Okay, so starting over, with the chapters I hit in the preview with changes:
Intro, Credits, Contents, Foreward:
Best Hits Actually useful ToC
Worst Flops Irrelevant Foreward, Massive Length, Sluggish PDF response on mobile device
The most obvious change since the post-gamma playtest packet is the addition of art, layout and color.
The art is merely adequate, but the art direction and use of art assets is actually pretty good. I like that there are recognizable depictions of each archetype, and those depictions are used again for later chapters in action and world-establishing shots. While some uses are expected like the PC Martial Artist leading the Fu Schticks chapter and the PC Sifu in the middle of the Fu Schtick Listing, some are not, like the PC Scrappy Kid tied to a chair in the background of the Supernatural Creature splash piece and the PC redeemed Pirate leaping with sword drawn to illustrate the Chi war. Oh heck, just click:
An Everyday Hero, a Gambler and a Transformed Dragon take on Cardinal Richelieu's men in a Pop-Up Juncture
I futher like that they didn't feel compelled to do this for all the art - there are villain only, environment only, and gear only pieces. Plus there are also pieces with characters who don't match the depictions shown in the archetype section-- The piece with the alternate masked avenger and not-in-this-book techie on page 113 is very evocative.
The layout is readable, but as I mentioned above, this PDF gives me tablet more trouble than a gaming reference really oughta, so that's gripe-worthy. Most of the book is bog-standard two-column, but there are a fair amount of inset boxes, full-page tables, character sheets and such to break things up without getting too confusing. Big headings are huge white text on bright red banners, small headings are large red text on the standard white background and the whole book has kinda odd green border trim with a texture that seems meant to evoke cloth - this does help the red banners and other colors pop, but it is ugly in and of itself, which I wouldn't notice if my pages and bookmarks didn't get stuck so often. Speaking of not noticing, the standard text font appears to be Times New Roman, with some less common font used for headings.
After the cover art and credits, we get a two-page, three-column table of contents, and each TOC entry of the PDF is an internal link to the referenced section -- That is pretty awesome for a gaming reference. We then get John Rogers' foreward which is somewhere between unnecessary, disappointing and outright insulting. He leads off with how to break the collar off a motel TV to install your VCR to watch bootleg tapes in something that's maybe supposed to be waxing nostalgic for the thrill of discovery of 80s Hong Kong Action cinema - but which few if any readers of this book will be able to identify with.
I should also comment that the 1e book I own clocked in at 286 pages, with 26 of the first thirty taken up by in-universe fiction and splash page art. This PDF is 354 pages, with zero full-page illustrations, no fiction and the only real waste of space is the 7 page list of Kickstarter backers ( where tragically, I now share a credit with Sean K Reynolds ) So the new edition is something like 80% longer than the old one. Even with all the additional archetypes and new schticks and addition of Mutant and Driving schticks, a lot of that 80% is bloat.
Chapter 1
Best Hits: Intro Paragraphs; Stat Streamlining
Worst Flops: Still too many specific subchecks; Leaving most factions as explicitly hostile
Chapter 1 is largely unchanged. The "Getting Started with Feng-Shui" intro section is still one of the best intros to the conceits of an RPG I have ever read, the confusing and in some-cases contradictory tables for sample AVs and Difficulties are still there, and still just as unhelpful as Frank pointed out months ago.
Speaking of unhelpful, I noticed that I have been interpreting the Boxcars rule wrong for nearly two decades now. I always assumed that the two 6s canceled each other and you merely compared your total AV plus a swerve of 0 to the Difficulty to see if you succeeded or failed at the check. but no, the 6s instead both Open-End and you reroll both to generate a new Swerve. And if you roll boxcars again, repeat. While entropy prevents this from being truly infinite and ensures that you do get to a resolution at some point, it's still rolling extra dice for the sake of rolling extra dice.
