Blades of Ether is a Xenoblade Chronicles that can be found here. I need to start doing this more often going forward.
If I've goofed on anything in here, sorry in advanced.
PDF is 95 pages long, counting covers and such.
Right off the bat, really intrigued by the system of a Bearer and a Blade. This means, ideally, you'll have an even number of PCs, because a Bearer and the Blade are separate characters with their own personalities. I haven't seen any games that put this sort of connection or interdependence in place.
An inline link to the glossary on the first page of the main book: excellent.
Game uses a d6 dicepool system. 5s and 6s are are successes, and you challenge against a target number set by the GM. If you tie the target number, you get a Near Hit. The action fails, but you get something positive, like a situation turning in your favor. Beating the target by only 1 is a Near Miss, you succeed, but at a cost. It's designed to be easy breezy as well, so you won't be making repeated checks for the same thing, like endurance and what not.
Degree of success and failure matter as well, which is also cool. Means that each dice roll is incredibly important so you can't easily undo a bad situation by just Making The Check Again.
Dice pool is built by using an Attribute and adding any necessary pool modifiers. Describe the action and outcome, the GM will determine the Attribute. If you try to phrase your action cleverly, such as trying to use your high Swiftness to detect a lie, the GM can raise the difficulty threshold for such a task, if they allow you to roll it to begin with. Neat stuff. Everything I'm reading so far is pretty slick.
There are 12 Attributes broken up into 4 subgroups. Each of these groups have a score that is equal to the sum of the associated skills. I have not read ahead, so spitballing, this is used for specific defense types or special actions where the whole of your Idea (the text name the subgroups) is important. Sorta like the Defense rolls in Forged in the Dark.
OK, that's cool too. You have special attacks and basic attacks, and like Xenoblade, you can't just use your Special Attacks all willy-nilly, you have to actually do some damage first. Right on.
Oh ho ho! The 4 Ideas above also help determine player's Elemental Affinities! Excellent! That's such a cool way to have your character's attributes and types be aligned. I may have missed this though, but is your Elemental Affinity set at creation, or can your Affinity change if you put more points into another subgroup until it exceeds your initial one?
The book is laying out that bonds between players is super important in this. Bond between A Bearer and their Blade, a bond between two Bearers, friends, lovers, enemies...
Field Skills are a great way to fill downtime, and sort of hammer out some important beats about your character. Are you charming? A good cook? A great tracker? A comically bad athlete? These field skills can really give some scenes some depth.
Talents are how your character can get some mechanical benefits. This can be automatically knowing when someone is lying, having a clue about tomorrow's weather, or being better at confusing people through use of eloquence. I like that a lot of these are narrative hooks, rather than straight mechanical.
Arts are really cool. It's essentially a "Build your own special ability" system using tags. You can add elemental effects, range, AOE, situational modifiers, status effects, and you get 3 of these to customize as you go by spending BP, Bond Points. This sounds real fun and naming your Arts sounds almost as fun as using them in battle.
On top of this you have Special Attacks, which are sort of like Limit Breaks. You earn a point for each round you deal damage, and you can expend 6, 12, or 18 to do a level 1, 2, or 3 Special Attack that uses an entire Idea as a pool and has one of the associated elements with it. For this, I wonder if you can purposefully roll a weaker Idea pool to take advantage of an elemental weakness.
Putting PC death in the players hand in an interesting choice. Going down to 0 HP for a PC typically means that they're just knocked out or out of commission, and likewise, players can try to do that to the NPCs. But if a player thinks it's narratively appropriate for their character to die, they can narrate the scene. This can lead to heroic sacrifices, desperation attacks that fell a foe, and other dramatic scenes.
Titans are like the Bionis from Xenoblade Chronicles, which is still a cool as hell concept. Giant living beasts that serve as floating continents. There are a bunch of sample Titans, and also guidelines for making your own. Very cool.
There's also some ideas for going down to the surface, below the Cloud Sea, which again. Very Cool.
Hell Yes! GM (This game calls them Architects) principles. I love that this is a thing modern indie games are doing. Love when a game tells me "This is the mindset you should carry into the game". My favorite in Blades of Ether is "Render the World in Vivid Color".
Reading more about Near Hits/Near Misses, and a Near Hit seems like a perfect opportunity to go like, "Player A, your attack misses, but it staggers their footing, giving Player B an opening for an attack, take +1 on the next roll Player B", because it's designed to be a failure for the first roll, but a positive bonus added.
I do like that they give clear advice for building battle maps, since this game is a combat-centric game that relies on positionals for arts and things like that.
This is another "GM doesn't roll" system, so damage done to players is static based on the monster's stat sheet.
As an aside, not sure how i feel about the "GM Doesn't Roll" system. On one hand, yeah, it leaves all the agency in the players hands for actions. They aren't getting "screwed" by a good GM dice roll. And yeah, GMs have a lot to manage as is, and GM rolls can slow things down but like... Rolling dice is fun. The GM should get to have some fun. ... I might need to just write something about GM-As-Facilitator and it's pros and cons in my eyes.
Oh that's cool. They included a table to show what thresholds a player is likely to hit based on the number of dice in their pool, as a way to help you balance enemies. Awesome.
First session guidelines: Always a blessing. Setting expectations and guidelines for the GM is always cool to see. And it does always need to be said, especially when trying a new game: Don't over-prepare, and the book makes mention of that.
I like this game! I want to play it and see how it goes! It seems like a really clever system and the partnering of Blades and Bearers is cool. It encourages those players to act together, but also form relationships outside of each other, and how that web of relationships can affect each other. ]
Edit: Elemental Affinities aren't affected by Ideas, they're chosen at start and you can spend BP on them. I just made a logic leap that wasn't there when reading a section about Elemental Affinities.