It was either on a thread post about the 4e vibe with structured combat around powers. Paraphrasing and I’ll look for that 4e comparison and post it if I do.
And perfect timing
@darjr wirhnthe link for a video posted earlier today.
It's absolutely got a strong 4E vibe rules-wise, I have no idea why anyone is suggesting otherwise, and MC himself has noted 4E as a major influence, and has many times expressed his admiration for major elements of 4E's design.
Based on the Backer (not Patreon) playtest of August, it's not as unfriendly to Theatre-of-the-Mind as 4E was, and has more detailed and frankly more interesting rules for stuff that isn't combat than 4E had (possibly than 5E has, by the time they're done), and the mechanics are very different, but vibes-wise, it's quite 4E-ish.
Overall the class design is looking really good, the species design is pretty great, but it has three distinct um, issues, two of which I 100% expect to be solved by the end of the playtest period, the third of which I 100% expect to remain unsolved and indeed not even mitigated. To whit:
1) The character building is overcomplicated and clunky for the kind of game this is. How are you making a game barely more complex than 5E feel like a bad Shadowrun character creation? Come on, MC... clean it up. But I expect they will.
2) There are a number of weird little systems which don't seem to serve much purpose or make much sense, and even are arguably anti-immersive/too meta, like Project Points or the generic Renown. Again though I think playtesting will shake this out.
3) The less-tractable one is that it is absolutely NOT a generic fantasy game, despite being kind of represented as such and MC himself suggesting you could use it as such (possibly even in the playtest, I forget). It is a weird-as-hell and very specific setting with a
lot of space fantasy in it.
Someone in I think another thread mentioned MC has absolutely bizarre/awful/random* and somewhat dated taste in media (or like, amazing-but-very-specific if you agree with him), and I think he might, perverse though this might seem, be actually
too influential on the setting design here. It feels like he might need some more critical voices, like the people who told him "DO NOT USE FUNKY DICE!" and made him listen even though every fibre in his being clearly wanted to use funky dice (he even has a Kickstarter thing to make "special" dice for this even though it doesn't need them lol!), to tell him to like, just make it so that certain elements of the setting are less... prominent/burned-in. Like specifically the space-fantasy/planetary romance elements (but not only those). It'd be one thing if what we'd seen felt really consistent and visionary - I'll accept weird taste if it all works, but it doesn't - it feels magpie-ish and just like random clashing stuff being put together. Which is more OD&D than 4E.
* = I say random because like, about 20% of what he likes is perfectly cool stuff like Deep Space 9, but then he'll be saying how good 2010: The Year We Make Contact was (it was bloody
embarrassingly bad, that it was 67% RT is honestly proof critics in the 1980s weren't harsh enough!), or how very cool Star Citizen is (?!??!?!?!?) or talking about bands everyone else forgot about 20+ years ago
for a good reason!
