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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7816351" data-attributes="member: 16586">[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]The design technology is pretty similar, but the play experience is vastly different. The narrative of combat is almost the opposite of Fourth Edition. Stylistically it reminds me more of Howard's Conan or the anime "Berserk!". In film school they covered cinematic realism where you really focus in on mundane details in a hyper stylized way. The game focuses in on things like drawing your weapon, shifting hands, raising your shield all with specific costs in the action economy.Combat is fast and furious. A monster of your level with similar themes will have pretty similar numbers. So a humanoid warrior will have numbers that are pretty close to a fighter and an enemy spell caster will look a lot like a wizard. One of the design goals was the ability to use NPCs built like PCs and have the encounter building guidelines work. Both monsters and player characters do fairly high damage compared to their hit points. Critical hits do double damage. In play this means combat feels like you are trying to murder each other as quickly and efficiently as possible. These themes are reinforced by things like a fighter feat that grants bonus damage for attacking someone who is restrained or otherwise compromised or another one where you attack and grab someone at the same time. Owlbears can disembowel characters. Both monsters and player characters can drop quick. It's rare to see a fight where a player character does not go down. In the last session we played my Barbarian dropped 3 times in 4 fights, including twice in the final encounter against this really nasty flesh weaver.The game uses a death save mechanic, but it is a bit harsher than other iterations. It's a flat check (just a d20 roll) with a DC equal to 10 + Dying value. You start at Dying 1 if a regular hit brought you down. You start at Dying 2 if a critical hit brought you down. Critical Success on the check reduces this value by 2. Success reduces it by 1. Failure raises it by 1. Critical Failure raises it by 2. At Dying 4 you die. Healing will bring you back in the fight, but every time you go from Dying to ready to fight you increase your Wounded value. When you go down you add your Wounded Value to your Dying value. You can use a Hero Point to clear these. Going down multiple times in the same fight is scary.This is not a heroic rally game. It's a scrap for every advantage to kill the monsters now game.Outside of combat the game is basically a mix of B/X and Apocalypse World. There are a set of defined activities with different results based degree of success that usually take about 10 minutes and have explicit results. It's pretty much like B/X exploration turns. This can be played a bit fast and loose if need be. Many things like Searching, Avoid Notice, and Recall Knowledge use secret checks made behind the GM screen to preserve a fog of war although the text mentions you can choose to roll these in the open. It suggests talking to the players about it.There's a pretty big focus on exploration, time management, combat recovery, and other operational details like encumbrance. It is definitely designed with dungeon crawling in mind. However, like Apocalypse World it uses concentric design.Monster and class design are largely based on themes. There are no roles for classes or monsters. Individual classes can be built to fit a variety of roles or combinations there of. There are basically three types of resource scheduling : daily spell slots, focus spells, and at will abilities. Focus spells are a combination daily/encounter resource. You can gain a pool of up to 3 focus points, but can generally only regain one after an encounter. They are also explicitly supernatural. Spell casters get spell slots, at will cantrips, and focus spells. Champions and some monks gain focus spells. All other martial classes are basically at will.Both combat and non-combat have been balanced through careful curation rather than resource scheduling. There is a defined niche for each skill and defined abilities for the martial classes. In their area of focus they are generally untouchable. Basically they made at will awesome. Spell casters tend to different things rather than do the things martial characters do better. There has also been curation of the spell lists so they are specialized and spells are a lot less automatic. There is more uncertainty all around.So far everything feels really grounded in the fiction. The characters all have unique abilities that fit the themes of their classes. My barbarian feels angry to play. The ranger feels like a hunter. The champion feels like a divinely inspired warrior.</blockquote>

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