deanruel87 wrote:
The way health and damage is handled in combat is unusably bad. If you read the system even briefly you will see that no one could survive even a single combat if it was run honestly. Each hit deals about 1/3rd of your total health and you get weaker as you take damage so characters have all the survivability of a wet paper bag even if they're supposed to be superhero level invulnerable. The only defense is to never be hit and while it's possible with enough system abuse to make characters that just can't ever be hit there is no way to make a character that can get hit and still live. Any character that an enemy could target and shoot would be dead within a couple sessions.
This is one of my big objections. Actually playing combat is basically if you get hit once, you become unable to hit anything and will probably die. So everything is either "all PCs just died"or "none of the PCs got hurt" there isn't a lot in between.
Most people end up building people with awesome stealth powers or are impossible to hit. Except new people, they try to build whatever is genre appropriate and die a few times. Especially if they are used to a game where you want a balanced group. "Well we've got a mage, and 3 rogues guess Ill carry a sword" or "Well we've got 4 snipers and a doctor. Ill carry two pistols or something".
Another big one missed is the dice curve. As you get better at stuff, you don't increase linearly. Sometimes the jump is big, sometimes its small. Sometimes when you invest your first rank in stuff you get worse (in more fantastic settings where high stats exist). This plays out in 1 of 3 builds.
1 - The best idea - Hyper specialize in 1 thing. Each member of the party picks 1, maybe 2 things and always wins at it while never attempting other things.
2 - A single member of the party invests up to d4 (the minimum) in a wide variety of skills and is allowed to attempt anything the rest can't.
3 - New players make characters with a balanced array of characters who aren't much better than player 2, but are totally shown up by player 1. Also they die immediatley.
Your party is generally 3 snipers a specialist in whatever interesting thing the setting has (magic/mechs/cars) and a face (who knows a ton of random shit). In western settings its 4 longarms guys and a face. In supers its 3 people with teleport/super speed/ghost powers, 1 with a big pile of random shit, and aquaman. In fantasy its a bunch of rogues/archers and illusionists.
