I recently finally took the plunge and purchased both the Player's Guide and the MC Toolkit books for City of Mist. The art and setting really attracted me. I love noir and I wanted something similar to Sin City in tone. I am reading through it all right now and am almost done with the huge Player's Guide, not even having gotten to the MC Toolkit yet, and this thing is really long in the tooth! It has plenty of examples but just seems to go on and on with minutiae.
What are your collective thoughts on the game? Is it worth all the Herculean effort to read through?
I've read the Player's Guide twice now. The examples did help a lot in showing how the rules applied. It's much better now than compared to the original version, which was the Player's and MCs books all combined into one massive tome.
That said, my group is still hesitant to pull the trigger and play. We love the concept and have ideas for characters but when we sit down to make them something falls apart. We can never seem to get from concept to paper to play. Even with all the examples and looking at stuff online for aid, it just never pulls together.
Great art and concept but my crew found it harder to understand and pull out than other PbtA we play, so we just gave up on it.