Stormlight RPG Preview

[Pagerunner he/him]

Brotherwise just posted a character sheet for the new Stormlight RPG over on TikTok, and there's quite a bit we're able to glean about the system from it. This may be a little bit biased based on my experience, but it looks an awful lot like a combination of D&D 5e (the most popular RPG system) with a lot of Fantasy Flight's Genesys system. (I've played a lot of FF's Star Wars version over the years, and just recently I got elected to DM a 5e group, so those are the two systems I'm most familiar with.)

First off, let's drop down some screencaps of the character sheet. It looks like it's two-sided: one has narrative info and equipment. (The big "AND" in the middle of the page is hiding that the first path is Champion, and the middle box is Goals. I couldn't get a great picture of with everything visible.) The blurry box on the right is "obstacle."

The second page contains mechanical info. (Ignore the TikTok play button white triangles.) The top half is abilities and skills, and the bottom half is an unlabelled box for miscellaneous features.

And that's an entire character sheet, right there! Let's break it down.

Starting with narrative, most of this looks pretty straightforward as roleplaying cues. I see the Goals box has three check marks; in the absence of any box for experience points, I wonder if that's the main leveling mechanism. Every time you accomplish three goals, you gain a level. The Paths are going to be pretty similar to Genesys's talent trees (which are a point buy system, so SARPGs are probably going to have a lot fewer boxes). As an example of talent trees, in my Star Wars RPG, I played a character who started in the Doctor talent tree and then moved to the Force-Sensitive Exile talent tree. That system does a really good job of letting you mix and match to pull together exactly how you want your character to play, but it balances it with a higher XP cost to get access to more talent trees. I'm wondering what restrictions, if any, SARPG will have on taking new paths. Maybe it's a level cap; you can't take a third until 8th level or so?

Equipment looks pretty standard D&D, both with ranges and damage dice. I wonder if the Javelin counts as heavy or light, but if I were running a game, I'd make my players include that info on their equipment lists. I don't see any encumbrance limit, which I think is essential to any RPG. Maybe they just haven't developed it yet (which would make sense, it's a lower priority for sure), but Genesys's encumbrance system looks like a better fit than 5e's. (Although I am very fond of Crafty's Mistborn encumbrance system, which doesn't involve you buying gear at all.)

I'm very curious about what the "expertises" are; there's no common "proficiency bonus," so they can't work like tool proficiencies or such in 5e. I'm guessing they give advantage (which is explicitly included in the features section, very similar to one of the Stoneward First Ideal features).

Next, let's look at abilities and skills. Brotherwise says you have Physical, Mental, and Spiritual abilities, and I understand the appeal to Realmatic theory... but it looks like Social to me, not Spiritual. There are arguments to be made on Realmatic theory on how much Connection plays into this sort of thing, but the applications on the character sheet definitely align with Genesys's pairs of attributes. I've always viewed a pair as "proactive and reactive," and that mostly holds up in this arrangement. I'm a little confused on some of the specific choices made in the skill lists. (I'd swap Initimidation and Survival, I see that there are only two Strength skills and four Speed skills so I'd replace Thievery with Endurance), but on the whole they look pretty similar to the Genesys system, too. You don't have ability scores and modifiers; it's all rolled into one number. And then each "rank" you gain in a skill increases it by 1. So your skill bonus is equal to your ability score plus your ranks. (Instead of, in 5e, your ability modifier plus you proficiency modifier. Don't ask me about Genesys. Their dice don't have numbers.)

To get into some gritty details, I think this is actually a pretty neat mixture of 5e and Genesys. The leveling mechanism is identical to Genesys, with a max of 5 ranks, but the "equivalent proficiency bonus" will be very similar to 5e. As you go from 1st level to 20th level, your proficiency bonus increases from +2 to +6. Here, it's only +1 to +5, but the ability modifier equivalents are all higher since you can't have 0's or negatives. Most 5e characters I stat up using a standard array get something like +3/+3/+1/+1/+0/-1, average +1.2. But in SARPG, the average ability score for the example character is 2.3, so just about 1 higher. You lose 1 on your proficiency bonus, you get it back on your abilities, and that has the wonderful effect of making 5e's DC levels match almost perfectly. Untrained checks will do a little bit better, but I don't think that causes any real problems with understanding appropriate DCs based on your 5e experience.

