Uh-Oh
Ein Playtester der 4th hat sich bei Dumpschock gemeldet (motorfirebox) hat folgendes geschrieben:
i'm really tired.
i'm a playtester for SR4. some people knew that; now, everybody (or at least everybody who reads this page) does. don't ask me for details about the game, i'm not going to break my NDA.
i am going to say that i hate the rules. i hate the basic design philosophy—not the one the devs say they're using, but the one they're actually using. the rules "fix" a shitload of things that really didn't need fixing, and straight-out ignore an even bigger shitload of things that did need fixing. there are a few gems in there; the Matrix rules, for instance, are really neat. i like the stat split. but most of the "okay" changes—few and far between—are not necessary to make a better game. the changes are neat, but they're not better than what they "fix". they're just different.
and the game has a seriously bad base mechanic, one that makes it much harder to write rules for. with SR3's base mechanic, it's easy to decide how a given situation should be represented in terms of TN changes and changes to the number of dice. with the new mechanic, modifiers kinda blur together. i'm not going to cite specific examples, but suffice to say that you end up with some truly crazy situations.
the biggest problem, though, is that they've really dumbed the game down a lot. Patrick Goodman, if you read Dumpshock at all, disagrees with me. i like and respect Goodman, but he's got some very different ideas about the role of game mechanics in RPGs. i'm really not sure why he maintains that the mechanics are not dumbed down, because they very, very much are. there's very little thinking involved; you add up the modifiers and roll your set number of dice, every time. if something goes wrong, you can use Edge to get out of it; other than that, it's d20 with more dice and a less wacky die mechanic.
it's bad enough that i haven't posted any comments on the most recent version of the playtest rules. i'm too tired. there are improvements in the latest version—improvements that came from comments i made, or which at least match those comments. but they're band-aids on a trainwreck victim of a game.
Mit Tanz vor dem Feuer
Medizinman
