I've played a fair amount of Redemption, 15-20 sessions to date. I met one of the authors in EVE Online and have ended up playing a number of other PC games with the folks working on it. I backed the kickstarter, and since then I have helped play test two of the adventures from the next book. I won't go into details of what those adventures entailed, but I'll cover some generalities.



I have found the game to be friendly to being "big damn heroes". The core of the game system is that you can reduce the difficulty of skill checks by spending Action Points (AP) to invoke your Tags (I'll cover tags below). This allows you to spend resources to make nearly impossible checks with ease, although this can get very expensive and leave you without anything for the rest of the session. Most combat rounds I used the one free action point that my Command Check generated for each member of the party. This generally help make Commander MacDonald feel like a bad ass. Then there was the time that I really, really wanted to make sure someone didn't die and I went through absolutely every AP and resource that I could possible use for the rest of the session in one round of combat. I still almost died, but it was awesome. During a major battle elsewhere in the adventure our Combat Psi did something similar and ended up pulling off a couple of rounds that would have fit right in at the end of an Avengers movie.



Tags are descriptors for things, and the main ones are your character's tags. Every PC has a Concept and a Trouble Tag plus a few others. You can spend action points to use them in various ways when the GM agrees that the tag would apply. So a tag of "Strong as an Ox" would work fine if you are trying to lift a bunch of debris, but would really help you sneak into a high class ball. Tags can also be used to compel you to a course of action in line with the tag. My character's trouble tag was "Heroes leave no man behind". The GM used it on one occasion when the far safer option would have been to flee, but it would have meant that an potentially innocent man would have been left behind. I could have resisted the compel, but by going along with it I earned 2 more action points.



I've found that tags are a wonderful RP tool to help you focus on who your character is and gives you a mechanical benefit to playing them to those tags.



I've also spent a fair amount of time with the design rules for gear. I have done everything from plasma swords to ships that certainly are NOT the SDF-1. It's very flexible and fairly easy to use but it isn't meant to be something like GURPS: Vehicles or anything. If folks have questions I'll be happy to answer questions about it.



Like Taurus II, who is playing with me in the playtest of the 2nd adventure, I have also been doing some work on hacks to the system. I've been toying with how to implement Tenno from Warframe into the game. So far it seems to be fairly easy, although some of the Tenno powers don't map to anything currently in the game.