Pink text makes it easy to see what's changed since the last version for proofreading purposes.

It's been a very wild and very long year, since Slipstream RX 1.1. What started as a simple passion project on a lonely October night in 2022 has really started to blossom into far bigger than I anticipated. It's simultaneously very exciting, and very, very, very humbling. There's been a lot that's been in the works, both under the hood and community-wise. As mentioned before, tabletop RPG development is a significantly different beast than video game development, but I've also been having a lot of fun with working on things.

Slipstream RX has gotten a lot of playing over the years, and a couple big issues revealed themselves over time:

• Character builds were extremely homogeneous--while pilot abilities were varied, vehicle stats were not. After two or three characters, you've effectively hit the limit on what a character build can be.

• Despite my efforts, Slipstream RX was still very much a defender's game. It was far too easy to avoid damage, and the damage that did happen was easy to patch up.

• Mapping required the GM to anticipate players. There needed to be ways for the GM to not have to consider all the ways a player can create shortcuts with jumppads and/or Jump Jacks. It was punishing for a GM to need to plan a map out, especially for something that's intended to have minimal prep time.

• The game was still slow--vehicles need to move faster, players needed to be able to make more strategic decisions faster, and conflicts needed less back-and-forth and more one-and-done.

• Pilots fucking sucked as a system. Everyone wanted to be able to play out of the vehicle, and it's important for the health of the game to include a way for folks to be able to talk and interact face-to-face--but the existing gameplay systems for actually being the pilot is barely a system. When even the core rulebook itself says "yeah you might want to use a different system", it's a problem.

• The NPCs were the definition of all-or-nothing. Either they weren't an issue or they were, and it was entirely a coinflip. Players in the lead needed to be threatened, but basing it off random chance meant either someone got bullied unnecessarily or was barely inconvenienced. The drawing and specific placements based on value slowed things down.

I've been spending a lot of the past year-and-a-half trying to address these issues, and the resulting changes to the document have effectively made Slipstream RX into almost an entirely new game. But, it's been worth it--the resulting changes have made the game much more fun and interesting to play. Slipstream RX 2.0 is now in pre-release and is in testing on the server. If everything goes well, I'll be compiling it into a .pdf and releasing it proper, and I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Thank you very much to everyone who's been supporting this over the years. And if you're just now joining us, please feel free to join in on the server and see all the changes that have been made!

https://discord.gg/ZCzzZm6SDU