Well, I finally watched a video of MCDM's new RPG's combat in action. Lead Designer James Introcaso ran a two-player combat encounter for the folks over at the Character Sheet and I got a sense of how the mechanics of this game function.
The players were a Shadow and a Tactician. These are the analogues for the Rogue and Fighter, but with the Shadow pushing for a more mystical angle that includes teleportation and the Tactician leaning into the battlefield-commander idea that in D&D is similar in flavor to the Battle Master.
The game works differently from D&D in several ways, but still looks familiar in terms of what a battle map looks like and the overall vibe and goals.
First, let's talk dice:
The game is a 2d6 system rather than a d20 system, and so the vast majority of rolls you'll be making will be 2d6 plus some modifier. In addition to these, there are d4s an d8s that can get thrown into the mix. D4s represent "boons and banes," which fill the roll of Advantage or Disadvantage - if you're, say, webbed up by a giant spider, your attacks will have a bane on them, requiring you to subtract the result of a d4 from your attacks, but if you have, say, a skill, you can add a boon of a d4 on top of the base ability you're using, such as combining the Athletics skill with a Might test (the equivalent of a Strength check).
Famously, the game does not use attack rolls - if you attack a foe, they will take damage, and it's just a question of how much damage. Regardless of what kind of weapon you're using, you'll be rolling 2d6 and adding a modifier. Enemies will also attack in this way, but in this example, the Shadow and Tactician each had a Triggered Action (akin to a reaction) that they could use to reduce the damage they took - the Tactician could be hit for as much as 22 damage and, with their class-specific defensive ability, reduce that to as little as 3 and even on occasion to zero - but you need to choose which attack to reduce, because you only get one of these per round.
Gear is handled in broad terms with "kits." A Tactician might pick up a kit that gives them heavy armor, which simply increases their max HP, and provides a few other scattered bonuses. But other than magic items, it doesn't look like you'll be tracking a whole lot of things like individual weapons, shields, helmets, etc. Example kits we've seen have also added new abilities.
The Shadow and the Tactician each have unique resources, and at least from the perspective of the video, these seemed to build up in similar ways. Shadows gain Insight, which they get when they use their basic attacks, and gain additional Insight when they have a boon on their attack (remember, that d4 bonus). Tacticians have Focus, which seems to build at the beginning of each round and might be generated faster by certain abilities. These resources can be spent to perform more powerful attacks. For example, the Shadow can spend 5 Insight to perform "Assassinate," which adds a d8 (maybe 2d8?) to their normal 2d6 and modifiers. The Tactician used 5 Focus to perform "Hammer and Anvil," which let them make an attack and then also let the Shadow make a free basic attack on the Tactician's turn.
Initiative is looser - the party rolls a d6 against the monsters, so it's "side initiative," but with alternating turns. When the fight began, the party was two adventurers versus five goblins, so they started with one of the players, then one of the goblins, then the other player, and then the remaining goblins. The party and the Director (GM) choose who on their side goes in what order, which is intended to encourage players to think tactically about what order they want to take their turns - you might have some cool attack that deals damage to enemies in a line, so you wait for your Tactician buddy to go first and try to push one of the monsters into a line between two others.
So, what do I think?
I love this a lot conceptually, but I do see some challenges that might present themselves:
First, players will need to be paying close attention - you can't really just look at your phone when it isn't your turn. Furthermore, there's definitely more bookkeeping - with resources that are generated in combat, you'll need to be tracking their generation as well as their spending, which means I can imagine some players forgetting to do so when a round starts and getting confused as to how much of a resource they have. Likewise, I can imagine that, especially in big encounters, a Director might have a hard time remembering which of their monsters have gone in a given round.
Something I like, though, is that because every attack is a guaranteed hit, you don't really need something like Extra Attack, whose primary utility (other than just doing more damage) is smoothing out your chance to hit - it sucks to miss, but if you have a 50% hit chance, getting Extra Attack reduces your chance to miss overall to 25%. Now, it's fine to just pile on the damage as you get more powerful.
It's also clear that, from level 1, you're going to have cool things to do, but unlike some systems I've found a little overwhelming, it doesn't seem like you'll be bogged down too much in complexity. In other words, I suspect that building a character will be relatively quick - perhaps even quicker than 5E, but that you'll have interesting choices from the get-go. I often try to start my 5E campaigns at a higher level these days because of how limited it feels at levels 1 and 2 (and honestly, I like to get to tier 2 as soon as possible).
I think they're only now starting to get the higher levels figured out, but the core playtesting has been to ensure that level 1 is fun, and I suspect that it will be.
At the same time, this game is very clearly aiming to be the kind of game that D&D is as most people playing it these days play it. That creates a big hurdle for them to clear - can they convince players that they should learn a new system to run the same kind of game they've been running already?
So far, the rules appear simple enough that you can learn it without too much difficulty, but I'll be curious to see how complex things get at higher levels. Part of this will also just involve resetting our numbers values, like how 20 degrees Celsius is comfortable but is frigid in Fahrenheit. So, for example, the Tactician in this video, at level 1, had 60 hit points - which most 5E Fighters wouldn't get until level 6 or 7. Likewise, in D&D, getting a 10 on an ability check is only rarely a success, whereas here it's a pretty reasonable "moderate difficulty" target. Oh, and DCs are now TNs (Difficulty Class versus Target Number - which is actually a clearer term, not requiring any adage like "meets it beats it").
Going back to the Kit idea, one thing I liked was how the Shadow fought with daggers. There aren't different damage dice for different weapons, so unlike in D&D where you'd be better off with, say, shortswords or a shortbow in most situations, these daggers could be used in a fully effective way. I believe that a kit that includes daggers might include a special attack that is flavorfully linked to them, but it looks like you're going to be able to have a lot of flexibility in the overall vibe you're going for.
The benefit of this all being heroic fantasy is that it should take very little effort to play this game in a setting you've already created for D&D - or even to play in an established D&D setting, if you've been wanting to play, say, a Ravenloft campaign.
I also think that it's possible it'll be easy to homebrew kits that can let you step outside the genre a little - a "Tactician" could, I imagine, easily work with a kit that includes modern body armor and an assault rifle, or a Shadow might work with a kit that includes cybernetics and laser swords. Currently, the plan is to have three linked official settings, which include a standard fantasy setting, an urban intrigue and politics setting, and a space-fantasy setting called the Timescape. I'm eager to see how they'll handle these, and ideally, if the rules will be robust and flexible enough to let us play around in genre.
The proof in the pudding will be to see how complex the game gets as you ascend through the levels. There are only ten levels, but the folks at MCDM claim that a level 10 character in their game should be comparable to a level 20 character in D&D - only that you should actually be able to hit level 10 in most campaigns.
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