Hi, Vicente --
I have thought about it. Like I said before, I was just batting around some ideas with Bill Slavicsek a few weeks ago. As far as improving or changing the game, hmm, let me see . . . I'd be inclined to tinker with the core mechanic to make rolling high good, I'd switch over to a cyclic initiative system to speed combat rounds, and I'd hammer out some good encounter-building guidelines so that a GM could more easily figure out the difference between a challenging fight and a screaming slaughter.
Hypothetically speaking, what would you want to see? Where do you think the old game would benefit from some improvements?
Rich
Hi Rich,
thanks a lot for the answer! Take this as my personal experiences/opinions, I'm sure other people differ (and A.NET has a lot of great ideas for some of these issues):
- I like that the step-difficulty with dice as modifiers and that a single roll produces different type of successes. I don't care that much if it's roll-under or over if that continues to be the case, I have become a huge fan of a single roll giving more than a binary result (like in games based on Apocalypse World).
- I never liked that Skill Points were tied to Int, it made it way too important.
- I like the races (a lot actually), but the classes reminded me a little too much of DnD in space. I like the idea of giving discounts to certain skills to specialize, but maybe they could be "narrower" instead of so open ended.
- I find character advancement very slow/uninteresting. I'm not sure what's the exact issue, if it's that raising ranks is too expensive, characters get too few skill points, skill ranks are too separated between each other... Or maybe a little of everything. This is my main problem with Alternity.
- Characters that use psionics/fx usually ended too low on other skills. I think I would collapse the skill list a little (I love how varied it is, but there may be a little too many).
- I enjoy a lot the damage/armor/health rules (although I think I'm a minority here). Maybe something to reduce a little the spiral of death as characters start getting injured would be nice.
That's what I can come up with on top of my head right now. I'll give it another thought when I get home and I can sit with the books.
Regards!
Vicente