[BNW] First impressions

[jsanta1@prodigy.net]

Hello all,

I just wanted to comment on my first impressions of the game.  I've had the two books and the power shield for just over a week now and have read through most of the main book and skimmed through parts of the Ravaged World book.  I'm running my first session for my gaming group tomorrow, using the adventure that came with the shield.  

As I read through the background information and history, I really started to fall in love with the setting.  It was everything I expected to see from Pinnacle.  I love the way they take actual history to a certain point and then warp it from there.  They did it with Deadlands and now it seems they have succeeded in doing it with Brave New World.  The Kennedy angle is great and there seem to be elements pulled from all different types of comic books.  Rather than just a bland four-color superhero game, it has a rich background that succeeds in not completely imitating any one type of comic book too directly.  It also keeps enough secrets to keep things interesting for some time to come.  This makes it the perfect superhero game for my current gaming group.  We have five people, myself included.  Three of us are fans of all types of comic books.  Two of my players don't really care for the Superman and Fantastic Four type comics.  They much prefer the darker, grittier comics th!
at take the genre more seriously.  Because the other three of us like all kinds of comics, this make BNW the ideal superhero game for us to play.  It has something for everyone.  The same thing was true of Deadlands.  One of my players doesn't care that much for westerns.  But Deadlands has horror, magic, steam tech, etc. which made the game interesting enough for this particular player.

I have also seen some people write that they don't like the idea of power packages because they are too limiting.  Personally, I like the idea of lower powered heroes and the power packages make sense for this type of game in my opinion.  Every delta starts out on pretty even ground.  There are enough ways to customize your hero (tricks, quirks, skills, etc.) that I think that the power packages work in this system.  And I'm sure we will see new power packages and new tricks related to the current power packages in future Pinnacle releases.

The game rules themselves resemble the rules in Deadlands so much that the transition for our group to playing BNW should be pretty easy.  That was one concern one of my players had when I approached him about playing BNW, that we would have to learn all new rules for a new game.  I told him about the rules and how close they are to the Deadlands rules so it would be a small learning curve.

After I told my players about the game, they all jumped onboard pretty quickly and at least one of them went out and bought the two books.  They all are eager to get the campaign started and I am looking forward to it.  I'll let you all know how it goes.

Jim