FASA Games, Inc.

Will it be free for all or up for purchase? If so, what is the estimated prize?

We haven't settled on a price yet, but my hope is the e-version will be free or very inexpensive (less than $5). I don't have final say on that, but this is one product where I am going to push the big boss for low-to-no cost because I think the information is too useful to go with the benchmark "e-version is 50% of print" we've been working on.

(We're still looking at the production costs of the physical version and figuring out print-run vs price, so I don't know the final answer there yet.)

Awesome, can't wait!

Do you already have a date for the GM Screen?

I just sent off some (hopefully final) notes to layout tweaking some things up, and gave approvals for the screen layout itself. It will be out at the same time (or very shortly after) the GM Guide, which is at the printer now, and the screen will be queued up for production as soon as we get the files over to them.

My campaign has been going for over half a year now, so I feel that I am finally ready to weight in on this topic.
I am mostly comparing ED4 to ED1 and ED2.

I like ED4, except for one very major feature: it kept discipline talents, and made them such that you need to advance all of them in order to advance to a new circle.

The system has always been very controlling. IE: the system says that any discipline can do this, and can't do that. The talent options were a very good idea, but how it treated discipline talents was a bad idea. It is now more controlling and limiting than ever.

Under the older systems, each new circle presented two new talents. You had to bring at least one of them up to the rank of your next circle, but better yet, if you brought both of the up to the rank of your next circle, you could choose to stop advancing some other talent.

Now you have a hard and fast list of talents that you absolutely must always advance, with no option other than to ALSO advance talent options. There is no option to stop advancing the talents that the developers have chosen to designated as discipline talents. And they have designated one for every single circle.

The problem is that this puts the developers vision for how a certain discipline should develop above anybody else's. For just about any discipline I could easily find one or two talents that I could take exception to: from the inclusion of Conversation on the Illusionist list (really - that is core to being an illusionist?) to the lack of Animal Bond from the Beastmasters list (really - the ability to bond with animals is NOT core to being a beastmaster?). Once again, I am sure that I could find several items on most lists where a reasonable person could disagree.

It is not that I think most of the choices are wrong or inappropriate, I am sure that many (if given a choice) would choose those options anyway. I just don't see any reason why the player should be forced to take certain talents that they might not think are truly core to their character. If climbing were not a discipline talent for scouts, there would be no need to create a whole separate discipline for windlings called "wind-scout" that is probably identical, except that it replaces climbing as a discipline talent with some other talent the wind-scout is forced to know- whether they want to or not.

I think that a better choice would be to move about half (this could vary for different disciplines) of the so called discipline talents to the talent option pool. Reinstate the table for how many talents you needed to have at the correct rank in order to circle up, and allow extra talent options for those circles where 5 discipline talents were not included at 1st circle, or none were included at any subsequent circle. IE: if your discipline does not offer a discipline talent at 3rd circle, then you can pick up to 2 talent options.

Other than this one issue, I am very favorably impressed.