Rearm checks are removed from this chapter and are instead handled differently with rules listed in the Guns chapter. The preview rules were ass-tastic and there are too many sub-checks, so this is an improvement. BUTBUTBUT, characters using melee weapons or cyber-claws might also need to rearm, so tucking those rules in the Guns chapter instead of either here in the overview or in the general combat chapter is a poor editorial decision. Design wise, the rules still list sub-mechanics for Attack, Constitution, Defense, Melodrama, Will, Notice, Strength and Fortune Checks. Now Attack, Defense and Fortune will not usually default to 7s, so those should exist. I cannot for the life of me see why Will and Melodrama need to be two distinct checks, Constitution should just be a Toughness check, and you could plausibly fold it into Strength. Heck, due to the collapsed stats and skill default rules even Notice could be scrapped as a namedchecked Check - it's just a Police/Detective skill check, and with the defaulting rules it still works the same. So this section really should just be Attack, Defense, Strength (maybe Toughness), Fortune, and Melodrama and then the 'Dude that's a lot of checks" sidebar could be deleted.
The factions are unchanged since the draft version, and I still think that's a tremendous missed opportunity there to give players many conflicting sympathetic, yet flawed faction ideologies to choose from.
Chapter 2.
Best Hits: The Art
Worst Flops: Not chunking archetypes into manageable sub-lists to pick from. Lack of customization directives anywhere. Unforgivably Sloppy editing.
This is where I start getting mad. A lot of what is needed to understand the game is flat-out missing from the archetypes section, too many of the numbers are wrong, and pointers point to missing or incorrect entries. Honestly, the editorial quality of this production version is on par with the editorial quality of my series of posts here. The difference being that these posts are written for shiggles by a drunk enthusiast on the internet, whereas the game is written by a team of "professionals" for a six-figure prepayment.
I suspect there was a paragraph Robin forgot to write that would say something like
Customization wrote:
If this is your group's first time playing, you should use the archetypes with their listed schticks. If you are all experienced hands at Feng Shui, you can customize the starting schticks for your archetypes. To do this, simply swap any of your schticks for any other schtick of the same type which you meet the prerequisites for. You may never swap out a character's Core Schticks - those are intrinsic to the archetype.
But there isn't, so it really looks like you can only customize non-combat skills for an archetype until you get advancements. If it's not an oversight, this is bad design. Limited options to streamline chargen and remove option paralysis only works to a point. When a game says "Your one choice at chargen is to pick from this list of thirty-six (with more coming in supplements)", that actually takes players more time to choose than presenting them with two choices from a pair of nested lists of six items each.
You can't even do easy chunking by attack type or juncture, since an actual majority of the classes are Guns / Martial Arts, any juncture but Contemporary listed first and biggest.Yeah, what it means that a juncture symbol is listed first and larger than the others for a given archetype is something else that is missing from this chapter. It's not explained in the reference key, nor anywhere else. So maybe it's a default juncture, maybe it's a purely aesthetic decision by the art department, maybe it's another typo.
But my point here is that so many of the archetypes overlap in juncture and AV types that some could easily have been folded together and then have customization switches as part of the class. Heck, they could have done what they did for advancement and wrote a specific section for "customization options" for each and every class.
Now another quick run through the archetypes, with things I feel comment worthy.
Archer - aside from the incorrect schtick labelling You get Wuixa Archery, which sets there bow damage to one less than the highest firearm damage of any of your allies at the start of the fight. You also get a super-slow mo replay that lets you repeat the same wound points just dealt for 1 fortune and 3 shots. So if you have buddy with Sig Weapon: Shotgun, you get arrows that deal 15 damage, and after you hit a named foe with one, you can bypass the normal attack rules and just spend fortune to deal damage over time equal to what repeated successful attacks with that would do. Handy for boss-killing.
Bandit - I still don't know how this Archetype isn't an 1850s dude who robs stagecoaches and Opium traders with six-guns.
Bounty Hunter - You get Sig Weapon: Shotgun to start, meaning that you start with the highest damage weapon of anyone (See Archer, Scrappy Kid). You also get a bonus against a designated "Quarry" and a schtick to share some of that bonus, so you are like the lynchpin of any boss-killing party.
