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Practice Makes Perfect $2.50
Average Rating:3.8 / 5
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Practice Makes Perfect
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Practice Makes Perfect
Publisher: Crafty Games
by Megan R. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 01/21/2015 08:33:40

If combat is the high spot of your game, especially if you like it cinematic and exciting, this resource supplies a lot of ideas (complete, of course, with appropriate game mechanics) to make it even more exciting and spectacularly cinematic. It does these through character options and feats, enabling each character to develop his own personal combat style by focussing on particular weapons and techniques. Characters can pick up advanced actions and tricks in place of taking new weapon proficiencies as they rise in level.

Naturally, you can do the same thing with NPCs - you want your antagonists to be able to put up a good fight after all, and to be memorable foes. A mechanism is provided for building this in to quick NPCs, whilst those you wish to detail in full - your major opponents - will use the same rules as characters. Either can use any of the various tricks and techniques presented here, of course.

The range of ideas presented is quite varied, including plenty of unarmed techniques for the brawlers (or martial artists) as well as ones to enhance gunplay for runners and gunners. There are even delightful quirks like Exhibition Shooting, which allows you to target items or scenery with a spectacular shot, showing off - 'That could have been your head!' as you demolish a statue for example.

Each trick - and there are 53 of them - has a descriptive paragraph showing how it works along with the necessary rules information to make it happen around your gaming table. They are also summarised in a chart for quick reference.

If that wasn't enough there is also a whole bunch of feats - basic combat feats, melee feats, ranged feats and unarmed combat ones - that you can take to further customise your fighting style. Many relate to mastery with particular weapons, and some even allow you to recover - more or less gracefully - from rolling a 1 when you attack!

These are somewhat mechanistic and best suited to those groups who'd like to be cinematic but who prefer to play out combat strictly according to the rules. If you tend to free-form and let things flow, relying on player descriptions of actions rather than stepping mechanically through each round of combat, this may be of less use - but it's still worth a look if only to understand how the rules can be made to support whatever it is that you want to do.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Practice Makes Perfect
Publisher: Crafty Games
by William C. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/19/2007 11:48:56

Spycraft 2.0 – Practice Makes Perfect This review is after I have looked over the book and read it to see what I liked and didn’t like… All ratings are based out of 5 points…

  1. Art: a. Cover Art – This is a good evocative drawing, but I feel that it lacks some of the realism that prior art has shown. It is cartoonish and just lacks that something that grabs my eye. - 3.5 points

  2. Layout: a. The book looks clean and the layout is easy to follow, there are some issues where things are in strange places… Like an explanation before the new mechanic that looks like it is a part of the new mechanic instead. – 4 points b. Tables – Now these are an improvement over the old tables and are cleaner and easier to print as well. The tables layout Cost/Bonus in an easy to read format. – 5 points

  3. New Mechanic: a. The new option to trade Weapon Proficiencies for Tricks is an interesting take and allows a combatant to do more than just have the golf-bag of weapons option. – 4 points b. The new options themselves are interesting, but there are some that are mechanically the same for a slightly different thing. (Example is actions that use a different stat in place of strength to modify your attack check.) They could have been rolled into one and been a choose the one that fits option. - 3.5 points

  4. New Feats: a. These are also similar to the new mechanic in that they are good but there are multiple ones that allow the same effect for a different subset of weapons (One of Blunt and One for Edged that offer the exact same benefit but use a different subset of weapons.) – 3.5 points

All in all I feel that this is a great option for players or GC’s to use to modify a PC/NPC to make them a specific type of fighter without using Feats alone. Total – 23.5/6 = 3.916 (Rounded to 4 points)



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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