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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9437167" data-attributes="member: 18">From the list, I backed Coyote & Crow and MCDM, but MCDM, despite saying they'd have stuff for us in about a month over a month ago, still haven't shown anything to actual backers, so I can't talk about that.Re: Coyote & Crow, it's sort of better and worse than expected. The setting is extremely cool, and well done, and whilst it is utopian, it's no more utopian than, say, Star Trek, and indeed, I'd go as far as to suggest it actually has quite a similar setup to Star Trek in some ways. One thing I think some people struggle with is that the main culture detailed is sort of anarchist-adjacent, but without being libertarian, and I think a lot of players (of all cultures around the world) don't have a good mental model for how operate inside such a culture. The Federation from Star Trek is more straightforward, like a sort of "What if there were routes to do what you wanted, whatever it was, but you had to apply and train and work" and so on, whereas this is looser and more open and more family/connection-oriented.There are some silly criticisms made like "Omg non-native people can't play it", when even my dumb white ass could parse the paragraphs about that, which amount to "If you're non-native, please pick one of the fictional cultures/tribes", and that's easy because like, they're the majority of the what the setting is about - other tribes are basically elided to allow native players from those to do what they think is right!I would say that it works so hard to portray the utopia that whilst it is extremely obvious that there is major, warlike friction (and actual wars etc. in the recent past) between the big cultures, it doesn't really explore how that would translate into actual adventures in a serious way, and the supernatural elements don't entirely jive with the rest of the setting (which makes sense given their seemingly-external origin, but still), and seem less inherently interesting than the conflicts between nations etc.The biggest problem is the rules, which are kind of bland d12-based dice pool system. Yeah it works, but it doesn't have any flavour. Because they haven't really defined the conflicts of the game - i.e. it's not primarily a game about subterfuge, which it could very easily be with all the spies, smugglers, private investigators and so on who are around, and all the "cold wars" or competitions between nations and so on, it's not primarily a game about monster hunting, despite there being monsters/demons to hunt, it's not primarily a game about doing any specific thing, and because of that, it's not a tight and focused game, and the rules don't follow the message/ideas of the game. I mean, for example, they make an awful lot out of the cultural rituals and so on, and the way people behave (which is cool - it helps to avoid assumptions that things work the same way as our world), but there's not really any rules support for that, it's just generic stuff (it's hardly the first RPG to treat points in cooking or music as valuable as other skills, and doesn't really do more than others to justify that). The special/magical abilities are largely well-worn low-end superpowers with a slightly psionic vibe, that you've seen in a million games before, and don't really further the setting.I kind of feel like what they should have done, in my infinite wisdom (or complete lack thereof), is worked out the setting, and then made a more specific and focus RPG within that setting. Focused down on specific elements, then supported that all with the rules. Given out some powers with a bit more bite and specificity.Because the rules are so "meh" and I no longer have time in my life for games with "meh" rules (as a DM, anyway), I don't think I'd run it with these rules, though I could see using the setting.</blockquote>

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