Cyborg - The 1e Cyborg was horrible for not reflecting movie cyborgs (Robocop, Terminator, Major Kusanagi) and being tightly tied in the the setting specific Arcanowave rules, which not everyone wanted to use in their games (and Cyborgs have more pop-culture traction that Abominations and Monster-Hunters from the future). The 2e Cyborg manages to do an even worse job of reflecting movie cyborgs, and due to revisions is now the only single archetype to use the scroungetech schticks. So it's got the same problems, but worse.
Full Metal Nutball - Ready Resupply is now a core schtick for this guy, and it doesn't actually resupply or rearm anyone, which seems kind of confusing and the current "you fumbled, have a free attack" version should probably have been named something else. This guy also gets Bag Full of Guns II - which has all the problems of the playtest version compounded by an even harsher trigger condition for scaling up. After you make at least 5 attacks against named opponents it tops out at a 15 damage homemade weapon. Signature Weapon: Shotgun gives you a 16 damage weapon at the start of the fight and costs 1 schtick. So at your first advancement you are going to take that and ignore the two schticks sunk into Bag Full of Guns here.
Gambler - Your core schtick lets you spend 1 Fortune to reverse a swerve. You might think that's meh compared to the +1d6 open-ended that normal Fortune expenditure is, since the averages are comparable, but you would be wrong. Firstly, it stacks with normal fortune expenditure, so you can both flip the swerve and also add +1d6 open ended on important rolls. More importantly it can reverse the results of
anybody's swerve. So defensively while it screws up
pregenerated mook attacks Robin likes to use, you can switch things so that the one mook who had a 24 attack result due to open-ending up three times instead open-ended down three times and has a negative 8 way-awful failure. Since this is a swingy RNG where you will face a lot of mooks, this sort of defense is useful. Alternately you can use it to aid allies, doubling the Masked Avenger's chance of getting the bonus mook clearing from or helping the Archer get her damage-over-time going faster and bigger. Finally, since this is a schtick, you are not explicitly disallowed from spending it on closed rolls and can use it to actually pass Death checks.
Gene Freak Like the Cyborg, this archeype gets yet another special-snowflake schtick selection, which is just not smart design. If you are going to have Mutant powers, and 36 archetypes, you should probably have 3-4 different archetypres who get Mutant powers. It would have been easy enough to do the Pure Mutant, the Guns Mutant, the Martial Arts Mutant and the Magic Mutant as slightly different archetypes.
Additionally, adding these special-snowflake rules creates issues with
grappling restraint attacks and various defensive schticks where the assumption is that all hand-to-hand attacks will use a martial arts AV. But a in 2e you can have hand-to-hand attacks with a buzzsaw hand (Scroungetech AV) or with a Super Strength punch (Mutant AV) or with critter claws (Creature Powers), and due consideration wasn't given to including these in a few rules.
Ghost Just like in first ed, Ghosts still get Damage Immunity: Bullets as one of their Creature Powers in 2e. Unlike in 1st edition, Damage Immunity is no longer listed in the Creature Powers section, so it's not really explained and important questions like "Do arrows count? What about grenades" are now left unanswered in ways they weren't in the old edition. On top of that, there's a severely questionable layout decision in the character sheet. Your primary attack is listed as "Sorcery 13", because that's what your Blast runs off of. You have no backup attack listed, but there is instead a note at the bottom of the sheet saying that your value with Creature Powers is 14. I kind of understand the desire not to confuse new players with a 14 AV they can't use at the start....but this sheet should say Primary; Creature Powers 14, Backup: Sorcery: 13, and the default picks should be redesigned so that players actually have schticks that use both as attack AVs.
Karate Cop The first ed version got an interesting non-combat schtick where they could gain the aid of a foe who wasn't this week's primary foe. The 2e version gets a forced-combo set of interlocking combat schticks that has you the player running a paindeck, where you are taking wound points to trigger bonuses and gambling that your next hit will recover wound points. I think the old version better simulated the source material and offered more interesting options than the unique resource management minigame here.
