Have now been to the session and to be honest I had a great time, but then I often do when I am not the one being the GM as its nice to be a cat not a cat herder for a change but that aside the meat of the matter is what do I think of the system.
First things first I find the proof of a system is often in the character generation as it gives you a feel for how all the basic and core stuff inter relates, however as we where playing the starter scenario in the new starter box and this did not feature any character generation rules we did not do this instead playing three of the pregens the box includes The pregens seemed to be an interesting and fair selection allowing for plenty of choice we ended up playing as a fighter a thief and a cleric irritatingly they still call thieves rogues but that's a minor peeve of mine and not a flaw in this particular version.
The first things I noticed are the skill set is a little thin and is even more generic than 4e but there is one so its not back to 1e/2e the core mechanic for most game actions is roll a d20 & add to beat a GM determined target or a pre set value such as the enemies armour class critical successes and fumbles appear but neither are major in effect as far as I could tell there where some nice die roll mechanics such as the concept of advantage and disadvantage where you roll two d20's and must pick the best of the worst respectively.
Hit points are back to pre 4e levels and fighters are rather vanilla as is traditional so none of this fighter being interesting nonsense that 4e introduced and made them at least as fun as the rest of the character classes, especially the spell using ones but in a different way.
Thieves seemed to be equally vanilla beyond possessing the expected thief abilities however I was not the one playing it so I could not really be sure. The thinness of the skill set seemed to be of a particular issue to thieves as most of their traditional skills boiled down to a stat roll with a fixed “proficiency bonus” this is something every one gets in a small subset of class skills and abilities.
None of the concepts in the mechanics seemed all that complex, or in many cases that innovative if I am honest and the most interesting ones seemed to be related to spell casters which as I was playing the fighter I did not get that much of a look at the cleric however seemed to have a good range of spells and the ability to cast quite often form a preselected pool how often he could cast his major spells was limited by his concentration which meant that once he fluffed a roll he lost his levelled spells until he had at least an hours rest he had a fair selection of minor spells which where not so limited and which seemed to be of a higher power level than previously. Changing ones spell selection entirely required a long rest and prayer rituals amounting to the traditional eight hours as far as I can tell.
The game which was part one of the adventures in the starter box flowed well and was reminiscent of a well written D&D4e encounter in that it was largely combat orientated with minimal role playing style interactions though we made an effort to role play our socks off I have to say as its just more fun that way. It ended in a near perfect TPK which only the thief survived and only after cheating death by a whisker and backstabbing to death the wounded boss before running off with the loot intended for all of us.
This is where the one major flaw I found in the game was discovered. He levelled to second level as a result of one session of four combat encounters and a similar number of other challenges and this is not just because he survived we would all have levelled had we also survived, levelling is cool however I don’t feel that we earned it. Levelling is also of the Ping your levelled type but that it was so easy was the major issue especially as the game appears to be planed to have the same level cap as 4e It did address the moaning about the limited role playing systems in 4e, mostly from the lowest sort of bottom feeding power gaming rules lawyer types who couldn’t role play there way out of a wet paper bag with comprehensive instructions, and there would seem to be a wealth of choices in character generation which would give you a good feel for the character you are building however as I said we did not get to experience this first hand just read the text derived form it on the Pregen character sheet.
All in all I would have to say so far it’s a good game rather than a great one and I think not as good as 4e when it came out as a lot of the system has the taint of the essentials fiasco about it, that however might just be another of my peeves.
Would I play again yes particularly if I got to roll up my own character, would I ditch any of my current games for it no I wouldn’t .
