After a page by page read through I have to say I will not be beta testing this RPG.
I could not present this game to my group with a strait face.
The Bad
From what I have read, this is not a role playing, it's a high-school drama club script writing meeting.
The game flow is simplistic to say the lest.
Character creation is limited at best, mindless at worst.
The opposed skill system is so random as to make have high skills a waste. A seasoned trained doctor can fail a tonsillectomy, just because the GM rolled well.
The narrative turn system will be a rule laws/powergamers paradise. Forcing the GM to spend session after secession raining them in.
Overall the game is a players storytelling secession not a rpg.
The Good
The mech-combat damage system has promise as a optional damage system for Alpha strike/Battleforce.
It Would work well to relive the complaints about the sameness of Battlemechs in those system.
Could also be used in AToW with some modifications to give a option to avoid a TW bogging down there game.
So as I see no way this game will be playable by me or my players without over a 2/3 rewrite, so for those that like this kind of game I will not waste CGL and my time, since there is no way that CGL could even make this game playable by me without making it unplayable to those that like this type of game.
So, first, I will note that I'm fully aware this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and that's fine, just like the poster above you noted. It's a very different style of RPG, and for those who don't like it, ATOW is- as the book takes
extreme pains to emphasize- still there, and is still going to get supported going forward.
That said, I have to push back against a few of the things you said here, which I know is hyperbole (on the internet, forsooth!) but I don't want to go entirely unchallenged. I'm going to go from the bottom up of your bad notes and kind of dig into some of the things you don't like about it, and discuss that.
"The narrative turn system will be a rule laws/powergamers paradise. Forcing the GM to spend session after secession raining them in."
If you have a group that keeps on doing that after being politely brushed back and after reading the rules, you have a group that's not interested in this style of game. That's not a bad thing, it just means the group is after diffferent methods of fun. Broadly speaking, and reaching back into the hoary old (and oversimplified!) theory from Edwards to try to explain this, there's a few non-mutually-exclusive ways to have fun with a role playing game. Two of those are the gamist style, where the fun comes from following a rigid set of rules and beating them, and the narrativist style, where the fun comes from the storytelling. Most groups- most games- have a balance of those and other ways of having fun. A system like Destiny shifts the lever over mostly, but not entirely, to the narrativist viewpoint, because it's very up front and explicit that the game is about cooperatively telling a story.
What a lot of traditional games like the D&D family have in common is that they work with a gamist sort of fun by encouraging an
adversarial relationship, in game, between the players and the GM. The GM sets up a challenge for the players to defeat within the rules, and then the players beat it. Rinse and repeat. The GM is also in sole control of the story to shape a progressive set of challenges towards a goal, and the players have to overcome each of these challenges in turn. That is a common way of doing things! But that's not necessarily what Destiny is asking a group to do. Instead of an adversarial model- which breeds powergaming and rules lawyers- Destiny and other games like it advocate for a cooperative model. The point isn't necessarily for the GM to make a fight and the players to win it. The point is for the GM and players to work together to weave a story out of challenges. The GM has more input than the players on what these are, but not sole input- that's the entire point of the Narration system, to be sure everyone is included in building the world and story. If you go into it thinking that your job as a player is just to win, then yeah, you can break that system over your knee. And you're not playing a game that's catering to how you want to have fun. There's Traditional GM style rules, but they read a little awkwardly to my eye, like it's something bolted on at the last second that doesn't really fit how the rest of the system flows.
"The opposed skill system is so random as to make have high skills a waste. A seasoned trained doctor can fail a tonsillectomy, just because the GM rolled well."
To me, the golden rule- and this is something I wish Destiny and many other systems emphasized- is that
you should only make players roll dice if failure is narratively interesting. If it's something that the player should reasonably be able to do without struggle, then hell, let them do it. A tonsillectomy? I would never ask a player to roll that. A tonsillectomy on the Archon's heir, on a burning dropship, with klaxons going on and a DEST strike team coming? Heck yeah you're gonna roll for that, because screwing that up could lead to some interesting story directions.
That said, I am a little chary of having skill resolution always be roll against roll, and not roll against static number. The probability on those is a lot harder to empirically get your hands around which makes balancing a little difficult. It's something I'm willing to let work out in play. Toying around on anydice, I THINK there's something like a 55% chance to hit someone when you have equal modifiers (including ties), 66% chance if you have 1 more, 76% if you have 2 more, etc etc, with 90% chance if you have 4 more and 97% chance if you have 6 more. But I'm still not entirely sure how that'll go in practice yet.
"Character creation is limited at best, mindless at worst."
Limited? Probably I'll agree to that. Mindless? I don't see that at all. There's not a lot of math, but there's not supposed to be; the entire philosophy of the system is something you can jump into quickly. Something the book dances around without making explicit is that it prefers if a group make their characters together, bouncing ideas off of each other to form a group of characters with interlocking narrative hooks, and not an isolated set of mathematically optimal sheets. In the same way D&D has gone to a more streamlined approach to character creation recently, so a lot of games are- asking new players to spend a lot of time in creation is becoming less and less popular.
"From what I have read, this is not a role playing, it's a high-school drama club script writing meeting."
This one appears to be born out of an understandable frustration that you're getting a style of game that you don't personally enjoy, but I have to tell you it's entirely wrong. Role playing is a very broad umbrella. What you're responding to is the fact that a lot of RPGs as we know them have their roots in tabletop wargaming, with the inclusive of story-driven elements being something coming from a different, storytelling wellspring of ideas. In the end, players are assuming some character role and helping to tell a story constrained by a set of mechanical rules. That's it. That's all you have to be to be a roleplaying game. There's an entire submarket of tabletop RPGs that has even *less* rules and even *more* story-driven philosophy than Destiny, believe it or not, and those are RPGs too. It's a terrible thing to assume that only the things you like have worth.
