MCDM RPG - 4th Edition on Steroids???

 If you have watched enough videos by Mathew Colville you may know he is quite fond of D&D 4th edition. To him 4e represented heroic high fantasy with a tight focus on tactics. Unfortunately for D&D, most of the existing audience was expecting to continue on with a mostly dungeon crawling, exploring, resource tracking style of system, and Wizards did nothing to advertise or explain this shift. So is the MCDM RPG 4e reborn?

I signed up to the MCDM Patreon for $8/month to get my hands on the playtest packet. It turns out that the games will have many aspects in common, but I feel from what little I have seen that the new RPG dice mechanics and design will separate it from the predecessor in all the right ways.  

The core mechanics in the playtest docs and as described in videos about the game have me intrigued enough that I will likely remain a backer despite my dislike of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. Note: I bought a lot of 4e books to give it a thorough chance before determining it just wasn't my thing.

Fourth Edition had too much of a video gamey, button pushing, Magic: The Gathering tap/untap/burn feel. I can still see some of that here, but the design choices so far have not fallen into that same repetitive rut. Unlike 4e the characters become more badass as play proceeds instead of wearing down to where the boss fight will be a slog, hitting the same at-will button every round.

Among the pre-generated characters in the playtest packet is a Conduit (cleric). This character is unarmed, carries no melee weapon of any sort, instead relying on a ranged cantrip. What happens if the enemy is in the Conduit's face? I do find this jarring since I would prefer to tone down the starting capabilities of these characters just a little.  Not everything needs to be conveniently solved with an overabundance of magic, even if the 1st level characters are already heroes.

I won't be able to pass judgement on this yet, though I will be watching closely till just before the crowd funding campaign on Backerkit ends.