Quote:
Originally Posted by Lev Lafayette
There are indications that women have, on average, greater endurance than men
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Actually, that is not entirely true. Women do seem to have a higher pain threshold in some specific circumstances, but they certainly do not have a higher endurance than men.
This is the problem with trying to be realistic. I liked this game, as should be apparent if you read my review, but inevitably, you'll make some mistakes. I like my game systems to be as realistic as possible, but not every game designer can have enough knowledge about psychology, physiology, biology, physics, etc. So it's pretty normal a game will screw up sometimes.
Is it really any worse, though, to raise or elevate a woman's characteristics where they maybe shouldn't than not do it? Here's the thing, people: women and men ARE different!!!!! Why shouldn't games reflect that fact? Because you want to be politically correct? That's just one of the reasons why so many Europeans laugh at Americans - I'm Belgian, and I love the States. I visit every year, but sometimes the focus on having to be politically correct in some areas just is plein weird and unrealistic.
The only problem here is that the stat increases/decreases don't all reflect reality... But NOT having gender adjustments is even less realistic!!!!!!
The reviewer, who seems to have had a lot of fun dissing the game, makes a similar mistake as the one he blames the author of the book for. So maybe he shouldn't have been so hard for the writer in the first place.
As for skill descriptions: come on! Do we REALLY need those? We DO know what Swimming will do for our characters, right? And we probably have a pretty good idea of what Dancing will do. I like expansive skill descriptions when they cover a lot of different uses and include a lot of adjustments, like
The Ultimate Skill (Hero Games) does. But if the skill lists just include a few sentences for every skill to tell you what it means, that seems like a waste of space to me. Additionally, it would have upped the page count, and the reviewer was already complaining about the game costing too much!!!
Let's just wait until the second book is released to judge this game.
I'm not saying this because I'm biased (I did the Dutch and French translations for the website). I haven't worked on the game and only met Mark at GenCon SoCal... But then again, since I work for several magazines, I meet most publishers and authors. That doesn't stop me from being objective.
Yes, there probably should be more setting information and flavor text. I just think we might get that in the second book.
As for the game resemblind
AD&D: no way! Why are so many RPG's compared to one of the worst game systems ever to hit mainsteam gamers? I like
D&D because of a lot of the settings, but this game system doesn't bear any resemblence to
D&D. Some aspects bear a passing resemblence to
RoleMaster and similar systems, but many others do not. I own more than a hundred RPG's, and if you know enough rule systems, every rule system will resemble some aspects of another one.
So what?