Never rush things out the door

I had originally planned to have the next version of MP done before the end of the year, specifically before Christmas, more specifically today.

It, uh, isn't going to happen today. For a multitude of reasons. One is that I didn't sit down to work on it as much as I could've, but the other is just that testing takes time because sometimes you don't notice a problem until it's been one for a while.

What was originally going to be an update with just two big changes (class tech/feat overhaul and no humanity/sanity) and maybe sneaking a lesser change here and there is now going to have tons of lesser changes here and there plus the big stuff. Some are the turning of a number up or down, others involve deleting things that just don't work and going back to the drawing board.

Here's a non-comprehensive list:

• Buffed what you can do with Wealth Tests. Now you can buy advantages to skill tests, Twists will cost you Wealth instead of backfiring on you and you get to keep weaker purchases as volatile items. It was always the lesser of the three health tracks by design, and still is, but by making it sliiightly more attractive it's less of a designated dump stat to always sacrifice when you suffer a Twist.
• The Status Mastery line of Archetypes got reworked. With the addition of Limit Breaks you can spam Limits with multiple status conditions nearly every turn. It's too much of a one trick pony build, especially in a world where status immunities are expected. The Status Condition Mastery line has been renamed to Status Prowess, it lets you trade the Status for additional Damage with every attack rather than just Limits, even against enemies that are immune to the Status itself. This makes you more resilient against enemies that would've just hard countered you before.
• Moved Group Tests from a sidebar in the GM section to the Types of Tests section and expanded it to a full page's length. Group Tests were always one of my preferred ways to make everyone pool their skillsets together during playtests but they were never spelled out in the book proper. Now they are.
• The various Archetypes that involve the use of the Assess Action got buffed with the effects of the now missing Assess Feat line. This mostly concerns the Elementalist, Mentalist and Changeling. The Chosen also did some free Action Assessing, which now is so useless that it got replaced with a free Tracking.
• The Gravranger and Dragoon have a new Trick called Fast Recovery. it lets them receive Healing Tests once per Day instead of once per Week and adds Fortitude Advantages to the healer's Test. Tanks are expected to lose 1 or 2 Vitality every fight, so they need more than 1 Healing Test per week if they're going to fight multiple days in a row.
• The Dragoon's unique Tricks are in the middle of an overhaul. The problem with Instant Friend, Know Their Price and Rumormonger is that... You can pull the same effect with a regular social Skill Test and you can also do more with them. I'm going to focus more on their leadership skills instead, one of their new Tricks is called Gang Boss and, well, I'll just let it speak for itself I think.

• Added Alternative Features to the alternative rules section. The loss of character feats isn't huge, but it does affect some of the more interesting character builds negatively. Notably, the builds based on Assessing, Tracking, Marking, defense and mobility got hurt the most. Assess-based builds already got compensated (as noted above), but the others still need more. Alternative Features are essentially powered up versions of the most interesting of the old Character Feats and you can take them in place of one of your Archetypes. For example now Orgone Jump, Marine Adaptation and Spider Climber now also give you a +2 Speed boost to make them worth the Archetype slot. They're going to be niche picks, more than they used to be in some cases, but at least they weren't straight up deleted from the game.
• The Survival Skill now works as a social skill against feral monsters. It already worked on regular animals so might as well buff it and go all the way. One of the examples includes offering a swarm of mothmen a bunch of lamps to distract them. I figured some of you may appreciate it.

There's more, but time is short and I'd rather spend today writing for the game itself than listing and explaining everything, so this will have to do for now. Since the next version is going to take a while I'll probably be sitting down to update y'all on how its coming in the next few weeks until the day comes.

Until then, have a good one.

Gimmick Out.