Howdy, folks! I'll post a rundown of last night's awesome Mutant Future game later today or tomorrow. Right now I'd like to help out Andrew, who emailed me asking my opinion of the Alternity rpg. The thing is, I don't really have an opinion about Alternity. Never played it, never read it. Anybody care to share an opinion in the comments? Or maybe supply some links to groovy Alternity fansites? Let's see what we can do to assist Andrew in his quest for Alternity information.
Internet... ACTIVATE!
A Return to the Stars
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After a veeeeerrrryyyy long, and mostly unplanned, hiatus, Stuart and I got
together to play more Stargrave in recent days. It was good! It was also a
bit ...
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Posts
I had a lot of fun with Alternity when it was released. Its rules are ... quirky, to put it charitably, but they're very easy to use and flexible. I wouldn't recommend them for anything too "realistic," but they work fine for fast-and-loose science fiction, particularly space opera.
ReplyDeleteWe played Alternity for a campaign or two of Sci Fi, and I intend to return to it. It's a good generic system for future roleplaying. Particularly if your background is in AD&D and you're comfortable with that style of play.
ReplyDeleteI quite like it's upside down D20 mechanic, and the simple way of calculating degrees of success.
Alternity's an okay system. Back in the day we had some fun with it, but nowadays it's too fiddly for my tastes - I'm less and less enamored of games with giant skill lists than I once was. I also find the die rolling mechanic kind of annoying personally, but that's easily fixed.
ReplyDeleteI do remember figuring out that Alternity is basically the same system as Top Secret SI with a switch from percentile dice to a d20. The added weirdness of the random bonus/penalty dice extra fiddly bits provide a pretty good disguise over the underlying system. That amused me - the classes in Alterntity even map to the occupations in SI pretty closely. (I actually like the Top Secret SI system more than the Alternity system these days, but that's just personal preference.).
I have almost all of the Alternity Star*Drive books. I'm still missing one or two, but they're great! It's a fantastic setting.
ReplyDeleteThe system is a little fiddly and quirky, but not too bad. I would probably not run the system again, using either d20 or d6, but I've used and reused the setting or at least some elements of it time and again!
I love Alternity, it one of the best games to show you the line where old school and modern RPGs was, because it makes good use of both.
ReplyDeleteIts a dice step system and was one of the first times you saw some of the ideas that cropped up in 3.0 DnD.
Its very flexible and can run virtually any type of game, especially with the FX and Psionics sourcebooks.
At first it can take a different mindset to get into, some are not as intuitive with dice steps and difficulty degrees moving up and down a dice step "chart". But once your use to it, it can really zing as a system.
Star*Drive is classic Space Opera. Dark Matter is one of the best conspiracy settings ever and Gamma World for Alternity had a nice serious tone to it other GW's didn't have.
Thanks for putting out the Alternity APB Jeff, and thanks to everyone who chimed in. Anyone familiar with the "Dark Matter" campaign setting that was out for the game? From what I've read online it seems to be heavily influenced by X-Files.
ReplyDeleteDark Matter is always brought up when anyone wants to play a conspiracy game, it and Conspiracy X seem to be the current leaders.
ReplyDeleteDark Matter is very much an "X-files"-ey setting and as I said its sort made itself the iconic setting for that type of game, it was even redone for d20 modern.
I liked Alternity in the beginning, but (at the time) I couldn't get my head around the advancement (it wasn't as clean as what 3.0 did with Feats and such). Today it might make more sense, but there are other games I'd go to first.
ReplyDeleteWell, to toss it out there...
ReplyDeletehttp://alternityrpg.net/ is sort of a clearing house for all things alternity.
It's been a long time since I did anything with the system (cripes, the system came out nearly a decade ago... when did that time pass?) so mostly I have... impressions. The system really could have used another 6 months to a year of smoothing out the wrinkles.
