I've been running a campaign for five players since a few weeks after the alpha rules came out. We've had to miss a few weeks, but we've done... 8 or 9 sessions so far?
I'm happy to get into any particular aspect, but here's my general takeaways. We run this online, using Foundry (I also had to build a lot of this Foundry system myself, since it didn't exist, so I became very familiar with the alpha rules in doing that. An official Foundry system is also in the works).
THINGS I LIKE:
- character generation is relatively quick, but the lifepath system still offers some good opportunities to flesh out backstory on the fly. You can go in with very little idea of what sort of character you want to make and just by listening to the dice you can end up with a pretty convincing virtual person.
- the systems are by and large consistent and elegant. Once you get over the initial speedbump of the skill grading system and how the dice math works and all that, and learn how one or two of the travel activities work, you can pretty easily apply it to everything without slowing the game down. Furthermore, everything degrades gracefully using these concepts. Meaning, if there's some specific rule in the book, and you forget what it is, you're still likely to get a pretty decent result just from using the basic mechanics.
- combat feels "right." I'm not an infantry veteran, but I have a fair amount of training and experience in such matters, as well as general tactical know-how and a decent amount of hands-on experience with much of the equipment in the game. In this game, suppression works, flanking works, the difference between night and day feels good, and there aren't a lot of mall ninjas making one-shot kills all of the time. There are a plenty of meaningful tactical decisions to be made, and by and large it feels pretty complete. It is true that most characters (potentially even NPCs) can take several rounds before going down, in a way that's not necessarily "realistic" (easy to argue about around and around) -- but this has been true of past editions too. It is a game, after all, and it's optimized around ease of use more than table after table of results. It is nonetheless a pretty dangerous, potentially deadly system. A series of bad rolls can easily kill any character in the game at any time, as I have seen several times now. This has the desired effect. Any encounter can turn deadly very quickly. Weapons like .50 cals and 14.5mm are positively SCARY, let alone tank guns and autocannons!
- the game is not exceedingly concerned with gear. The level of detail given for differentiating one rifle from another, for instance, is just about right. The streamlined encumbrance system works well enough and is effective at getting to the point. The meaningful distinction between what you have in your combat load, ready to access, and what is stashed away in your backpack, works well enough.
- there are interesting and meaningful decisions to be made in and out of combat when it comes to pushing rolls, getting help from other group members, etc.
- the character-specific moral codes, big dreams, and buddy system work pretty well at driving narrative and/or creating conflict. They definitely work at encouraging players who may not be the best at roleplay with some easy hooks that are right there to play with.
- the rules as a whole are well-organized and indexed, the book is well laid out, and the design and art are both very good. The character sheets are clean and clear (although, again, we're not actually using these).
- the new solo section is great (although I think mistitled/misplaced). It's full of generators and tools that are extremely useful in any sort of game, not just solo play. Great tools for GMs to have that I have previously relied on other sources for. Since the beta, I can mostly just use what's in the book.
- the new homebase section is... a good start or basis for exploration. I think there's enough here to inspire some cool ideas and get you going, and even provide enough adventure hooks for a few sessions, but it still needs a bit of work or expanding. Whether that will happen officially in this release, no idea.
THINGS I DON'T LIKE SO MUCH:
- I still really, really think the game needed a few more skills. There are a lot of careers in the lifepath system that just don't have much going for them. Around 16 skills, instead of 12, would be sufficient to add the depth that I think is missing to many of the careers and some further character differentiation. As it is, there's a bit more skill overlap than I would like. Specialties are a nice touch, but they don't solve the problem.
- MGs aren't really as potent as they ought to be, and still feel like they're missing something to make them truly effective versus other guns.
- there are a bunch of edge-case rules for a lot of heavy weapons of different types. We haven't run into many of them, so they're a bit harder for me to keep track of it. I'm sure if you were using them more often they'd fall into memory pretty quick.
- combat can still be pretty slow. We run three hour sessions, and if there's going to be more than a very small combat encounter, I can count on it taking an hour or two of the time available. I still think this is faster than many games including older versions of T2K, but as I've gotten older it's just not what I'm primarily looking for in an RPG... I have tabletop wargames for that. But, it does get faster pretty quick with experience. The first fight took a looong time as I had to explain to everyone and we all had to learn on the fly. The second one was twice as fast. Some of this is software-related but some of it is not.
