Sorry if this isn't quite the right venue, but I just finished reading the leaked documents and I needed somewhere to share and they've already been getting brought up a lot.
(Worth noting in mentioning CBT is that that Penultimate Unity of Form+Celestial Bliss Trick lets use use CBT with say, a political speech rather than sex. This is really really weird and probably far far more immature than the base effect by itself. This kind of transference is the only reason Penultimate Unity of Form exists.(though most examples wouldn't be so... ) So the thought that the devs/prior playtesting editions/etc missed this is somewhat inconceivable.
Also worth noting is that most performance charms are limited to one kind of performance now. IE: you have speech charms and music charms and dancing charms and sex charms and without using Penultimate Unity of Form they are not cross-applicable. So it's not simply a case of the one sex charm standing out as very limited, but a question of 'why is there a sex subtree in performance?' )
Anyway read through the documents. There's some stuff that felt iffy and some amazing stuff.
The worst thing was probably craft. I love the idea of playing a crafter and had some fun with it in 2e (kinda 'breaking Creation now' fun at times but still....)
Here... the core craft system before charms feels a bit off. I might be misreading it but it seems like you need to make a ton of meh items to make some decent items to make some artifacts to make one NA artifact. Except if you don't make your artifact fast enough you lose all your progress (and the craft XP spent on it), and for some artifact plans you made, can never ever try to make that item again.
It really reminds me of MMO crafts in a not-good way. But it's the newest part of the playtest and therefore probably the most in flux. It's also a bit better than that summary suggests in terms of what precisely gives you different tiers of craft XP. It's also probable that the number of artifacts is being dropped relative to 2e and that they're more special, so the huge investment to make one might be more justified.
Doctor Doom charm( and most of the craft trees feels)really gimmicky and facepalm worthy, but it'll probably get revised some at least. (Worth noting is that the cost is huge. 30wxp is about half an NA artifact's worth of work though, or more depending on charm set ups. Obtaining that much is potentially years of IC crafting work down the drain at once. Haven't really crunched the numbers on how fast a min-maxed crafter can build it up.)
There are so many "Take double 9s for 3m on this one kind of roll" charms in every ability that it really feels speed bumpy, especially since they took excellencies away as prerequisites for things and then made so many entry level charms "Take double 9s". Same with the "Once per whatever get one free full excellency" charms.
Still, easy to house-rule those away as prereqs so it's a smallish gripe. Worst is probably performance where there's a "take double 9s while speechifying" charm a "take double 9s while singing" charm, etc that basically do the same thing for slightly different areas of the same ability. The goal seems to be to make people define their niche more narrowly, but given how boring the charms are I can't feel satisfied with this kind of charm-tree design (no xp but it is likely that charms are a smaller investment than in 2e).
Charms on the whole are smaller and less distinct. BUT There's still a lot of awesome thematic charms that are core huge effects, not just the mass of "reroll every six you get" which feels kind of gimmicky and obfuscates probability calculations to hell and back when you have five such effects on the same roll.
It feels like a lot of charms are made to work together which means you'll need more charms to do the same thing. IE: You don't add one craft charm to get successes, you use your excellency and then ten small effects that each give you something like "reroll every 1 on your dice until no ones appear" "Take double 8s" "Add No general XP rules that I could find so it's hard to compare, but it seems like most characters will have more charms at any XP level.
Okay, that's my 3e ruined everything forever whining done.
Now:
Destiny Manifesting Method is the sexiest thing I've seen regarding Shaping Defense ever. This strikes me as such a massive improvement over 2e that I'm begging my gms to let me swap in that and one other charm as part of 2e even though it won't work as well probably. (Destiny Manifesting Method and Phoenix Renewal Tactics are pretty much the fix to shaping. Not that shaping is a thing.) (What's SV's stance on spoiling the leak stuff. I really want to spoil this because it's awesome and made me like 3e.)
There's also a socialize charm tree that gives you multiple personalities each with their own abilities and memories who can go and learn different charms. It's a hellish amount of bookkeeping and there are some parts of it that seem like they'd be hell to use in session but it's definitely there and cool and distinct as a thing. (Does really feel more 2e Infernalish than 'solarish' to me though, but it's still neat). Let's talk about some of these.
Essentially I'd say that of a 300+ page document with a very different rules paradigm the things that jump out are often the worst or the most different. Even with the full ruleset, things like XP are missing as are artifact rules. This means that evaluating the difficulties here/speed-bumpiness of various charmsets, etc is a bit tricky and will probably need to wait for the full product.
Especially for people just seeing bits and parts of the leak, I'd say that there is a lot of good there too. A lot of the bad is in flux or isn't as bad as it looks in isolation.
Honestly though, aside from a few areas (craft) I'm far more optimistic and eager to see 3e than before I saw the leak.
Edit: Also CBT, while something I hope goes away, isn't as bad as it looks once you see the full rules. There are at least 3-4 places where the writers went to great lengths to say "If this creeps out a player it doesn't work." or "Anything which makes a player uncomfortable is an unacceptable order." The 'red rule' shows that, while the sex charms are included and didn't really need to be, the writers were aware of issues people might have about them and did at least try to take these into account.
In short, while I don't like that the content is there, that's one charm taken away from the relevant sections which strive to acknowledge that a lot of people might have trouble with that kind of content and which went a long way to soften the blow, at least for me.
