QUOTE (Bigity @ Oct 20 2011, 02:15 PM)
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Is this RPG still under active development? The only two books came out over a year ago, and that makes me a little nervous when considering a new game to buy.
As a player in a year-old DFRPG game:
Buy it, and either find or start a group to run a game in it. The lack of quantity is just fine, given the quality of the product.
It's a very solid system, which manages to have struck the right balance between free-form and rules-heavy for me. You can come up with any character concept you like, but there are limits and rules that you have to work within to build your character. Plus, building the campaign area with your group helps solidify concepts that might've otherwise been glossed over, and the entire Aspects system is a fantastic way of modifying the classic "Hit it until it's dead!" RPG mechanics.
Magic is much different than Shadowrun, as might've been mentioned earlier in-thread. Rather than a list of specific effects, magical characters are limited by elemental type - which you can make up your own for, if the GM approves it - as well as how much juice they put into the spell and how well they can control it.
- A spellcaster with Fire as an elemental type could shoot a flamethrower blast at someone, or they could suck the heat out of the air around someone to encrust them with ice while cutting something else - like a pack of ghouls - in half with a heat-laser.
- A mage that can deal with Earth magic could levitate boulders and hurl them at a target, or they could summon a hand made out of rock to grab someone and hold them in place, or they could summon a wall of rock around themselves and their friends as a shield.
- Someone with Metal as an element - I prefer the 'can modify, manipulate, and mimic the properties of metal' rather than the classical Chinese element - could redirect electricity as an attack, or as an aspect-applying maneuver (I've found that 'Tased, Bro', 'Shocked', and 'Stunned' are all nice aspects to apply to enemies), or could start pulling some serious Magneto shit if there's no electricity around to play with.
- Seriously, it's very much an "Okay, what do you want to do?" magic system with rules that support it.
Mortals don't get the short end of the stick, either. There's these fun little things called stunts that everyone can buy, but mortals can take the most advantage of. They can be either a situational bonus, a skill-swap effect (Guns instead of Weapons when hitting someone in the face with a firearm instead of shooting them, for example), or a Fate Point-fueled temporary bonus that exceeds the situational bonus. I'm particularly fond of the skill-swap effect, as evidenced by an ex-MMA fighter I made. He's got a high Endurance skill, plus "Wait For An Opening" (Endurance instead of Might to start grappling), "I'm Not Going Anywhere" (Endurance instead of Might to maintain a grapple), and "Oh, Is That All?" (Endurance instead of Fists for melee defense) and they all come together to make him stick to things like superglue in melee combat. Hell, the last session I played him in, he managed to wrestle a Fetch (a fear-eating fey creature; this one looked like Redneck Death) to the ground and proceeded to bounce its head against a tile-over-concrete floor to make it answer questions.
...You know what?
Here, have a good batch of writeups on how the system works. This guy explains it all better than I ever could.
And Redjack? I endorse CanRay's suggestion. The Dresden Files books are modern-day fantasy-mystery-noir-with-a-splash-of-comedy novels, and I'd suggest them to anyone who enjoys any individual part of that description. (And yes, CanRay. Jim Butcher is a glorious golden bastard of a writer.)