[yorrick]

I had more or less the same reaction to the Wild Talents Essential Edition. I like a lot of it but get confused by many of the power build options. They combine a level of detail with a degree of flexibility that caught me off guard compared to Mutants and Masterminds or SAS. In essence, it's as if any power in Wild Talents is the equivalent of a Dynamic Power in SAS, once you add Attacks, Defense, and Useful qualities.

I think that building more basic characters and running more tests with them will give me a better sense of combat benchmarks. I think you would really need to set a cap on the number of hard dice and wiggle dice you'd want in any single power to have some level of control over the balance in play.

That being said, I'm very pleased with Arc Dream's willingness to rework the text so quickly to improve clarity in response to reader/player feedback, while at the same time holding true to some of their basic design principles, such as the lack of major power restrictions. For some reason that combination seems to display a lot of integrity to me, and I'm looking forward to comparing my revised hardcopy of EE with the .pdf I downloaded.