Love the new rules, playbooks and crews, and I really appreciate all the new text being red. Thanks John!
A couple thoughts:
Is the intent of the Breaker ability Dangerous (as well as the Cult Chosen and Hawker Silver Tongues) that you can get 3 dots in an attribute even before you have mastery unlocked? Also, did you mean to change Everyone Steals on the Thieves crew sheet to have the same text?
I don’t love the Conviction ability on the Cult crew sheet. I wish it was something like ‘heal up to 4 of your stress’ instead of ‘heal half your stress’. In the best case you have 8 stress and heal 4, which still leaves me pretty stressed out. It’s pretty easy, even early on, to have 2 dice to roll (3 if you get help from a friend), and in the case when I have a lot of stress I’m going to reach for a big roll where the average roll is 4.5 and the mode is 6. In the case where I have less stress (ie 4), I’m unlikely to want to spend an action just to lose 2 stress. If, however, I have something like 3-6 stress, and I know an action would clear up to 4, I might do that instead of rolling. Another solution might be to make the ability clear stress AND give the bonus die. My feeling is that downtime actions are so powerful and so limited that I don’t know that I’d ever want to use Conviction as currently written.
Mastery is actually really confusing to me now. Do you still NEED Mastery to reach 3 dots? I thought it was changed in an earlier version that you could get to 3 without it, and just needed Mastery to reach 4? But I can’t even find THAT info in the current version – it says that Mastery allows you to “Advance your PC Action ratings up to 4” but I can’t find where it says that you’re not allowed to pass 2 (or 3?) otherwise.
1. Yes, that’s the intent. I should change Thieves to match.
2. You don’t need mastery for three dots. You need mastery for 4 dots. There’s a cap of 2 dots only during character creation.
3. I like that change to conviction (half stress and the bonus die). Thanks!
John Harper My players are going to be very happy they can have 3 dots now, and perhaps annoyed with me that I’ve lied to them all this time.
Thanks for the reply John.
John Harper You probably should add a clarification to the Mastery section where it explicitly calls out that without it, the cap is 3 dots.
Mike Pureka I dunno, that seems pretty redundant to me. If Mastery says you can now have 4 dots, then absent any other info I assume you can have up to 3 before hand.
Maybe, but since there is a “max starting action rating” it’s probably best to avoid the confusion. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching people ask questions about these rules for all these months, it’s that even if it’s there, people will miss it.
Agreed with Mike Pureka . There’s no such things as redundant information in game design.