Mondays are not so bad
Still floaty over the free new World of Darkness book I got from my really good friends; Aldwin, James, Sam and Seth. The system is very... reminiscent to d20 in the sense that many of the stats and abilities are interconnected. The new Attributes seem very familiar to the approach DC HEROES had in the past. And the approach to Merits reminds me a lot of the Advantages (DC HEROES) and Feats (D20) both games had. Still, I liked the way Willpower works now and I really enjoy the concept they used for handling Vice and Virtue. The new Morality system seems a bit wonky (since the slide to degeneration seems to be standard for all now rather than more focused on an invidividual's beliefs). Combat works very very interestingly well for a one roll system, but I kinda miss the flexibility and freeformness the old system had. Where, for example, are the multiple action rules??!?!

Playtested it last weeked with Sam and Alvin and me playing " Matrix wanna-bes" storming into a hotel lobby at first facing four policemen then 8 Swat officers. We opted to create out characters as Niobe, Persephone and Seraph using standard character creation + 75 experience points (expert). And just to get a grasp of the game's grittiness, I ignored the mook rules and gave all policemen and Swat officers full healthlevels and skills to use.

We took down the 4 policemen within the first three rounds, blasting them down with guns (well actually, only I did the shooting. Persephone was too busy intimidating the other out of sheer looks while Seraph was realising martial arts moves are not that good against a cop with a shotgun), but when the SWAT came in, we only got to take down two before being forced to run away.

The game seems like an odd mix of half-realism half-dramatic license.
I guess it'll grow on to us soon enough. I used to feel bad about the non-changing difficulty 7 rules Trinity had but you don't see me complaining at all now with Exalted.

Again, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE BOOKS!
(now am getting ideas of having an actual wishlist in my blog. Hehehe)