- Attributes are too restrictive. You get 6 attributes, each of which is rated from 1-5. They all start as 1s, then you split 6 extra points. So, you could have all 2s. If you want above average in anything, it means below averagein something else. Human maximum is a 5, but to get human max inanything requires human minimum in 3 other attributes - half of allendeavors.
- Skills are limited by Attributes. You can't have a higherskill rating than the attribute it's linked to. So, for thoseattributes you have at 1, you can't get more than the lst level ofskill. There's lots of things for which you'll only roll 1 or 2 dice.
- Success is measured in pairs. If you're rolling 1 die (lowest attribute, and noskill) you always fail. I can live with that, but it's not ideal. Ifyou've got the skill, you can succeed, but if your rolling just twodice, your chance of success is 10%. Backing up slightly, the PC with a5 in some stat, has no better than a 10% chance of success in half ofeverything he might be called upon to do. Yuck. And trust me, the 7 or8 dice he'll be rolling in his area of expertise isn't going make upfor that.
- You get 20 levels of skills. 4 dice (2 levels of skill ona human average attribute) grants roughly a 50% success rate. 50% on 10skills out of 30+. Don't expect to succeed much. I rolled 4 and 5 dicerepeatedly in our opening scene, and never succeeded at anything.
- There's a "Commando package" of skills you can get if you're character's been through training. It gives you 1 die in 19 skills, so it nearly doubles the skills any non-commando character has. Yet, since they're just 1 die, you'll probably still fail a lot. The package gives you a broad base of incompetence.
- Most of those Commando skills aren't on the skill list. Since you can make up your own skills to augment the list of 30 or 40 basic skills, at first this seems like it's not a problem. The issues crop up when trying to figure out what Attributes the skills are based on, since that effects your die pool and limits how many dice you put into it. Is Knife-Fighting a Body or Coordination skill? Is Mortar based on Coordination or Brains? How about Demolitions? The book offered no help there.
- The power system is very flexible, and definitely the selling point of the game. However, a single very basic "classic" superhero power can easily run more than 20 of your 25 points. Even then, many tricks are unattainable - the example of how the "Immunity" power functions would require having 64 points invested in the power, and even if you spent 256% of the starting character's power budget, you'd still be vulnerable to rifle shots. For freakin' superheroes?
- Seems like making a character who isn't an extremely narrow one-trick-pony would be impossible. If your one trick isn't offensive, don't expect to ever hit a villain with your mundane stats and skills. If your trick is offensive, you'll probably score lethal headshots with every use. For anything more than a one-shot, that's pretty undesirable.
This system seems stupidly broken. A typical "mundane mortal" rarely ever succeeds at anything. We're not talking about abnormally difficult tasks - the minimal threshold for success is one pair. It's hard to sustain disbelief when grenades are duds 90% of the time.
It's called "Godlike" but your characters will feel anything but.
