I finished reading through the rules and have done a little solo playtesting to get the feel for it. Here’s my thoughts so far-
I like the roll 5 and pick the best one method of character generation. It’s a bit slow but it’s pretty neat and creates some interesting characters.
I love that fighters increase their damage as they level. This is a simple, effective way to make sure that fighters are always badass. Likewise, the cleaving rule makes combat furious and is sure to be liked by my group.
I like the proficiencies. They work pretty well as a rules lite substitute for skills/feats.
The templates are a good idea to speed up character creation. You might want to rethink giving fighters Military Tactics though. It seems pretty useless at first level and I doubt anyone would take it if they had a choice. Riding is probably a better choice for beginners. Also, it would be nice if the templates listed out the stats for the items they contained so you didn’t have to waste time looking stuff up. AC, weapon damage, range, encumbrance, and speed would all be handy to have pregenerated.
I love, love, love the Mortal Wounds table. It’s one of the things I always enjoyed about WFRP and I’d be tempted to port in it’s sanity rules (and maybe fate points) to use along side it. This rule also looks like goes a long way in stemming the rampant death rate in low level D&D.
The AC system. It works nicely but is it worth making the change from normal ascending or descending rules for? I’m not sure I really see the benefit.
Did I mention I loved the Mortal Wounds table? Yeah? Because I’d love to see more random effect and events tables in the game. I was surprised that there weren’t carousing tables like the one Jeff Rients came up with. It’d be pretty awesome if there were class specific tables like that to roll on when you spent gps to buy reserve xp.
I was also kind of surprised that there wasn’t more randomness involved in creating and managing domains. You know, stuff like the random terrain tables from the 1e dmg. Or random events tables for your domain. I’d love to see random tables for creating domains that functioned kind of like the star system tables from traveller.
Speaking of domains, I hope that section will include even more examples (and some example maps would be great) when published. It’s pretty complicated.
The only thing I was meh about was the deal with wizards creating dungeons to attract monsters with. That’s really meta and kind of silly IMO. Why bother doing that (and why are monsters attracted to it anyway?) when all a wizard need do is hire some flunkies (a good job for pc’s) and send them out in the wilderness to gather monster parts for you? No long term investment, no risk, and nobody gets mad at you for attracting monsters.
Why bother doing that (and why are monsters attracted to it anyway?) when all a wizard need do is hire some flunkies (a good job for pc’s) and send them out in the wilderness to gather monster parts for you?
Monsters are good for more than parts - they can be crossbred, charmed, tamed, hired, etc. I don’t know how King-level mage dungeons pan out in play, but my suspicion is that they turn into recruiting stations for monster armies.
Thanks for the feedback!
Random events tables for domain events are more campaign-specific than the domain system itself. That said, each of the gazetteer and supplements we come out with that are devoted to specific campaigns will definitely have those kinds of things, and the idea of random tables for generating domains is a great one too. Do you want it to output hexadecimal code like Traveller’s 23A58DC?
I like the idea of random tables for spending gold on Reserve XP too. It’d be neat to see this have some sort of impact on the fiction (for good or ill) outside of “I go booze it up for three nights straight… here’s 500gp.”
That’s a nifty idea.
“Do you want it to output hexadecimal code like Traveller’s 23A58DC?”
Nothing that severe, but I do like the idea of having things have stats like characters. I did something like that for rolling up random cities a few years ago. You can see that here-
http://1d8.blogspot.com/2011/02/give-your-cities-some-character.html
It would be pretty neat if you could roll up a 24 mile hex of 6 mile hexes just like rolling up a traveller subsector. You can kind of do it with the random wilderness table in the ad&d dmg but it doesn’t really go into the kind of depth that I’d like.
The AC system. It works nicely but is it worth making the change from normal ascending or descending rules for? I’m not sure I really see the benefit.
APM: We wanted the game to use a “throw” system of target number or higher for key actions like attack throws, saving throws, and proficiency throws. Ascending AC starting from 0 worked better for this purpose than traditional descending AC. We specifically avoided a BAB v. AC style.
The templates are a good idea to speed up character creation. You might want to rethink giving fighters Military Tactics though.
APM: Hmmm, fair point. I’ll take a second look.
No the AC system is one of the best method innovations ACKS is making. Frankly, there is nothing normal intuitive about starting Armor Classifications at 10 and counting up by ones, or 9 and counting down to 2.
I only wish ACKS had started AC at 1 instead of 0, and thus been directly and exactly compatible with Dave Arneson’s original Armor Class system he has in the FFC (and also conveniently directly compatible with the AC system of Spellcraft and Swordplay and D@D), but I guess I came too late to the ACKS party with that information.