I can't quite figure out how defenses work. (How they get calculated, I mean; it seems fairly straightfoward that skill tests that target you use your appropriate defense for the DC.) I'm gonna assume you add both your scores together to get your defense, but there's another degree of freedom in there. The example character has:

• Physical Defense: 11 + Str + Spd
• Mental Defense: 9 + Int + Wil
• Social Defense: 10 + Awa + Pre

So why are all the base defenses different? Is the physical defense +1 from nimbleform? Are there modifiers from the paths that haven't been written on the character sheet? (Personally, I like to have auditable character sheets, so an undocumented path-related modifier would really bother me.)

Health, focus, and Investiture are probably all based on your paths. Health is hit points, obviously. Focus and Investiture are both limited resources that get consumed by features, sort of like Genesys's Strain or 5e's spell slots. I think it's interesting that the "current Investiture" field is blank, so I'm guessing that it doesn't recover like focus or health, and that you start at 0 at the beginning of a combat. (I also think it's telling that they didn't call it Stormlight. Already planning for worldhopper paths?)

Down in the features, we're able to glean out how combat works somewhat. There are black triangles, white triangles, and the tap symbol; I assume a black triangle is the equivalent of action in 5e (although the Memories of Stone has two triangles and specifies what happens if it takes longer than a single round, so you might get more than one black triangle per turn) and a white triangle is the equivalent of a bonus action. The tap symbol... is that a full-round action, perhaps? But it's something you spend, which the triangles don't say, so it must be some kind of resource you either have or gain. It's not focus or Investiture, since those are both spelled out in other features.

There's some info about Paths, as well. I see one Champion ability, Decisive Command. I see one racial ability, Forms of Finesse. And I see three Stoneward abilities: First Ideal, Second Ideal, and Memories of Stone. So I'm guessing this character is Champion 3/Stoneward 3, and that two levels of Champion increased skills. Not every level gives you a new feature; I'm guessing some of the Champion stuff gave more defense, hit points, focus, etc. I wonder if you can just flat-out gain ranks in skills (1 of your choice per level, for example), or if you can only earn them from paths?

I haven't looked a ton into the OneD&D playtest material, but I think I see some elements of it. "Skill test" is similar to the new "d20 test" term, and I see attacks "grazing," which I want to say I saw in there somewhere, too. There are some other combat-related terms, like a recovery test or an "injury," (Genesys critical injuries?) which I don't recognize. Are they OneD&D content?

I have some specific questions about Stormlight Enhancement and Forms of Finesse. If they modify an ability, do corresponding values (like defenses) also increase? Or are those just for skill tests? I know, it's just a playtest, but I'm definitely going to need some more more precision.

And that covers about all the detailed analysis. Big-picture, I think there's going to be a pretty stark culture shock from going from 5e to the SARPG in terms of combat. Genesys combat is simply not balanced, full stop. In 5e, every character at a given level is roughly balanced to be an equal participant in combat, so you can choose appropriate monsters for them and make reasonable combats. (That's enforced by the "monoclass" system that the TikTok referred to.) But in a more open character creation system, not all 6th-level characters are created equal. There are going to be paths that are much more useful outside of combat, but they won't be able to keep up when the bullets start flying. My Genesys experience has always wound up with half the party dominating combat, and the other other half making all the checks outside of combat. (Which worked fine for my group dynamic, but might be jarring for 5e groups.) We played three campaigns with the Star Wars Genesys system; the first finale was a difficult, balanced combat, which to this day I still consider a miracle how well it came together. The second campaign ended with PvP, but us poor Dark Siders were all utility characters and got flattened by the bloodthirsty Jedi. And the third campaign... well, we stopped time and did a finale without rolling a single die, that's how little we cared about combat at that point.

