Take Your First Look At The Upcoming ALTERNITY RPG!

Later this year, Sasquatch Game Studios will be releasing the new version of the 1990s Alternity science fiction roleplaying game. It features a brand new system, and is designed by industry veterans Dave Noonan, Richard Baker, and Bill Slavicsek. The creators have kindly sent along a sneak preview of the upcoming game, which I'm excited to share with you right here. Next week, there will be a 50(ish) page free demo/playtest packet you can download, with a short adventure by Dave Noonan, another by Rich Baker, and a brief rules overview. For now, though, take a look at the preview below!

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[Achan hiArusa]

I think the D20 system borrowed from different places, including building on 2nd edition and some concepts of the Alternity system.

The task resolution system was pulled whole cloth from Ars Magica. Go find a copy of the third edition and read the Berserk Virtue on page 76 ("While Berserk you gain a +2 bonus on Damage, Soak, and Fatigue Scores while suffering a -2 penalty on Defense"). The attributes went from -4 to +4 (so Green Ronin's True20 innovation of getting rid of the ability scores and just using the ability modifiers was actually a step back to ArM) and the Talents, Skills, and Knowledges section looks mighty familiar. It just uses a d20 instead of a d10. It also doesn't hurt that Johnathan Tweet wrote both ArM and the D&D 3.0 PH.

Of course, this fact comes up periodically and I'm one of the people who brings it up.

And I liked the original Alternity system. It had degrees of success and a die pool that didn't require buying your FLGS out of d10s or d6s

 

[GMMichael]

Good on Sasquatch for flipping the roll resolution, making higher=better. But after reading the core mechanic blog post, my brain hurts. I'm not sure why they had to consider lowering target numbers, based on abilities, and changing the bonus amount of die "polyhedrals," which are translated from a number of difficulty steps . . . when a system like Numenera does it very simply: one step of difficulty means you have to roll 3 points higher. Done.

Benefit of the doubt: I can't wait to find out what elegant, 1990s-esque Alternity-like system they came up with!

 

[darkmoonrising]

I ran a playtest session of Alternity last night which went down well.

I liked seeing skills as 11/16/21 - intuitive. Makes it feel different from D&D, plus you only need to add the die type modifier - which is simpler than add +9 and die type modifier to beat DC20.

 

[Jer]

Good on Sasquatch for flipping the roll resolution, making higher=better. But after reading the core mechanic blog post, my brain hurts. I'm not sure why they had to consider lowering target numbers, based on abilities, and changing the bonus amount of die "polyhedrals," which are translated from a number of difficulty steps . . . when a system like Numenera does it very simply: one step of difficulty means you have to roll 3 points higher. Done.

It's a style of mechanic that I actually quite liked back in the day. Success is tied to your ability scores, not to GM determined target numbers. If you beat your ability score you succeed, if you don't you fail. The better your roll the better your success. (Possibly the worse your roll the worse your success, but Alternity didn't really go there except for the "critical fail" rule). Your opposition takes the form of bonuses/penalties on the roll instead of an external target number you're rolling against. Usually its tied in with opposed contests being opposed rolls, though not always.

What was nice in the original Alternity (and in the 2nd edition Top Secret, where I suspect this mechanic was actually taken from in-house when Alternity was built) was the precomputed levels of victory right there on your character sheet. Having the Marginal/Good/Amazing or whatever categories made things less number-centric in a lot of ways - major calculations were done offline and just put into the character sheet and then when the roll happened you could just say "I got a Marginal" or "I failed" or "I got an Amazing". The only time numbers were mentioned is if someone got a 1 because they'd say "I rolled a 1 - I don't remember, is that good?" and then we'd have to remember if it was better to roll a 1 or to roll equal to your best success target number (there were games that went both ways - I want to say that in Alternity a roll of 1 was a critical success, but I can't remember if it was that or if you hit your Amazing target number exacty to be honest). Tying them to the ability score was nice because it meant that if you had a higher ability you had a bigger "spread" of target values. Someone with a 10 in a skill would have 10/5/2 (I think - it's been awhile) - meaning that if they rolled a 2 or less they had an Amazing success. Someone with an 18 in a skill would have an 18/9/4. Mathematically that's different from just having every 3 values be a better roll - it curves the successes out more so that the guy who has the higher skill isn't always off the chart. Half of the time his successes will still be average successes, it's just that he'll score his average successes almost twice as often than the guy with a 10 and will be more likely to get a success in the face of penalties. (And having it all precomputed on your character sheet meant that you weren't doing the math in your head either - so even though it looks weird, it plays pretty smoothly).

