Well, I ran part of the Caves of Chaos adventure tonight. General sentiment in my group was neutral-to-negative. Everyone loved the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, and people liked theater-of-the-mind play, but those were the only two positives I heard called out. Negatives included rogues not being able to sneak attack with flanking, the presence of Vancian casting, the reversion to saving throws rolled by the defender, the lack of interesting combat options, and a bunch of stuff unrelated to D&DN (some longstanding issues boiled to the surface and we spent a while hashing those out).
My own feeling was that there wasn't enough of a system to get much out of it. There weren't any sparkling new mechanics that really made me sit up and take notice, though I agree that advantage is clever. The main thing I will say for D&DN is that when I wanted to reward creative play and make stuff up on the fly, it got the hell out of my way, and that is no small virtue in an RPG. It was very easy to "say yes" without crashing into the game mechanics.
I do have one major complaint: The skill system. Specifically, there isn't nearly enough difference between the superstar and the klutz. The random element overwhelmed people's modifiers. If I hadn't known what was on their character sheets, I could never have guessed by watching their performance who was good at a skill and who was bad at it.
My own feeling was that there wasn't enough of a system to get much out of it. There weren't any sparkling new mechanics that really made me sit up and take notice, though I agree that advantage is clever. The main thing I will say for D&DN is that when I wanted to reward creative play and make stuff up on the fly, it got the hell out of my way, and that is no small virtue in an RPG. It was very easy to "say yes" without crashing into the game mechanics.
I do have one major complaint: The skill system. Specifically, there isn't nearly enough difference between the superstar and the klutz. The random element overwhelmed people's modifiers. If I hadn't known what was on their character sheets, I could never have guessed by watching their performance who was good at a skill and who was bad at it.
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