Another Fading Suns Blog: 3rd Edition System Teasers

Apparently there a juicy tidbits available on another Redbrick blog about Fading Suns in The Reborn Sun.

So what neat things can we find out in this blog regarding the overhauled game system?

1. Fewer attributes to confuse character creation:
   
   While I liked the idea of the opposed attributes, in practice they just didn't work very well. They caused confusion, both in how the pairings worked and in what some of the attributes actually stood for. Really, they had to go, but some aspects were still useful and relevant to the game.
   
   The solution was to do away with all the old attributes and instate a set of new ones. We chose 6 attributes: 2 physical (Dexterity & Vigor), 2 mental (Wits & Will), and 2 social (Intuition & Presence). These are rated on the standard 1 to 10 scale, but may exceed these limits with racial modifiers, cybernetics, or theurgic influences, etc.
   
2. Physical, Mental, and Social health:
   
   We also expanded the Vitality health track, dividing it into Vitality, Resolve, and Reputation, and essentially providing 'hit points' for the areas of physical, mental and social conflict. In addition, these health tracks are considered 'ablative' or non-life threatening -- only when the track is completely depleted do characters suffer real injuries and risk death.
   
3. Unified conflict resolution mechanic:
   
   Initially, we had a system for combat and a system for social conflict, but that really grated on me. These are both conflict situations; why do they use different mechanics? In the end, we developed a universal conflict mechanic that can be utilized to resolve any type of conflict, be it physical, mental or social.

All of this sounds interesting in theory -- I do not hold the prior game system as sacrosanct and am guilty in fact of making some similar tweaks to the system as denoted above. But then, this is just the begining. What happens when using this to pilot ships, or perform theurgy? I suppose we'll have to wait and see.