Wow, I really fell down on this one. Its been nearly 2 months. Ridiculous I say!
To be fair, I havent had much time to work with the Anima project lately, busy with papers for school and whatnot.
However, something else interesting has come along. You may or may not be familiar with Warlord, Reaper Miniatures fantasy skirmish game.
Well, during last years Reapercon, Mike managed to get a few copies of the 2nd edition play test rules. After reading them, we discovered that the rules as they were were pretty bad. Not necessarily in their function, but very much in their layout and presentation. In the few weeks that followed, we embarked on a desperate quest to create a feedback document that we could send in. We even asked Gus (the editor) to delay the publishing of the book, but that just wasn't possible. So we sent in what we had, and hoped for the best.
Well, the book got published, and it turns out that almost all of our changes were implemented! And though I don't want to sound too full of myself, I have to say that the book is massively better for it. Even better, I recently got to play a few games of the new edition, and its actually really fun! I wasn't actually much of a fan of 1st edition, but 2nd is definitely a huge improvement. While some of the improvements to the base rules are due to yours truly, the real thing that makes the game better is the total re-balancing of all the data cards, and I had nothing to do with that. So go Gus and Co.!
Aaaanyway, long story short, Gus recently contacted Mike and asked him if we would be interested in giving the rules another going-over for clarity. He also said that if we did, he would be able to give us something a bit better than "Playtester" in the credits! So super cool.
Now, after my first read-through, The rules themselves are pretty solid (as they should be, since that's the part I went through last time :P) but a few of the special abilities could still use some work. The real challenge here is that I cant actually recommend any changes to how anything actually works. That will make some of the SA's hard to cut down.
Regardless, I haven't given up on Anima! Quick re-cap on what still needs to be done:
- Need to figure out how Critical Hits will work.
- Combat can probably still be pared down and streamlined more.
- Should probly take another look at Characteristic checks.