Amethyst Play Experience: Is D&D 4th with guns worth giving a shot?

A couple of days ago I wrote about my experience building a character for Goodman Games' Amethyst. Amethyst is a campaign setting putting the characters in a futuristic America where the fantasy mixes quite thoroughly with the sci-fi. You've got elves, halflings, and vampires (a playable class!) thrown together with laser-guided rockets and mecha powered armor.

Character generation was a little rough. Part of this was because of how big a crutch the D&D Insider Character Builder (CB) software is. Sure, it's nice and conventient in that it does all the math and tells you exactly what you need to pick from. The CB can be handy, but it also makes you weak! 4th Ed. characters can be quite complex (and in fairness to the system, we were building level 16 characters in a new system from the ground-up - we've never built anything bigger than a level 9 character from scratch before).

Now that we've gotten a chance to play it for this past Friday's gaming night, what did I think? Keep reading to find out!

I'm going to be upfront about this - Amethyst is pretty awesome. I don't want to bury the lead or make people wonder what I think about the actual game play of Amethyst. I liked it a lot, and, as I repeated numerous times to the group Friday night, I felt like the game captured something really right with how they implemented the controller role.

I was playing a grounder by the name of Roland. He's your typical heavy-weapons guy. The grounder can be defenderish, controllerish, or strikerish, and having played an Eladrin Wizard in our regular 4th Ed. game numerous times, I thought it'd be cool to try out the familiar controller role with some guns and some heavy armor. Looking at the picture at the beginning of this post, my miniature is second from the right. I used a Tacarm from AT-43 (we all used AT-43 mini's for the PC's) which worked our perfectly since my mobile motor armor was a 2 x 2 large character.

My powers were weaker than my wizard's powers with less condition effects but with about the same amount of damage. The thing that worked was that the guns themselves had unique effects. Because I was wearing my power armor, I could weild two-handed weapons as if they were one-handed weapons. I chose to equip myself with the coilgun (a type of gauss rifle) in one hand and a sonic stunner in the other. My coilgun was able to do damage and was used for my encounter and daily powers. My sonic stunner, a special weapon, could not be used in anything other than basic attacks (and as a grounder, all my at-wills count as basic attacks). The stunner was special though - it didn't do any damage. Instead it causes the target to become weakened and slowed (save ends). In our two fights, the stunner saw a ton of use. I had many chances to strike the two bosses and really control the battlefield with the stunner.

The real magic of the game lies in the gear - like all good sci-fi games. From our armor to our guns, each piece felt unique and appropriately powerful. There were also almost all vulnerable to a form of magic corruption that exists as a result of being out in the wild and near magical creatures. This is an interesting check on the power of battery-powered tools. Because fantasy and traditional races and classes are also appropriate for the setting, this feels like a fun and simple way to differentiate the worlds of techan (tech-based classes) and echan (fantasy-based classes).

I guess my parting thought on Amethyst for now is its complexity level. There are enough rules here that it can feel a little overwhelming when you first start out. From ammo types to weapon traits to the mechanical corruption, it can get a bit heavy. I'd say the amount of crunch added onto the existing 4th Ed. rules is comprable to one of the fatsplats (like Vampire, Werewolf, or Mage) and how much they add on to the World of Darkness core rules. Everything is translatable from 4th Ed. rules, but there's a thin extra game laid over the top of it. It's more complex and adds more to the game than something like Day After Ragnarok does to Savage Worlds. It's definitely worth a look at what a different design team can do with the 4th Ed. rules in a completely different setting than the standard put out by Wizards. I'm excited to hear that Amethyst Evolutions is going to be following up the core book we have already (Amethyst Foundations). I can't wait to see what epic destinies they include to expand upon their nice list of paragon paths. Hopefully we'll get something to follow-up on our Brothers of Blood - that would make two grounders very happy!