Magic Cop You get a core schtick which lets you ignore juncture costs for sorcery in your home juncture. Except that these only come from the contemporary juncture because screw the weird west idea and they are actually called juncture
penalties. So minor fails of both considering sources and editing here.
Masked Avenger When you drop a mook, 4 more mooks flee. Or 6 flee if your positive die exploded, this has small but notable combo potential with the Gambler.
Private Eye: You are one of the few archetypes in 2e that has a non-combat core schtick. You also get Disarming Shot, which has issues in that it doesn't actually disarm, due to the "simplified" rules for foes. Guns schticks not actually doing what their name implies seems to be a theme in this edition, just to be clear and it's bad, by which I mean it is actually the opposite of good.
Redeemed Pirate: The art department gets props for this one. When I think "pirate"I don't think
Juri from Street Fighter 4 but with a sword. But somebody did, and it works really well.
Scrappy Kid: This was criticised for being perhaps too strong in 1e. So of course 2e gives them 3 more schticks than the old version and Driving skill they didn't use to have. Their Distraction still combo's well with the Old Master's Flying Windmill Kick, and Forcefull Dart combos really well with any ally who has a Signature Shotgun (see Bounty Hunter, advancement)
Sifu The art (and listing the Past juncture largest) makes it quite clear that this is the Wong Fei Hung class. I'm unsure if the inspiration was the Once Upon a Time in China version or the Iron Monkey version.
Spy The 1e version had a
highly genre appropriate schtick where they could spend a Fortune to get an NPC to tell you something they didn't want to. Like so many other non-combat schticks this is gone and it's now replaced by a couple of combat schticks.
Supernatural Creature This one hurts. The 1e supernatural creature was a great design and had easy customization which let you approximate the vast majority of movie monsters. The lack of explicit customization removes that and makes me sad. But there are significant overall nerfs on top of that. Now your only non-default skill is Creature Powers, in first ed, you got a backup Martial Arts attack and got +3 to spead between up to 3 noncombat skills. So now you can't have a supernatural creature who has better-than-default tracking (Detective) or sneaking (Intrusion) or even has Info: Noodles or any sort of flavor detail like that. On top of that the Transformation schtick got battered overly hard with a nerfhammer. So in Feng Shui 2, your supernatural creature will absolutely need to waste the first three shots of any combat monstering out, which really really sucks when your Speed is the lowest value any archetype) and a bunch of your critter schticks lose potency with each passing sequence. In short, they took one of the best designed classes from 1e and nerfed the hell out of it for no rhyme nor reason.
Transformed Crab and
Transformed Dragon Okay, look the game kept Tranimal schticks, but they manage to be less special-snowflakey-for-no-reason than Scrougetech and Mutant. Not only are there two of them in the core book with strong implications of more coming later, but Tranimals attack with Guns and Martial Arts, and their unique schticks interact with pre-existing AVs, not with a new unique AV called something horrible like Beastiness. This is how Cyborgs and Mutants should have been handled.
Two-Fisted Archeologist This is a straight up Indiana Jones rip, which is sad because it can't do Lara Croft, who should be the same class. I'm also not sure if their Dogged schtick works as intended, although that could just be be assuming the general level of incompetence in this section applies here. As written, you Impairment only causes you to get hit more often for the same damage, unlike the normal case where Impairment causes you to get hit more often for more damage.
As arcanowave types from the first edtion,
Abominations and
Monster Hunters don't make the cut into 2nd edition, and I'm am totally onboard with that. What I am a little concerned about is that the
Techie is also gone. While it was kind of weaksauce and underplayed, it was at least enough of a niche that it deserves inclusion in a list of three dozen classes. In 2e if you want a Fixit specialist, you are probably playing a Full Metal Nutball or a Driver now, and well neither of those quite does the MacGuyver/MacGruder / Nick Cage in the Rock archetype like the old Techie did.
Chapter 3
Best Hits: Streamlined Stunting Rules, Explicitly giving players authorship abilities in the "boosts" section.
