We're planning a short playtest of N.E.W. in September, as a break from our D&D campaign. I was going to round up all the comments after September, but one player has made a character so far and given some feedback. I did an audit to check up on his build. Some of this might be of interest to include in the new version next week:
To summarise, the player's comments were:
He had trouble working out what the starting psychic powers were for his character, as the instructions were spread all over the place (e.g. the fact that you get Psi-Blast for PSI 1+ isn't mentioned until the 'Mastering Powers' bit of the Psychic power section, while, the fact that you get one Psychic power per new psychic career is at the start of the Psychic Careers section.)
He then noted it was better to take multiple psychic careers to get a better spread of powers. I told him he'd get more power picks if he chose the Venetian race rather than humans, but he said "I wouldn’t want to take the psychic race as then everyone would know I’m a psychic - I imagine many people hate Venetians."
We were also a bit confused which career exploit you got when you took a career, or took a second career twice. Do take the first one, or pick from the list? It also seems strange as you can’t get to level V, as you only get four careers after the starter.
Some more comments:
"It does seem rather frustrating as you don’t get a lot of choice during character creation, but once you start you can buy whatever you want. I think it would be better if you could choose between a wider range of options with a career."
"The number of careers could also be reduced, as there are a lot of varioations on the same thing."
"The main problem I see is that there’s very little sci-fi, all the careers are very mundane. There isn’t even a basic astronaut or space-worker career."
As a matter of fact, I was having a look and was thinking it would be hard to do a 'dawn of the space age' game, where you would be the first NASA expedition leaving the solar system. A lot of the built in Naval careers assume a sort of Star Trek-ish background.
Can there be scope to run '2001' (i.e. Dave Bowman, Franke Poole) or Gravity style games with N.E.W?
He was interested in a more straightforward, optional point-buy system for building a character, especially given that this is offered by the experience system (Mongoose Traveller has an optional point-buy system outside of its career package system.) How much XP to build a starting character, for example?
Anyway, I hope to have more feedback in September when the other players make up characters and we start our short playtest game.
I hope this is of interest.
To summarise, the player's comments were:
He had trouble working out what the starting psychic powers were for his character, as the instructions were spread all over the place (e.g. the fact that you get Psi-Blast for PSI 1+ isn't mentioned until the 'Mastering Powers' bit of the Psychic power section, while, the fact that you get one Psychic power per new psychic career is at the start of the Psychic Careers section.)
He then noted it was better to take multiple psychic careers to get a better spread of powers. I told him he'd get more power picks if he chose the Venetian race rather than humans, but he said "I wouldn’t want to take the psychic race as then everyone would know I’m a psychic - I imagine many people hate Venetians."
We were also a bit confused which career exploit you got when you took a career, or took a second career twice. Do take the first one, or pick from the list? It also seems strange as you can’t get to level V, as you only get four careers after the starter.
Some more comments:
"It does seem rather frustrating as you don’t get a lot of choice during character creation, but once you start you can buy whatever you want. I think it would be better if you could choose between a wider range of options with a career."
"The number of careers could also be reduced, as there are a lot of varioations on the same thing."
"The main problem I see is that there’s very little sci-fi, all the careers are very mundane. There isn’t even a basic astronaut or space-worker career."
As a matter of fact, I was having a look and was thinking it would be hard to do a 'dawn of the space age' game, where you would be the first NASA expedition leaving the solar system. A lot of the built in Naval careers assume a sort of Star Trek-ish background.
Can there be scope to run '2001' (i.e. Dave Bowman, Franke Poole) or Gravity style games with N.E.W?
He was interested in a more straightforward, optional point-buy system for building a character, especially given that this is offered by the experience system (Mongoose Traveller has an optional point-buy system outside of its career package system.) How much XP to build a starting character, for example?
Anyway, I hope to have more feedback in September when the other players make up characters and we start our short playtest game.
I hope this is of interest.
