it is very weak mechanically compared to the others and they even call it out for being weak in the book.)
In addition there is an archetype system that lets anyone swap out some class features for abilities from the archetype. However since there are only 2 in the book I'm going to label this too as underutilized design space. Although it's probably going to see a lot of expansion in the future as one of the things you can use it for is to represent membership in and training from an organization.
As GamerPrinter said a lot of your characters power is in their gear and that gear is not level gated (although every item does have a level suggestion,) and are priced about like magic items with a cheap gun costing a few hundred credits and a top end gun costing maybe a half-mill. Campaigns that don't adhere to the level guidelines will probably go off the rails rapidly.
There is some definite 5e feel to the damage/hp inflation although it's also paired with to hit bonus and AC inflation, so I don't know how that will work in practice.
All in all I'd love to play a game and see it in action.