Thanks Graham, it's always good to hear from people who've played. That's a fair overview of the game.
On making the game work, I would say is that the crucible and using the characters therein is a key. Both from a point of view of ensuring conflict works (it means you are up against people who it matters what happens with to you or somebody else, this does affect which traits you'd use) and making things progress naturally as a story (consequences of conflicts cascade around player's crucibles). There are a lot of dependencies in the rules though, and I guess the text doesn't stress them enough.
On the crowbarring of traits issue. It's interesting that this hasn't been a problem for some groups, but has for others (including some I've run post-launch). I do wonder if by their nature, playtest groups are more harsh on crowbarring whereas others are more laid back and don't stomp on pushing things too far. I've put up a few suggestions for handling this on the
Realms Codex , any feedback welcome.
Thanks again for the review.
-Matt