But beyond balancing the players' abilities, my GM also had a hard time picking appropriate enemies. His trick wound up being infinite enemies, but our combats always had a narrative goal. We didn't need to kill all the enemies, we needed to accomplish something, so he would load up a million enemies and have them get distracted with other things. The combat-heavy characters would shred, the noncombat characters would kill one enemy maybe, and then we'd figure out how to "win" the combat to move on. The combat itself wasn't terribly satisfying, it was just another step in the overall narrative. That's very different from 5e, which in my experience allows you to design well-balanced combats where each player can contribute, and a good fight is an end unto itself.

EDIT: And Another Thing. My Star Wars group had an electronic character sheet, and I tweaked it a little to make it fit with SARPG. I've rearranged a few things based on my experience using online character sheets. (Only the top-right box should have any changes outside of level-up, so that combines the current health/focus/Investiture with the conditions. All mechanical abilities go in the bottom-left regardless of source, so that gets the senses and expertises. Only include ranks in skills and not final values because if you can't add 2+2 you're going to have a bad time with any RPG.) I also took a few liberties on how the paths will work; the lines show prerequisites, and the darker squares are the improvements that have been gained. I'm guessing for the Radiants, you'll be able to buy straight down for the five Oaths, and then any extra abilities branch off. So I treated the Champion the same way, and gave it a trunk and branches, too. (On closer inspection, I realized that the Combat Coordination is an improvement on the Decisive Command ability, so it makes sense as a branch.) For what the first level of Champion gives him... I'm guessing defenses and skills.

Edited July 29, 2023 by Pagerunner

[bmcclure7]

On 7/29/2023 at 11:16 AM, Pagerunner said:

Brotherwise just posted a character sheet for the new Stormlight RPG over on TikTok, and there's quite a bit we're able to glean about the system from it. This may be a little bit biased based on my experience, but it looks an awful lot like a combination of D&D 5e (the most popular RPG system) with a lot of Fantasy Flight's Genesys system. (I've played a lot of FF's Star Wars version over the years, and just recently I got elected to DM a 5e group, so those are the two systems I'm most familiar with.)

First off, let's drop down some screencaps of the character sheet. It looks like it's two-sided: one has narrative info and equipment. (The big "AND" in the middle of the page is hiding that the first path is Champion, and the middle box is Goals. I couldn't get a great picture of with everything visible.) The blurry box on the right is "obstacle."

The second page contains mechanical info. (Ignore the TikTok play button white triangles.) The top half is abilities and skills, and the bottom half is an unlabelled box for miscellaneous features.

And that's an entire character sheet, right there! Let's break it down.

Starting with narrative, most of this looks pretty straightforward as roleplaying cues. I see the Goals box has three check marks; in the absence of any box for experience points, I wonder if that's the main leveling mechanism. Every time you accomplish three goals, you gain a level. The Paths are going to be pretty similar to Genesys's talent trees (which are a point buy system, so SARPGs are probably going to have a lot fewer boxes). As an example of talent trees, in my Star Wars RPG, I played a character who started in the Doctor talent tree and then moved to the Force-Sensitive Exile talent tree. That system does a really good job of letting you mix and match to pull together exactly how you want your character to play, but it balances it with a higher XP cost to get access to more talent trees. I'm wondering what restrictions, if any, SARPG will have on taking new paths. Maybe it's a level cap; you can't take a third until 8th level or so?

Equipment looks pretty standard D&D, both with ranges and damage dice. I wonder if the Javelin counts as heavy or light, but if I were running a game, I'd make my players include that info on their equipment lists. I don't see any encumbrance limit, which I think is essential to any RPG. Maybe they just haven't developed it yet (which would make sense, it's a lower priority for sure), but Genesys's encumbrance system looks like a better fit than 5e's. (Although I am very fond of Crafty's Mistborn encumbrance system, which doesn't involve you buying gear at all.)

I'm very curious about what the "expertises" are; there's no common "proficiency bonus," so they can't work like tool proficiencies or such in 5e. I'm guessing they give advantage (which is explicitly included in the features section, very similar to one of the Stoneward First Ideal features).

