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="Byrons_Ghost" data-source="post: 2550874" data-attributes="member: 7396">This is pretty much what I was thinking with my previous posts in this thread. I'm playing around making starting characters on my own, and it's been a pretty long process to wade through all the options. And I haven't even got to the gear section yet.The complexity involved means that a) my players will have to acquire a book (somehow) and ready pretty much 80% of it on their own, or b) I'll have to commit an evening to each one of them, and take them through the chargen process step-by-step, as if I were taking an end user through a server configuration. And I get enough of that at work.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I've seen the toolkit statement, and that's pretty much the feel that I got from the book, too. But my players are by no means newbies. We've all been playing and running D20 since it first came out, and other games for years before it. We've even played GURPS and Hero in the past, and like those games, there's a steep learning curve to this one. It's going to make it more difficult for people to get into.My assumption and hope is that, once everything is up and running, things will run a lot smoother. But I won't know this until I've done a lot of groundwork to make things digestible to my players. Even on the AEG forums, they're talking about taking some of the more complex rules and holding off on them until people have a feel for the system. In short, I still prefer the toolkit approach, but (liked anything else) it is possible to go too far.As to Henry's point #2, the lower-level characters etc, I can see it either way. One of my main complaints about D&D has always been low-level games. I just don't get many thrills from killing orcs or giant snakes. I usually compensate for this by starting my games at higher levels, but that leaves me less room for the game to expand (especially in D&D, which I find becomes increasingly unplayable as it approaches level 20).This same thing is really even more of a turn-off for D20 Modern. Without getting into the whole generic vs. archetypical class debate, D20 Mod has always struck me as pretty bland. Characters still can't do much at lower levels, and they're in the normal world as well, so there's no much cool stuff they can draw from the environment either. That's pretty much like two strikes against the game right there.So, having the ability to play the "world's greatest X" at an early level in Spycraft is definately a feature for me. Mechanically, the characters still have a lot of room to advance, and I see it more as honing one's skills or branching out into areas rather than spending several levels becoming competent. I could even see it working like M&M 2e, with a power level cap and the PCs building their characters around it. After all, the advancing mechanics really don't do much other than expand character options and inflate the numbers involved. Their main purpose is to give the PCs a sense of accomplishment. If this can be done in other ways- not just story ways, but also with things like training levels, organization membership, etc- then I could see low level Spycraft being sufficient for a pretty long time.At any rate, all this is really going to be up to the individual GM. I didn't read that sidebar so much as "your game SHOULD work like this". I read it more like "we've seen this issue with other games, and have decided to try something different, and here's how you can do it". YMMV.</blockquote>

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