Anyone remember Alternity ?

[Welverin]

I have the game too, as well as the Star Drive Setting. I wanted Dark Matter but missed the opportunity. We only played a times but I thought it was a marvelous game system.

You shouldn't have much trouble finding DM if you look around a bit. Like here, for example.

Originally posted by baseballfury I liked Dark Matter very much. Good take on the whole modern day conspiracy genre. Star Drive was dreadfully boring though. Didn't much care for the rules system either, but I'd run Dark Matter with a different system in a heartbeat.

Erik Mona gave me reason to believe there will be a Dark Matter mini game in Polyhedron at some point.

Also jonrog1 said he'll eventually put his conversions up. Read more here.

 

[leaghe]

I'll be the dissenting voice here.

I have most of the Alternity products, including Dark Matter and Gamma World. The game system was well thought out and designed, but I had a couple of problems with it.

The learning curve was steep. It always took multiple explanations before anyone could figure out how to do anything... use a skill, attack, absorb damage anything. The system seemed well suited to handle the mechanics of science fiction gaming, but it did not seem suited to novice players.

My players stoically finished the adventure I had prepared, but they hated the system and begged to convert the campaign to a simpler system (when d20 came out, they loved that).

My overall impression was that Alternity is for veteran gamers, not neophytes. I didn't think it was worth saving, and (although I never peer into the corporate mind of WotC) thought it made sound business sense to cancel the line.

Leaghe

 

[Eryx]

I bought the main two rulebooks because I was after a generic sci-fi system and I have to say... *Looks at all the Alternity fans around him *... that I didn't like it.
The system was too chunky IMO and the system just didn't flow well. I gave it a try however, but it didn't cut it with my group either.

I still have them somewhere, packed away in a box somewhere.

 

[Florin]

I actually thought it was much easier to teach than AD&D 2e. All they had to do is roll a d20 +/- whatever other die I told them to roll. Then they just had to compare that number to the number on their sheet. It really doesn't get much easier than that. Although, if you tried adding in too much at once all at the beginning, like extra races and psionics, I could see things getting hairy, but that's true with any system.

 

[Greatwyrm]

I really liked Alternity, but I'll admit it had some problems.

The die shift mechanic was really neat, but also very difficult to teach to a newbie. Even some experienced players had difficulty getting a feeling for their odds of succeeding at various tasks.

Also, the skill points were too few for starting characters to be fairly good at more than one or two things. I know it's a lower power level overall than something like D&D, but it might have been a bit too low.

I'd like to see WotC take another step forward in open-gaming and open up Alternity. They could produce the core books as ESDs and let other people write new material. Either that or give us Dark*Matter d20. No offense to the Chthulhu fans, but I'd rather have that than Delta Green.

 

[Horacio]

I'd like to see WotC take another step forward in open-gaming and open up Alternity. They could produce the core books as ESDs and let other people write new material. Either that or give us Dark*Matter d20. No offense to the Chthulhu fans, but I'd rather have that than Delta Green.

I love Dar*Matter, but now it's much easier to find d20 players, so I'e bough Spycraft and CoC d20, and I'm going to merge them in a new Dark*Matter d20...

Better Dark*Matter than Delta Green, yes, IMHO...

 

[Psion]

As far as I know, Alternity was dumped to not offer competition with d20. I sure that this was a loss to the game community but I it does make sense businesswise to WotC.

Well that is true. First off, WotC has this big thing about self-competition. They wanted to leverage d20 and planned to do it with the Star Wars license. Alternity was roadkill on the d20 highway.

Also, it really wasn't making much money for them by the third year. Not that is sold badly -- a survey in Shadis showed it was at one time one of the ten most played games. It just wasn't on par with WotC's RPG cash cow, and for the scale of print runs that they comfortably work with, Alternity couldn't really turn much of a profit.
Now the kinds of sales Alternity got are the kinds of scale that smaller publishers would kill for. So you have to keep things in perspective.

 

[fenzer]

Dark Mattter d20 conversion

Anyone who is interested in a Dark Matter d20 conversion should check out this story hour by jonrog1. He has customized his own rules and if enough of us ask nicely he might be willing to share.

http://www.enworld.org/messageboards/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4912

 

[Greatwyrm]

Also, it really wasn't making much money for them by the third year.

Did it get three years?

Anyway, it's easy to see how it wasn't raking in the cash. Most of those books, Dark*Matter especially, had very high production costs. Lots of full color hardbacks when most companies weren't doing that. Dark*Matter is still probably the best produced rpg product I've seen.

 

[King_Stannis]

we still play dark matter, though depending on our dm for it, we may switch to shadowforce archer (spycraft).

i tried to dm the stardrive setting and found it very tough to do. something just didn't click. we've had a pretty good time with dark matter, though. lots of interesting adventures and characters. in fact, one of my favorite characters of all time was in dark matter. i played ed hinkle, a divorced, overweight forensic pathologist. (he found his wife in bed with the cable guy). hinkle met a horrific fate...