- the encounters included in the book are I guess about as complete as in most games, but I just don't love them for the most part. The playing-card system is not terribly fast in practice. Very often the encounters do not apply to whatever setting the characters are moving through, which is the game's way of saying "no encounter this shift."
- the cross-country travel rules don't feel quite right to me. Or rather, the speed of movement is too high, especially with vehicles. Even more specifically, the game permits you to move cross-country at a very high rate without putting yourself in extreme risk when it comes to encounters (you'll just face MORE encounters potentially, which isn't really the same thing). I don't think other versions have really accounted for this, either (it's frankly always been a problem that if your group wants to "get out of Poland and head west!" that you can do it potentially VERY quickly), but it's something that bothers me personally. The game uses 10km hexes for movement and I think if 5km hexes were used instead many of these problems (and others) would be resolved, but, so it goes.
- some of the vehicle stats are a little wonky, especially where cargo space and so on are concerned. Vehicles as a whole are a little more abstracted. I could maybe go for a bit more detail here, and the damage tables could use some work specifically. The game does list different rounds for, for instance, AP vs HEAT for vehicle guns, but it doesn't have any system whatsoever for penetration over range with AP rounds, or composite armors, etc so the distinction is kind of meaningless. I hope a supplement will address this, but again it doesn't really concern me much -- this is a roleplaying game and not a tank simulator. Tanks are basically a dragon that you can drive around, with just as much potential for unbalancing the situation in every direction.
- there's not a whole lot of info provided on what it's like to just exist in Poland. It's a few pages that just barely touches on history, geography, politics, and current situation. However, this is still more than can be said for at least 1st edition (and IIRC v2 as well).
- the included battle maps are unfortunately not really sufficient. There just aren't enough of them, and most of them are on much too small of a scale for anything but isolated urban encounters. I've used a few of them but mostly have had to make my own for situations at more reasonable engagement ranges. I am still hoping that they will provide a "mapmaker's toolkit" with all of the art assets available.
- the "scenario sites" are a good idea, but the ones included are all on the range from "a little goofy" to "utterly bonkers." I guess this makes sense as they are supposed to stand out immediately to the players and draw them in, and this is a world with extreme mental trauma after all... but... they're mostly just not my cup of tea.
STUFF THAT HAS DEFINITELY BEEN IMPROVED WITH THE BETA:
- travel activities. These have all been cleaned up and are much more consistent now. Some of the results have been changed to provide more reasonable values (ie, hunting). You're still not going to find a GDW level of detail for brewing up ethanol fuel or dealing with disease or a few other things. Those rules all exist, but they're simplified by comparison. Personally, I have zero issue with this; my table's interest is in keeping a story moving with plausible, ballpark results rather than spending 10x as much time making sure my burn rates are correct. Of course it wouldn't be hard to simply use 1st or 2nd edition values here for most stuff like this if you prefer.
- combat, in general. A number of oddities have been cleaned up and rules have been tweaked. Notably, ammo dice is an area that got some work that has implications throughout the combat system. Several suggestions that I personally made and have been using as house rules have been more or less officially adopted, which is nice.
- the background. I'm not going to say much about this because holy hell do I have zero interest in igniting that dumpster fire of a conversation again. But the revised background information is inarguably improved from the alpha edition and more than sufficient to get a good game going. As it is, I used a heavily modified version of the alpha version to kick off our campaign, and a lot of v1 details to fill in missing gaps as far as troop dispositions and so forth, and now find that the official current version has ended up in the ballpark to what I came up with anyway!
- the organization and layout of the rulebook has only gotten better. Still a few issues here and there but I am confident most of those will be resolved before it goes to print.
Probably plenty more I'm forgetting but this has definitely gotten long enough. Overall analysis: it's a bit lighter than previous editions, for sure. To me, that is not at all a negative. I don't really have the time or patience anymore for clunky, inelegant games. I'd say this version is without a doubt a more playable game than previous ones, emphasis more on game than on reference book.
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