ED4 Preview #3

[Roth]

[etherial]

I've always been kinda "meh" about Karma Ritual as a Talent, but I really liked the fact that I could dump Legend into becoming tougher. This change basically forces characters to go upcircle whether they're ready or not just to raise their Unconsciousness Rating. I planned to solve the "Mandatory Talent Option" problem by letting characters take as many Talent Options as they wanted (all from their Discipline, of course).

[Danger]

[Danger]

[Kasbak]

[Slimcreeper]

[Mataxes]

I welcome constructive feedback. I've been playing the game for nearly 20 years, with dozens of different players, but I recognize that my experience is not the only one, and what I look for in my games is not necessarily the same thing other people look for.

I've got some good people helping me out, and we frequently go back and forth looking at different ideas, trying to make sure that we think about possible repercussions of different changes and how it might affect play.

As long as people understand that at the end of the day, my goal is to make the best game I can. Different people have different opinions of what that means, and as discussion here has shown, there is no possible way I can satisfy everybody.

[Darth Quiris]

Well my voice will be a minority and that's totally cool with me... changing how Durability works is a huge change to me and really changes the feel and vibe of the game as a whole to me. Sure it's a minor change, but now my Durability Rank is, for all intents and purposes, directly tied to my Circle level and that alone and I have no say in how I wish to spend my Legend Points on it and that is seriously lame. Part of the major appeal of Earthdawn has always been the fact that I have my control over that, that I can choose to spend those points in making my character a tougher character if I wish to, and now that has been taken away (as far as Durability goes) and that's not the same.

If I wanted to play a game with levels and hit dice/hit points that automatically go up regardless of everything else we have Pathfinder and D&D and a few other games.

Just because a Talent didn't have some kind of automatic die roll attached to it doesn't mean anything. It still provided me with a benefit that I deemed worthy of me spending my Legend Points on and allowed me to grow the toughness of my character's Legend in a manner that made more sense to me... thematically, story-wise and roleplaying-wise.

That's the core of made Earthdawn so awesome... I got my experience points... Legend Points, and I had free reign on how to spend them to increase my power and my Legend, my Circle in whatever Discipline I chose however I saw fit and while some of that might be still there, the fact that my hit points was not tied to my level but it was tied to the rank of the Talent I spent points in... that is huge.

[Roth]

[Kasbak]