Next, let's look at abilities and skills. Brotherwise says you have Physical, Mental, and Spiritual abilities, and I understand the appeal to Realmatic theory... but it looks like Social to me, not Spiritual. There are arguments to be made on Realmatic theory on how much Connection plays into this sort of thing, but the applications on the character sheet definitely align with Genesys's pairs of attributes. I've always viewed a pair as "proactive and reactive," and that mostly holds up in this arrangement. I'm a little confused on some of the specific choices made in the skill lists. (I'd swap Initimidation and Survival, I see that there are only two Strength skills and four Speed skills so I'd replace Thievery with Endurance), but on the whole they look pretty similar to the Genesys system, too. You don't have ability scores and modifiers; it's all rolled into one number. And then each "rank" you gain in a skill increases it by 1. So your skill bonus is equal to your ability score plus your ranks. (Instead of, in 5e, your ability modifier plus you proficiency modifier. Don't ask me about Genesys. Their dice don't have numbers.)

To get into some gritty details, I think this is actually a pretty neat mixture of 5e and Genesys. The leveling mechanism is identical to Genesys, with a max of 5 ranks, but the "equivalent proficiency bonus" will be very similar to 5e. As you go from 1st level to 20th level, your proficiency bonus increases from +2 to +6. Here, it's only +1 to +5, but the ability modifier equivalents are all higher since you can't have 0's or negatives. Most 5e characters I stat up using a standard array get something like +3/+3/+1/+1/+0/-1, average +1.2. But in SARPG, the average ability score for the example character is 2.3, so just about 1 higher. You lose 1 on your proficiency bonus, you get it back on your abilities, and that has the wonderful effect of making 5e's DC levels match almost perfectly. Untrained checks will do a little bit better, but I don't think that causes any real problems with understanding appropriate DCs based on your 5e experience.

I can't quite figure out how defenses work. (How they get calculated, I mean; it seems fairly straightfoward that skill tests that target you use your appropriate defense for the DC.) I'm gonna assume you add both your scores together to get your defense, but there's another degree of freedom in there. The example character has:

• Physical Defense: 11 + Str + Spd
• Mental Defense: 9 + Int + Wil
• Social Defense: 10 + Awa + Pre

So why are all the base defenses different? Is the physical defense +1 from nimbleform? Are there modifiers from the paths that haven't been written on the character sheet? (Personally, I like to have auditable character sheets, so an undocumented path-related modifier would really bother me.)

Health, focus, and Investiture are probably all based on your paths. Health is hit points, obviously. Focus and Investiture are both limited resources that get consumed by features, sort of like Genesys's Strain or 5e's spell slots. I think it's interesting that the "current Investiture" field is blank, so I'm guessing that it doesn't recover like focus or health, and that you start at 0 at the beginning of a combat. (I also think it's telling that they didn't call it Stormlight. Already planning for worldhopper paths?)

Down in the features, we're able to glean out how combat works somewhat. There are black triangles, white triangles, and the tap symbol; I assume a black triangle is the equivalent of action in 5e (although the Memories of Stone has two triangles and specifies what happens if it takes longer than a single round, so you might get more than one black triangle per turn) and a white triangle is the equivalent of a bonus action. The tap symbol... is that a full-round action, perhaps? But it's something you spend, which the triangles don't say, so it must be some kind of resource you either have or gain. It's not focus or Investiture, since those are both spelled out in other features.

There's some info about Paths, as well. I see one Champion ability, Decisive Command. I see one racial ability, Forms of Finesse. And I see three Stoneward abilities: First Ideal, Second Ideal, and Memories of Stone. So I'm guessing this character is Champion 3/Stoneward 3, and that two levels of Champion increased skills. Not every level gives you a new feature; I'm guessing some of the Champion stuff gave more defense, hit points, focus, etc. I wonder if you can just flat-out gain ranks in skills (1 of your choice per level, for example), or if you can only earn them from paths?