Worst Flops: The new Death Check rules are worse in all ways than the 1e version.
I covered most of this stuff in my preview post so I'm just going to point on the glaring typo where the Sidebar on Page 101 say "Reload An Submachine Gun" and then move on to rant a bunch about Up Checks, Death Checks and Healing.
To recap, PCs get to make UP Checks at 35+ Wound Points. Each take you take additional damage that increases your wound points to over 35 you make another UP check. This is a difficulty 5 Toughness Check, but your base value is very likely a 7 AV with -2 impairment, making you ~57% (since rolling a 0 swerve passes) in most cases. If opponents are "fighting to kill" (GM Fiat), then a PC takes a mark of death for each UP check made, and another Mark of Death for each Fortune spent on an UP Check.
A Death Check is Toughness difficulty 4, +1 for each Mark of Death, so minimum 5 if you need to make it and you are usually at -2 impairment, so again you are looking at about ~57% to not die on the easiest one, and there is nothing you can do about it, because FUCK YOU that's why. Oh, but that's not not enough fuckery. You also get to increase the difficulty if nobody has yet died this campaign, or if it's late in the campaign (or session for one shots) because REALLY, DOUBLE-GYGAX FUCK YOU for growing attached to a character.
These rules are so shitty, that they are only used to shaft the PCs. Enemy Assymetry ( which I am spelling that way because the 2e increases to it are Ass ) prevents the MC from having to deal with it.
Featured Foes: simply go down in a manner of the downer's choosing at 35 wound points. Bosses are a flat even/odd 50/50 to go down when taken to 51+ Wound Points. Then each attack that delivers a smackdown to a boss at 50+ wound points then generates a new 50/50 check whether that smackdown exceeds the bosses' Toughness or not, so ticking damage exists here, albeit likely unintentionally as this seems a weird wrinkle of complexity. It also somewhat removes player agency to have it be an unmodifiable 50/50 roll instead of based on damage or something.
Shifting from design back to editing, the game has Schticks which trigger when enemies succeed at Up checks (Against all Warlords, Casual Leakage, Why I Oughta....) , yet the by the final rules, enemies never actually make Up checks.
That's the big rant for this section. The number 2 rant is that the healing have been made WORSE since the playtest pack. To wit:
All of them allow the healer to make a check and subtract the result from the recipient’s Wound
Point total. A character can benefit from any number of healings during a fight, but only one healing in the period between one fight and the next.
Thus the FFT style thing where healers should spam entangles, restraints and impairments and avoid ending the fight is still there, because that's what the rules encourage. But it's made even worse with the following addition:
Where not otherwise specified, any in-combat healing is a standard action costing 3 shots. Healing with the Medicine skill costs 5 shots. The next attack against the character performing healing
with the Medicine skill gains +2 to its attack AV. The healer can’t Dodge this attack.
So, yeah, healing out of combat is once-between fights, and healing in-combat gives opponents a meaningful bonus to hurt you, so make extra sure that you're in a fight but not actually in danger before using these schticks.
On the upside, healing now explicitly removes marks of death.
A positive change since playest is the addition of "Partial Recovery Rules" - at the very start of a fight, you can sacrifice a point of toughness to recover half your spent fortune and reduce your wound points to 10. In a slightly crunchier game, this would be key to an engine of infinite health and bonus dice, here it's only marginally exploitable in conjunction with already abusive defensive schticks and serves instead to help characters who do not have Rube Goldbergian Fortune-Recovery Engines stay relevant in longer sessions and/or when they've had a run of bad luck.
As a smaller gripe, the Weapon Damage Chart is even sparser than 1e, which makes for problems matching listed entries to listed damage values. What looks like bad math and leaky-sewage editing to me might only be miscommunication between the authors and the readers. Is the Bandit's "Dagger" a "Knife" or a "Machete"? Is the Bounty Hunter's Telescoping Baton a "Club" or a "Tonfa". A larger list of example and equivalents would help a lot here, and it would be really easy to insert into a full-page chart in a book that's 350 pages of text.