Been doing a number of playtests for Slayers this month. Looking good so far. Here is an initial report:
(taken from my blog post)
1) The system is quite lethal, but in a good way. Because hit points range from 6-12 and some weapons can inflict up the thirteen points of damage, death from a single blow is entirely possible. It is also easy to hit targets in combat. So this makes for some deadly battles.
2) Armor matters a lot. Because it provides Damage Reduction up to DR 5 (when combined with a shield) armor frequently means the difference between losing 12 HP or losing 7.
3) Slayers works well without a battle mat. We designed Slayers for gaming without miniatures. So we avoided things like tactical subsystems and tried to keep combat relatively light weight to achieve this goal. Every playtest so far has not involved any miniatures and this hasn't posed any issues.
4) Magic is dangerous and flavorful. These aren't meant to be D&D style combat wizards (though I personally love hurling lightning bolts and casting polymorph). Magic in slayers is very powerful but less useful in a pinch. It is also a double-edged sword. So far we have seen wizards suffer casting consequences such as coma and disease.
These are the most significant things we observed. We have also discovered and fixed some minor mechanical issues. The rulebook itself is likely going to be fifty pages or less. We want to keep it light. If people like the PDF we hope to incorporate feedback into developing it for a larger print release.
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Didn't go into too much detail on the blog but some of the mechanical issues we discovered were obvious things that just didn't occur to us when we first designed the mechanicsl for example we had a rule for scouting to avoid encounters, but it cut your overland movement rate in half. The math worked out that scouting actually increased your chances of having an encounter. We also noticed some math issues with the movement rates in general and have worked to fix these.