I haven't looked a ton into the OneD&D playtest material, but I think I see some elements of it. "Skill test" is similar to the new "d20 test" term, and I see attacks "grazing," which I want to say I saw in there somewhere, too. There are some other combat-related terms, like a recovery test or an "injury," (Genesys critical injuries?) which I don't recognize. Are they OneD&D content?

I have some specific questions about Stormlight Enhancement and Forms of Finesse. If they modify an ability, do corresponding values (like defenses) also increase? Or are those just for skill tests? I know, it's just a playtest, but I'm definitely going to need some more more precision.

And that covers about all the detailed analysis. Big-picture, I think there's going to be a pretty stark culture shock from going from 5e to the SARPG in terms of combat. Genesys combat is simply not balanced, full stop. In 5e, every character at a given level is roughly balanced to be an equal participant in combat, so you can choose appropriate monsters for them and make reasonable combats. (That's enforced by the "monoclass" system that the TikTok referred to.) But in a more open character creation system, not all 6th-level characters are created equal. There are going to be paths that are much more useful outside of combat, but they won't be able to keep up when the bullets start flying. My Genesys experience has always wound up with half the party dominating combat, and the other other half making all the checks outside of combat. (Which worked fine for my group dynamic, but might be jarring for 5e groups.) We played three campaigns with the Star Wars Genesys system; the first finale was a difficult, balanced combat, which to this day I still consider a miracle how well it came together. The second campaign ended with PvP, but us poor Dark Siders were all utility characters and got flattened by the bloodthirsty Jedi. And the third campaign... well, we stopped time and did a finale without rolling a single die, that's how little we cared about combat at that point.

But beyond balancing the players' abilities, my GM also had a hard time picking appropriate enemies. His trick wound up being infinite enemies, but our combats always had a narrative goal. We didn't need to kill all the enemies, we needed to accomplish something, so he would load up a million enemies and have them get distracted with other things. The combat-heavy characters would shred, the noncombat characters would kill one enemy maybe, and then we'd figure out how to "win" the combat to move on. The combat itself wasn't terribly satisfying, it was just another step in the overall narrative. That's very different from 5e, which in my experience allows you to design well-balanced combats where each player can contribute, and a good fight is an end unto itself.

EDIT: And Another Thing. My Star Wars group had an electronic character sheet, and I tweaked it a little to make it fit with SARPG. I've rearranged a few things based on my experience using online character sheets. (Only the top-right box should have any changes outside of level-up, so that combines the current health/focus/Investiture with the conditions. All mechanical abilities go in the bottom-left regardless of source, so that gets the senses and expertises. Only include ranks in skills and not final values because if you can't add 2+2 you're going to have a bad time with any RPG.) I also took a few liberties on how the paths will work; the lines show prerequisites, and the darker squares are the improvements that have been gained. I'm guessing for the Radiants, you'll be able to buy straight down for the five Oaths, and then any extra abilities branch off. So I treated the Champion the same way, and gave it a trunk and branches, too. (On closer inspection, I realized that the Combat Coordination is an improvement on the Decisive Command ability, so it makes sense as a branch.) For what the first level of Champion gives him... I'm guessing defenses and skills.

Can't wait to homebrew this system,  I'm a big dnd and Lord of the rings fan. While I appreciate what Brandon make his own fantasy races, I do love the classics. 

Already have some ideas on how to homebrew elves dwarfs and hobbits into roshar.  

[Pagerunner he/him]

Another character sheet showed up. https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1687192372847722496/photo/1

A Skybreaker character shows the Second Ideal granting 2 ranks in Gravitation, and an ability that, when using Stormlight Healing, you can spend 1 Investiture to make a recovery test instead of healing an injury. (The recovery test doesn't count against the one you can make per encounter.) Similar to the Stoneward's healing, but not quite.

What is a recovery test? I think this will be something pulled from Genesys. At the end of an encounter in Genesys, you can roll a type of easy skill check to recover strain (which are like mental hit points; stun damage targets strain, a lot of your abilities have a strain cost, etc). So you'll be rolling a d20 at the end of an encounter to recover hit points. (Probably not one-to-one, but it's possible. Depends if you get a lot of hit points as you level up, or if you keep a similar hp total and just gain better defensive abilities.) Stormlight Healing lets you spend Investiture in the middle of combat to heal in a similar fashion.

