Well, you said everything that needed saying and it all makes perfect sense to me. I think we only disagree around some nitpicky details that basically come down to taste. Like you, I can see what they were TRYING to do, and it's a crying shame it did it better in the early 90s.
RE: Over the Edge RPG - New Edition Review
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Over the Edge RPG - New Edition Review
For me, the worst thing about it is that I can absolutely see what they were trying to do – and they missed the mark in such predictable ways that it is painful to see. Part of it, I'm sure, is that editorially they knew they had a lot more pages and column inches and felt that they needed to fill it up to be "a respectable book" instead of writing only what's necessary to communicate the process involved. Very much what I believe happened to Ars Magica 2nd Edition versus 3rd Edition. The budget went up, expected sales went up, but instead of focusing more aggressively on the things that were important and paring away, things ballooned to fill all available space to the detriment of the text.
It is a set of problems that the design never had to have, and that is what hurts the most.
Well, if we take the system as written in this text, a guy with a tin cup versus guys with assault rifles is facing what is at least a Level 5 threat, taking into account the difference in available weaponry, being outnumbered, etc. A normal person being two Levels beneath the level of threat is effectively going to be rolling 2d6 and rerolling both of them individually to take the worse. Let's give the character the benefit of the doubt and saying that he is aggressively choosing to attack a group of guys with assault rifles while he has only a tin cup. The chances of actually succeeding, that is rolling us some greater than 7 on two dice when both of them roll twice and take the worst result is not very good. You've got to roll at least a 3 and a 4 twice in a row, so you're looking at a bad time. Not an impossible time, but an extremely unlikely time. That's not really any different from the chances of pulling it off in 2nd Edition, so that's a wash.
If you have Specializations on your Trait, and it is "being a badass" (potentially literally), a Level 3 badass character will be performing as if they were Level 4, so only one of their dice will get rolled down. Still less likely than a more reasonable matchup.
Part of the problem here is the goofy Level system applying to both a description of the character and an assessment of the difficulty of expressed intent. Their examples are terrible and it's no surprise that a casual read through doesn't make this stuff jump out at you.
Another example of a good idea with a bad execution is the character advancement by adding Specializations. That is actually brilliant. As you play your character, you demonstrate competence at something special for you show that you've learned from a previous experience or in some way the actual process of play and things that happened to you make a difference and get carried forward. That's wonderful. Right up until the point that you increase the base Trait – and all of those Specializations go away, wiping out the accumulated history of your character and how they have interacted with that Trait.
Again, I see what they were trying to do. They didn't want a whole bunch of descriptors piling up on the character sheet making it ever more complicated to try and figure out what your Level was for the purposes of rolling the dice. I get it. But the purge of history represented by the Specializations going away is terrible. They would have been better served by making Specializations which are attached to a Trait which gets bumped up worth only half a Level, but able to be increased back to a full Level if the player invests in advancement into it. That way they Specializations hang around for at least one advancement and provide some continuity with the character that they used to be.
They didn't do that. It's a painful missed opportunity.
Way too much of the game feels like a missed opportunity.
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Those don't really have any bearing on the threat level though, that's you compensating (as a good GM should) but not the game as written, which is how you have to review it. Those gun-wielding goons would be level 2 or 3, max. Page 48-49 show something kinda like this in examples, but they're buried and don't work the way you've spelled out.
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See p31:
Text as written, what I described is exactly what it talks about right here in this section. Being outnumbered is an exceptional circumstance, being significantly out-weapon and is a significant circumstance. I may have extended the degree of that significant circumstance by a second full level, but some of the examples later do that as well, so that also counts as text is written.
While you would be technically correct that advantage and disadvantage "don't have any effect on the threat Level," the actual mechanical impact is exactly the same as changing the threat Level insofar as the GM is concerned. There are three moving possibilities that the GM can choose from to represent the impact of the situation.
Change the target number between 7/8.
Force/allow one reroll (a half Level).
Force/allow to rerolls (a full Level).
Any adjustment beyond that is apparently fairly explicitly leaned against in the text; there you are right.
The big crime here is that this stuff is buried in a section that looks exactly like all of the other text talking about casting lots when in any better designed and laid out game, this would be in one of those really bright sidebars with multiple arrows pointing at it saying "this is important." Because it's huge. It's also not called out in the GM section anywhere, even though that would be a fine place to point out "here is your primary mechanical tool for having the narrative world impact the mechanical world of the players." Along with a nice casual list of various things that might bump up difficulty or provide advantage to the players where they could stick in some more weird.
The mechanics aren't complicated and they aren't bad, necessarily – but they aren't better than the ones that they had nor are they more narrative (despite the claim at the beginning of the book), and it all seems so unnecessary.
Really, this section should have simply been about setting a Level for the opposition, as an aggregate or as individuals, and then let the already defined Level interaction mechanics do the heavy lifting. It almost feels as if that was the original intent, given the rest of the layout around the section, but it fell on the floor at some point.
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Actually, and if you could double check me on this it would be excellent – is there a section in this book that even talks about the GM and setting appropriate opposition? There is the bit talking about what Levels represent at the beginning, there's this bit talking about advantages and disadvantages in a very loose way and almost entirely focusing on advantage for the players, but I can't find it anywhere at all where it talks to the GM about how to deal with opposition mechanically outside of the examples.
I don't think I'm blind, but I haven't read it with great thoroughness. Am I missing something?
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I find it really hard to find anything in this book and it lacks a decent index.
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