Ok I'm gonna be blunt I went in excited for 2nd Edition but well I just do not from my go to faction just being gone and treated as villains among other things I am at a loss for how to handle it.
I love some changes like removing Scrounging, and narrowing PSI stuff. But I hate how Asyncs work, how Moxie works, I would have prefered seekers/kinetic/beam be the 3 types of gun with it being you have a penalty to using the other types instead of this universal system and more.
Just what I'm saying is I'm lost on what to do and take from 2nd Edition it feels less like a game and more like a mouth piece and I am not sure where or what to take from that.
And really what I wanna here is the good from others on it what you've found that has really helped you enjoy it. What things you liked and disliked personally from what was losed to waht was gained over 2nd edition
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Welcome, we shall watch your madness please inform us when you are fully insane
- As mentioned, skill consolidation - before, it was too easy to have these trap characters where you think you'd be competent, but you're missing some skill that applies in certain situations, so you can't do what you built the character to do.
- Morph points - I'm not exactly a fan of pools like this, but they work really well to resolve which part is the morph and which part is the ego. As a side effect of this, the player is much more the ego, and the morph is more like equipment. This was part of the original vision, but is better realized now
- Removal of morph aptitudes - This makes resleeving much less of an accounting nightmare, where all your skills need to be updated. It also gets rid of a stupid issue in EP1 where you would want to tank your ego aptitudes so you could buy the skill to 80, then sleeve in something with a high morph aptitude to get it higher. It didn't make any sense that the best hacker was an idiot without his morph.
- Reduction of gear porn - In EP1 there's so many items. If you know the system, this can be pretty fun, picking out all the good items across all the books and combining them for +100 to whatever roll. That wasn't good for game balance, and wasn't good for new players, who didn't have in-depth knowledge of the system. This reduction of modifiers applies outside of gear too, which makes the game less about fishing for modifiers and more about the story.
- Fewer actions - In EP1, multiple actions was a must-take option. Now, while you can still use pools to take extra actions, you don't get them all at once, and you don't get to keep doing that all day.
- Better opposed tests and superior results - These dice mechanics are a nice addition.
- Cleaner remote operations and hacking rules - The new remote operations and hacking rules are much better. Previously, the jamming/remote control rules were almost as bad as Shadowrun. Now, they actually make sense and are consistent, while preserving the choice between autonomous mode and jamming. Mesh mechanics are simpler as well, which means you don't need a flowchart to figure out how things work.
- Eliminating the networking skills - Replacing these with the simpler reputation system means you don't need to sink tons of points in skills just to use the other set of points you spent in reputation.
- Gear points - I found tracking the individual credits to be a hassle in EP1. I play enough spreadsheet games.
Edit: From reading your other post about "the four different types of Moxie", I'm assume you mean that what was previously one pool is now four pools. As I mentioned, I'm not a huge fan of these pools. Nevertheless, I think it ends up working out pretty well. It's the lesser of two evils, where the other option is to put aptitudes on morphs, which just doesn't work well.