[Firesong she/her]

Quote

Comatose

Can we finally confirm what type of spren is used to create half-shards? Is it Radiant spren, Shardplate spren, or something different?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO! This theoretically should be confirmed in the RPG. We should be giving you all the tools that you need for these sorts of things, including all of the armor spren, all the different brands of Fused, and things like that. The stuff we need so that you can roleplay...

Comatose

People who are making them?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. This should all get confirmed in that.

 

I do hope we still get it all confirmed in the books still, not a fan of using the RPG as a source of information, as it is basically a non-canon system that is going to have a lot of inaccuracies in how powers and everything work to make it work better as a game and such. You know?

But I doubt he won't also include it all in the books. The last two Fused Brands he is at least going to include. Highly doubt he wouldn't include armour spren either, although that is going to be a lot slower. Half-Shards I am a bit more concerned about. 

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

On 7/29/2023 at 0:16 PM, Pagerunner said:

Brotherwise just posted a character sheet for the new Stormlight RPG over on TikTok, and there's quite a bit we're able to glean about the system from it. This may be a little bit biased based on my experience, but it looks an awful lot like a combination of D&D 5e (the most popular RPG system) with a lot of Fantasy Flight's Genesys system. (I've played a lot of FF's Star Wars version over the years, and just recently I got elected to DM a 5e group, so those are the two systems I'm most familiar with.)

First off, let's drop down some screencaps of the character sheet. It looks like it's two-sided: one has narrative info and equipment. (The big "AND" in the middle of the page is hiding that the first path is Champion, and the middle box is Goals. I couldn't get a great picture of with everything visible.) The blurry box on the right is "obstacle."

The second page contains mechanical info. (Ignore the TikTok play button white triangles.) The top half is abilities and skills, and the bottom half is an unlabelled box for miscellaneous features.

And that's an entire character sheet, right there! Let's break it down.

Starting with narrative, most of this looks pretty straightforward as roleplaying cues. I see the Goals box has three check marks; in the absence of any box for experience points, I wonder if that's the main leveling mechanism. Every time you accomplish three goals, you gain a level. The Paths are going to be pretty similar to Genesys's talent trees (which are a point buy system, so SARPGs are probably going to have a lot fewer boxes). As an example of talent trees, in my Star Wars RPG, I played a character who started in the Doctor talent tree and then moved to the Force-Sensitive Exile talent tree. That system does a really good job of letting you mix and match to pull together exactly how you want your character to play, but it balances it with a higher XP cost to get access to more talent trees. I'm wondering what restrictions, if any, SARPG will have on taking new paths. Maybe it's a level cap; you can't take a third until 8th level or so?

Equipment looks pretty standard D&D, both with ranges and damage dice. I wonder if the Javelin counts as heavy or light, but if I were running a game, I'd make my players include that info on their equipment lists. I don't see any encumbrance limit, which I think is essential to any RPG. Maybe they just haven't developed it yet (which would make sense, it's a lower priority for sure), but Genesys's encumbrance system looks like a better fit than 5e's. (Although I am very fond of Crafty's Mistborn encumbrance system, which doesn't involve you buying gear at all.)

I'm very curious about what the "expertises" are; there's no common "proficiency bonus," so they can't work like tool proficiencies or such in 5e. I'm guessing they give advantage (which is explicitly included in the features section, very similar to one of the Stoneward First Ideal features).

