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Solar Echoes Player's Guide
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$35.00 $30.00 |
| Average Rating:4.3 / 5 |
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In my opinion the book is well organized and written in an easy to understand way. Every aspect of the game is being well thought off and covered. Rules are easy to find in the book, and aren't mixed with narrative. It gets right to the point, good for quick reference. It seems like a complicated system at first like any new game system, but once you start playing, it moves fast and is easy to understand. I also like the variety this game offer. You can customized the character that suits your style of play. Besides the routine combat talents. I also enjoyed the other, non-combat options they had, like Engineering, Persuasion, Biotech (Medical), Hacking, Disguise, Robotics, Resourcefulness, and Vehicle Talents. I also like the artwork at the beginning of each chapter and also all the art pieces through out the book. It gives you the right feel and set your mood to indulge in the game.
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The following review was originally written at Roleplayers Chronicle and can be read in its entirety at http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=30510.
Solar Echoes Player’s Guide is the base handbook for the Solar Echoes core mechanics and a very high-level overview of the setting in terms of the history that has led to the setting’s present day and a look at the different character races. Everything else is core mechanics only, giving the player everything they need to play in an adventure or campaign. While not saying it outright, Solar Echoes is a space opera setting whereas the player characters are explorers or warriors of some type that travel the stars along with a host of others.
Solar Echoes utilizes a roll-over dice pool system whereas a player rolls a number of d6′s equivalent to the character’s base stat and adds any applicable modifiers (including those from skills) in hopes to meet or exceed the given target number. (Opposed rolls use a dice pool where the only the highest die rolled is considered.) The target numbers are fairly static meaning that as a character progresses, they do get better because the target numbers don’t continually increase. The base dice mechanics are very simple and straight-forward. Base attributes are determined by character race and then players choose the skills their character is going to have. There are no character classes and players are free to create whatever character type they want, given the inherent flavor of the character race. The game does include a number of recommended archetypes to help players get started.
As stated, this Player’s Guide provides all the basics and core mechanics. Outside of that and you’ll have to get the Mission Controller’s Guide.
OVERALL
Solar Echoes is a decent space opera system. I can’t say much about the setting as there is little information here in regards to the setting. The combat system utilizes an integrated turn sequence whereas the players and MC act upon and react to each other going back and forth without slowing down. It can definitely keep the game moving better and keep players from getting bored. However, there are a lot of mechanics and it almost seems as though there are too many situations attempting to be discerned in the core mechanics. In other words, too many modifiers for too many situations means too much memorization or constantly referencing back through the book.
RATINGS
Publication Quality: 6 out of 10
Solar Echoes Player’s Guide is a decent publication. The layout is smooth enough, but I was quite let down by the artwork. Each chapter has a two-page piece of artwork leading into the chapter, although none of them seem to pertain to what that chapter is about. Yes the artwork looks cool, but it has little to no meaning to the system or setting. While the cover art looks excellent and really draws you in, the large color pieces inside are let downs. The artwork in the character creation and equipment sections look awesome, and the rest of the artwork should have followed their lead. I also found a problem with all of the sidebars – none of them seemed to be legible. Either the font wasn’t right or they weren’t placed properly, but I really couldn’t read any of them without squinting.
The content formatting, however, was fairly bland; most of it read like a Power Point presentation. Each section has lots and lots of crunch, but there is very little narrative to either fully introduce the section, describe the mechanics, tie the mechanics to the setting or to other mechanics, or to simply give the reader something to read. There was definitely too much crunch and not enough narrative, and the setting doesn’t come through outside of History and Character Creation.
Mechanics: 7 out of 10
The base mechanics are interesting enough, but suffer from bloating in some areas. Although the character creation part is streamlined and the skills are kept trim, combat and talents are a bit much. The talents all seemed to be oriented toward combat leading to characters that may be useless outside of combat or at least the game falls short on exciting non-combat encounters. Additionally, a lot of the mechanics carried too many situations for penalties or bonuses whereas too many situations are trying to be compensated for instead of keeping it simple and consistent. Combat, while interesting and designed to keep everyone involved all the time, has a lot of fiddly rules that seem more like a miniatures war game than a role-playing game. All of the combat mechanics appear to be written exclusively with the use of a square-grid battlemap, otherwise they may break down. To me, this could slow things down. I would have preferred to see all the mechanics as trim and streamlined as character creation and skill usage.
Desire to Play: 6 out of 10
The core mechanics for Solar Echoes present an RPG that is interesting and unique. However, the setting information within this Player’s Guide does not; it completely falls flat and fails to present the player with enough information to immerse themselves within the game’s setting. If you want to try something new whereas combat is designed to be more interactive and presents itself as a grid-based system, then Solar Echoes is a great place to start. However, there is very little setting information and you would have to get as much out of it as you can or want to.
Overall: 6 out of 10
Solar Echoes Player’s Guide is obviously a great place for players to start should they be getting ready to play a Solar Echoes adventure or campaign. You’ll have to rely on the MC to provide additional setting information (hopefully) from the Mission Controller’s Guide, but you’ll definitely have no problem making a character. You may have some difficulty plowing through the combat mechanics during the first few sessions, but having a chance to act and react back-and-forth from PC to NPC can make for some excellent game sessions and you may find yourself preferring the integrated turn sequence over the basic initiative system.
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Publisher Reply: |
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Thank you for the honest review of our Player's Guide. We looked into the issue you brought up regarding blurry text in our “Flavor Text” boxes, and realized on some computers the resolution of these images was not as sharp as intended. As a result, we have corrected this by uncompressing the file to produce optimum clarity—we had wanted to keep the file size smaller for everyone, but agree that the text was slightly blurry in some instances due to the compression.
Regarding your comments on setting, a lot is detailed in the flavor text boxes throughout the book, but we have also now added some of the setting material from the Mission Controller's Guide into the Player's Guide in the History section.
As for mixing rules text with setting text, we had decided against this because we want players to be able to quickly find the rules they need to keep the game moving. The Player's Guide is intended to provide players with everything they need to create a character, buy equipment, and jump right into the game with an understanding of the rules.
Yes, we do use a battlemap grid system for squad combat, which is a familiar method of gaming used in many RPG's. However, we step away from this for our vehicle combat, using a simplified, abstract system that frees players up from using a grid to conduct exciting battles. We believe these systems are well-suited for a tactical combat game.
We hope that everyone enjoys the updates we have made to the Player's Guide, and welcome your reviews. Thank you for your thoughts on Solar Echoes!
Andy Mitchell, Corefun Studios |
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