The roll under system in Top Secret 2e was actually quite nice, because it was just a percentile check. In Alternity it got weird because you had a bonus/penalty die to modify your die rolls and the bonus die subtracted from your die rolls while the penalty die added to your die rolls. The hard part of the system for new players in my eyes was teaching players to subtract when they had a bonus and add when they had a penalty. I tried to reverse it to a roll high system the way that Sasquatch is doing it here, but the game petered out as D&D 3e was coming out and we switched back to D&D and by the time we came back to revisiting Alternity we'd decided to try d20 modern instead. Plus reversing it makes it really weird in another way - now you're better at something if your skill level is lower, which my players also balked at. (They didn't like roll-low and they didn't like low-stat so .... d20 worked for them even if it made them do more math in their heads).

(All that said - I'm still looking forward to this revamp and I hope to get some of my players to give it another shot.)

 

[MadTruman]

It's a style of mechanic that I actually quite liked back in the day. Success is tied to your ability scores, not to GM determined target numbers. If you beat your ability score you succeed, if you don't you fail. The better your roll the better your success. (Possibly the worse your roll the worse your success, but Alternity didn't really go there except for the "critical fail" rule). Your opposition takes the form of bonuses/penalties on the roll instead of an external target number you're rolling against. Usually its tied in with opposed contests being opposed rolls, though not always.{snip}

I just have to live lonely in this population of one that can't abandon the original low roll system. It allowed for a fine relationship between ability scores (higher is better) and die rolls (rolling lower is better, trying to come in as far below the ability score as possible) and having the failure/success numbers needed all laid out on the character sheet without any fiddly math.

 

[Jer]

I just have to live lonely in this population of one that can't abandon the original low roll system. It allowed for a fine relationship between ability scores (higher is better) and die rolls (rolling lower is better, trying to come in as far below the ability score as possible) and having the failure/success numbers needed all laid out on the character sheet without any fiddly math.

I agree - I quite liked it. I think there's something psychological about rolling low though - most of my players across the years definitely prefer the thrill of rolling a 20 over the thrill of rolling a 1. (Percentile systems are nice in that way - you can often just houserule that "00" means "0" and let a roll of "99" be the worse possible roll and "00" to be the best. And now that I think about it, nobody ever really complains about roll under mechanics with percentile systems anyway. Hmmm...maybe it's something about that d20.)

I think the "subtract a bonus/add a penalty" part of the original system is more of a sticking point though. And we tried variants where you add the bonus/subtract the penalty to your skill instead of to the roll. It was easier to treat it as a bonus, but then you lost the simplicty of the roll-under precomputed levels of achievement because you're adjusting the target number on the fly. Modifying the roll is more natural in a roll under situation to me, but in my experience at least players were so used to adding for a bonus that it took a while to adjust.

 

[Von Ether]

I always admired that TSR was trying to create an implied setting like fantasy had. Instead of your elf archetype, you had your klingon/wookie archetype, etc.

If that had taken hold, and fast forward 20 years later, I wonder how that would have panned out for the current crop of genre writers who got their feet wet in fan fiction for their RPGs and all that.

 

[aramis erak]

Alternity was probably the greatest lost of the end of the TSR era and the pivot toward the d20 system. It had so much potential, with two great full fledged settings plus a decent (not great) implementation of another classic (Gamma World). It is too bad we never got to see what Alternity could have turned into or how Star*Drive would have developed into the sci-fi Forgotten Realms.

It had the Star•Drive setting book, Dark•Matter setting book, a Star Frontiers (incomplete) setting (in Dragon), the partial StarCraft setting (in a box, but not a full-up one; Grr...), and Gamma World (in a book)... and a convention adventure/conversion of the bughunters game setting (formerly a setting book for Amazing Engine).

3 full, 3 partials... and several fans doing speculative conversions of D&D... there was hope it would be the 3E engine... hope badly dashed.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Just read the Design Diaries.
1 point I REALLY liked was the Wounds system. I have been playing a lot of games with guns lately and getting kind of hard to describe whittling down health when under fire. If being shot at, I like the idea that it could really hurt you

 

[Wrchylde]

So basically the DC for anything is 20 minus your ability score and skill (score? rating? points?). Your GM then assigns difficulty modifiers which are the stepped +/- 4,6,8,12,20 dice. So my pretend for example: something easy-ish would have you roll and add a +d4 while something not as easy-ish would have you roll and subtract a -d4. At least that is the current pre alpha playtest.

I also find the initiative and damage systems to be interesting and fun.