Next, let's look at abilities and skills. Brotherwise says you have Physical, Mental, and Spiritual abilities, and I understand the appeal to Realmatic theory... but it looks like Social to me, not Spiritual. There are arguments to be made on Realmatic theory on how much Connection plays into this sort of thing, but the applications on the character sheet definitely align with Genesys's pairs of attributes. I've always viewed a pair as "proactive and reactive," and that mostly holds up in this arrangement. I'm a little confused on some of the specific choices made in the skill lists. (I'd swap Initimidation and Survival, I see that there are only two Strength skills and four Speed skills so I'd replace Thievery with Endurance), but on the whole they look pretty similar to the Genesys system, too. You don't have ability scores and modifiers; it's all rolled into one number. And then each "rank" you gain in a skill increases it by 1. So your skill bonus is equal to your ability score plus your ranks. (Instead of, in 5e, your ability modifier plus you proficiency modifier. Don't ask me about Genesys. Their dice don't have numbers.)

To get into some gritty details, I think this is actually a pretty neat mixture of 5e and Genesys. The leveling mechanism is identical to Genesys, with a max of 5 ranks, but the "equivalent proficiency bonus" will be very similar to 5e. As you go from 1st level to 20th level, your proficiency bonus increases from +2 to +6. Here, it's only +1 to +5, but the ability modifier equivalents are all higher since you can't have 0's or negatives. Most 5e characters I stat up using a standard array get something like +3/+3/+1/+1/+0/-1, average +1.2. But in SARPG, the average ability score for the example character is 2.3, so just about 1 higher. You lose 1 on your proficiency bonus, you get it back on your abilities, and that has the wonderful effect of making 5e's DC levels match almost perfectly. Untrained checks will do a little bit better, but I don't think that causes any real problems with understanding appropriate DCs based on your 5e experience.

I can't quite figure out how defenses work. (How they get calculated, I mean; it seems fairly straightfoward that skill tests that target you use your appropriate defense for the DC.) I'm gonna assume you add both your scores together to get your defense, but there's another degree of freedom in there. The example character has:

• Physical Defense: 11 + Str + Spd
• Mental Defense: 9 + Int + Wil
• Social Defense: 10 + Awa + Pre

So why are all the base defenses different? Is the physical defense +1 from nimbleform? Are there modifiers from the paths that haven't been written on the character sheet? (Personally, I like to have auditable character sheets, so an undocumented path-related modifier would really bother me.)

Health, focus, and Investiture are probably all based on your paths. Health is hit points, obviously. Focus and Investiture are both limited resources that get consumed by features, sort of like Genesys's Strain or 5e's spell slots. I think it's interesting that the "current Investiture" field is blank, so I'm guessing that it doesn't recover like focus or health, and that you start at 0 at the beginning of a combat. (I also think it's telling that they didn't call it Stormlight. Already planning for worldhopper paths?)

Down in the features, we're able to glean out how combat works somewhat. There are black triangles, white triangles, and the tap symbol; I assume a black triangle is the equivalent of action in 5e (although the Memories of Stone has two triangles and specifies what happens if it takes longer than a single round, so you might get more than one black triangle per turn) and a white triangle is the equivalent of a bonus action. The tap symbol... is that a full-round action, perhaps? But it's something you spend, which the triangles don't say, so it must be some kind of resource you either have or gain. It's not focus or Investiture, since those are both spelled out in other features.

There's some info about Paths, as well. I see one Champion ability, Decisive Command. I see one racial ability, Forms of Finesse. And I see three Stoneward abilities: First Ideal, Second Ideal, and Memories of Stone. So I'm guessing this character is Champion 3/Stoneward 3, and that two levels of Champion increased skills. Not every level gives you a new feature; I'm guessing some of the Champion stuff gave more defense, hit points, focus, etc. I wonder if you can just flat-out gain ranks in skills (1 of your choice per level, for example), or if you can only earn them from paths?

I haven't looked a ton into the OneD&D playtest material, but I think I see some elements of it. "Skill test" is similar to the new "d20 test" term, and I see attacks "grazing," which I want to say I saw in there somewhere, too. There are some other combat-related terms, like a recovery test or an "injury," (Genesys critical injuries?) which I don't recognize. Are they OneD&D content?

I have some specific questions about Stormlight Enhancement and Forms of Finesse. If they modify an ability, do corresponding values (like defenses) also increase? Or are those just for skill tests? I know, it's just a playtest, but I'm definitely going to need some more more precision.

