NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9715970" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah I was looking at that - I've not got the full book, but looking at the consolidated playbooks it seemed like some really strange choices had been made.For example, there are like 5 (arguably 6) different "spellcasters" with huge conceptual and thematic overlap. There are essentially 3 "detectives" who also have big conceptual and thematic overlap. There are 3 "warrior angels"/"holy warriors", similarly (not even counting the Chosen).Yet there's no Buffy-type at all! Instead their "Chosen" is all about a special magic weapon which is kind of strange, because whilst "Chosen"-themed characters are not uncommon in modern supernatural stuff, they almost never start with a special magic weapon (albeit they often acquire one later in their career - even Buffy does but in like, what her last season?).And basic, common concepts which you might to see multiple different ones of are all jammed into "The Monstrous" and "the Expert" meaning like, potentially you might have as many as three PCs with the same playbook and similar mechanics. I could easily see a group where every PC mapped to The Expert or The Monstrous.I guess what I'm saying is I feel this looks (superficially) like an RPG (again just based on the playbooks) desperate in need of a new, better-thought-through edition. Perhaps not surprising as I believe it was last updated in 2015. Especially as I struggle to see how you'd map many of Buffy, Angel and Supernatural's characters to this! It seems like The Expert, The Monstrous, and the Mundane cover like, 90% of the characters, and then we have this crazy number of other playbooks for a few others (interestingly The Envoy maps to Castiel much better than The Divine, and The Professional is a surprisingly poor match for Riley but is almost a good match for Gunn? Not quite though because there's no option to not have an Agency. The Crooked doesn't map to Gunn at all which is probably a good thing). Feels like maybe they should reconsider that.I'm guessing there are non-official playbooks out there that take a shot at opening up that space more. Like if you're going to have multiple overlapping playbooks it should be for core concepts/tropes to give players different takes, rather than for weird ones.Sorry to go on, just very surprised to see this. I was expecting to see very obvious mappings and a focus on core/typical tropes, but the focus seems instead to be on weird edge cases (like, they've got an entire playbook for "Harry from Resident Alien", and an entire one for a concept I've never seen as a good guy in any "Monster of the week"-type show or book/comic, the Interface, though I can think of at least a couple of villains like that). I think that actually illustrates one potential issue with PtbA games - a proliferation of odd playbooks where really just adding some abilities/options to an existing one was all that was needed. That said credit where credit is due - The Expert and The Monstrous playbooks do seem more well-developed than many of the others, which is kind of what you'd hope. A bit funny that it seems like Sam, Dean, Giles, and Wesley would all map to The Expert though lol. I feel like Dean would pretty upset by this!Also now I've typed the word "map" so many times it has lost all meaning to me lol.</blockquote>

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