Hmm. I keep rambling and deleting... basically, what we experienced in playing was that first level characters felt way under powered. Somewhere around 5-7 we were able to create solid characters (people who were not in high school, or literally just out of basic training). The step system for die rolling was really different at the time, and while I had no trouble with it a number of my fellow players could never remember it and had to be told every roll what to roll.
The settings of Star*Drive and Dark*Matter were sweet. DM is a /very/ X Files like setting. Magic, weird science, aliens, and real world ordinary crime all blended together.
I played one campaign with Alternity, but honestly, we didn't invoke the rules much. It's fun, and in my mind, it feels kinda like a GURPS-lite, which is unfair to both games.
ReplyDeleteIf I wanted to play an off-the-shelf skills-list game, Alternity would likely be my first choice for almost any fantastical genre (sci-fi, fantasy, sword & planet, etc.). The main caveat would likely be how difficult it is to get the books these days.
I never played in any of the officially released settings, but I heard good things about both Star*Drive and Dark*Matter.
I didn't like the system at all. It wasn't so much the wonky dice mechanic, which is quite fun in practice, but the sense that they were trying too hard to be different to anything else out at the time.
ReplyDeleteThere is an excellent (and free) star system generator out on the web, called Cosmos 2. It's for Alternity, but is essentially system-neutral and will work just fine for Traveller, or in my case, Rogue Trader. It's available at the alternityrpg.net site mentioned above.
Dark Matter is very much an "X-files"-ey setting and as I said its sort made itself the iconic setting for that type of game
ReplyDeleteOooh, I don't know about that. While I'm not as much of a cheerleader for it as some, I'd say Call of Cthulhu's Delta Green is the "iconic" conspiracy/aliens/X-Files rpg setting. Obviously its fans hate it when people say that ("It was published years before the first episode of the TV show!" etc), but so it goes. ;)
"'It was published years before the first episode of the TV show!'"
ReplyDeleteWas it? The earliest I recall encountering Delta Green was in an early issue of "The Unspeakable Oath" (number 7 maybe?), well prior to the publication of the DG setting itself and well after the appearance of the "X-Files."
I've never been a fan of the full Alternity system, but the lite system (as it appeared in the Starcraft boxed set and the fast-play demos of the time) was a decent enough system. I loved Dark Matter for its X-Files-esque themes and atmosphere. Just was never able to get past the unnecessarily wonky game system...
The first Delta Green stuff was published (in TUO) in about 1992, a year or so before The X-Files (September 10th 1993, which I only remember because it was my birthday!). The collected book was released in '96 or '97 I think, at the height of X-Philia.
ReplyDeleteAlternity is great, if a little wonky to learn. Once you've gone through the basics once or twice, you realize that you can do just about anything with it. Have seen folks running fantasy games with it and it worked great.
ReplyDeleteOh sure, we're running a full-fledged Alternity Star*Drive campaign! Check out the session summaries and whatnot. I have a soft spot for the system, and really liked Dark*Matter especially.
ReplyDeleteAlternity was a Sci Fi system that tried to be both Hard Sci-Fi and Space Opera, and failed at it. In all honesty, the system worked great as a near future ruleset, but it wasn't really good for much else.
ReplyDeleteWhile I hated trying to play Star Drive with the Alternity ruleset, I did enjoy the setting a lot.
In fact, the only thing that saved the system for me was Dark Matter, which the rule set fit to very well, and the campaign was complex enough to enjoy. In a way, I wish I had had more time to play with it before my group got fed up with the system.
Ive tracked down alot of the Dark Matter material (I think there is still one published book for it I dont own) along with the corebooks for Gammaworld and StarDrive.
ReplyDeleteThe simple most important thing to remember with Alternity is the fact its a SKILL based game. If you dont like that you will not like the game in any version.
The combat system is one of the few Ive encountered that balances the lethality of a gun and the needs of a heroic game too. Also the book Beyond Science is amazingly straightforward for creating FX powers (magic or psionics or whatever) and with this book and the core books you can run virtually any setting.