And that covers about all the detailed analysis. Big-picture, I think there's going to be a pretty stark culture shock from going from 5e to the SARPG in terms of combat. Genesys combat is simply not balanced, full stop. In 5e, every character at a given level is roughly balanced to be an equal participant in combat, so you can choose appropriate monsters for them and make reasonable combats. (That's enforced by the "monoclass" system that the TikTok referred to.) But in a more open character creation system, not all 6th-level characters are created equal. There are going to be paths that are much more useful outside of combat, but they won't be able to keep up when the bullets start flying. My Genesys experience has always wound up with half the party dominating combat, and the other other half making all the checks outside of combat. (Which worked fine for my group dynamic, but might be jarring for 5e groups.) We played three campaigns with the Star Wars Genesys system; the first finale was a difficult, balanced combat, which to this day I still consider a miracle how well it came together. The second campaign ended with PvP, but us poor Dark Siders were all utility characters and got flattened by the bloodthirsty Jedi. And the third campaign... well, we stopped time and did a finale without rolling a single die, that's how little we cared about combat at that point.

But beyond balancing the players' abilities, my GM also had a hard time picking appropriate enemies. His trick wound up being infinite enemies, but our combats always had a narrative goal. We didn't need to kill all the enemies, we needed to accomplish something, so he would load up a million enemies and have them get distracted with other things. The combat-heavy characters would shred, the noncombat characters would kill one enemy maybe, and then we'd figure out how to "win" the combat to move on. The combat itself wasn't terribly satisfying, it was just another step in the overall narrative. That's very different from 5e, which in my experience allows you to design well-balanced combats where each player can contribute, and a good fight is an end unto itself.

EDIT: And Another Thing. My Star Wars group had an electronic character sheet, and I tweaked it a little to make it fit with SARPG. I've rearranged a few things based on my experience using online character sheets. (Only the top-right box should have any changes outside of level-up, so that combines the current health/focus/Investiture with the conditions. All mechanical abilities go in the bottom-left regardless of source, so that gets the senses and expertises. Only include ranks in skills and not final values because if you can't add 2+2 you're going to have a bad time with any RPG.) I also took a few liberties on how the paths will work; the lines show prerequisites, and the darker squares are the improvements that have been gained. I'm guessing for the Radiants, you'll be able to buy straight down for the five Oaths, and then any extra abilities branch off. So I treated the Champion the same way, and gave it a trunk and branches, too. (On closer inspection, I realized that the Combat Coordination is an improvement on the Decisive Command ability, so it makes sense as a branch.) For what the first level of Champion gives him... I'm guessing defenses and skills.

One thing I was curious about was the Forms of Finesse portion. It seems to indicate that Listeners will only be able to switch between 2 forms, depending on the type of Listener.

[Pagerunner he/him]

4 hours ago, Faceless Mist-Wraith said:

One thing I was curious about was the Forms of Finesse portion. It seems to indicate that Listeners will only be able to switch between 2 forms, depending on the type of Listener.

I'm guessing you'll get two at character creation, and then there will be a talent tree where you can take more forms (at the expense of, say, progressing along your Ideals).

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

23 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

I'm guessing you'll get two at character creation, and then there will be a talent tree where you can take more forms (at the expense of, say, progressing along your Ideals).

That'll be interesting. I had originally thought you might have access to all of the standard forms (just not be able to benefit from more than one/it taking time to change). I'm curious to see how it feels to play with the change

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

I am excited to see what this system has to offer. I would love to see if it sheds any light on potential mechanics that will cross well for making homebrews for the Mistborn Adventure Game. As a huge fan of the RP I can't get over social forms of combat as well. Would love to see how they handle making rules around what is honestly a magic system that is imbalanced at every step. I struggle to try to cross any game with any form or concept of what is the Knights Radiant. 

In a world where the most powerful beings become as obsolete to their radiant overlords as the stable boy was to them before... always makes me sad for Adolin haha. 

[Frustration]

The website was announcing they would be doing beta testing to people who signed up has that started yet?