Post originally by Bjorn at 2005-04-25 16:05:00
Converted from Phorums BB System

I'm in a game currently but only at episode three and started off into our second career with one advance.

I got some loves and some dislikes, no hates. The fact that the races and classes are greatly evened out on the power curve makes rolling a character so much more fun again. When you played 1st Ed long enough you realised everyone was a 3-way mage,
BountyHunter-Assassin, or Slayer of the week. Now it's fun to actually roll up Rat-catcher, Thug, Musician. I got tradesman and was deflated, till I realised I could be a friggin' gun smith and when to engineer and making sweet love to my blunderbus. The game play is just so more intune for taking advantage of career variety, and the fine-tuning everything to D10's just makes the game so smooth and clean its amazing.

Now the few things that still have me off a bit:
1. Everything does D10...I mean everything... so the Axe wielding troll slayer, blunderbussin' engineer, fire-mage with 2 Magic, and Elven Rogue are doing about the same damage regardless, so you don't feel like anyone particularly shines out.
2. When the first Tzeenetch Roll came up we all got giddy and loved it! Big Kudos for removing the resource game and putting the danger back in. But my 2 Magic Flame Mage friend is already feeling boxed in by small spell selection and the pull to Fire to have more than one Fire spell.
3. Bestiary.

To be honest, the first two go away if you really get into the setting and ignore the mechanics and rely on your skills to make you stand out. I think they did an amazing job with this game for a clean-up and it just feels good to play, but I just feel that they left a little too much out for some of the detail. Little to no bestiary, 8-spell schools with some petty/lesser classics thrown in make it too obvious of the add-on rush to come.

And one other small thing that I noticed was the content has changed tone a little bit. It seems to be far more Empire-centric than Chaos-centric in its detail. I only had a few of the 1st ed add-ons, but stuff I knew about Chaos is at best glossed over here, and I found empire stuff that I never saw before. For me, playing 1st Ed was fun because you had priests and assassins actually fighting side by side without too much trouble because all you had to do was toss Chaos in the mix and everyone hated Chaos. Now it feels like the goblinoids are just a fraction under the threat level of chaos. Perhaps its for a revamped Realms of Chaos which will have to drastically alter the book to make up for lost mini-rules filler.