Free League's Alien RPG - My Experience

[prabe]

I bought the hardcover. I played like three sessions. I'm probably never going to play it again, or run it. I do not feel ripped off.

 

[Puddles]

Thanks for sharing the experiences you had. I am planning a one-shot for this, but will be using my own agenda cards rather than any premade ones (I bought the hardback, not the starter set). I was planning to make my agendas a split between good agendas, bad agendas and funny agendas, with more “carrot” and less “stick” than the official ones appear to be. An example of a funny one I have created is needing to find a certain chocolate bar in a vending machine (it will only be in 1 vending machine on the ship), and getting a major personal win for escaping with the chocolate bar, and a minor personal win for eating it before you die. (There will be team wins and personal wins to encourage risk taking).

 

[hawkeyefan]

My group played the starter set adventure over three sessions. I think the agendas are great for shorter cinematic play. I do think they require player buy in. Like, I had one player who didn’t want his character to go against any of the others at any point. He basically ignored his agenda when it would have been relevant.

But everyone else dived right in. I think it helped to have the movies to lean on. The agendas absolve the players from the douchery of their character.

I like most of the mechanics quite a bit. i think you have to really keep the pressure on the characters. I think the panic results could do with some expansion to suit more situations.

I had plans to run a campaign after the initial adventure, using the surviving characters along with some new ones. Definitely would have introduced some new agendas at that point. We never got to it, but maybe some day.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I bought the hardcover. I played like three sessions. I'm probably never going to play it again, or run it. I do not feel ripped off.

I have yet to play it, and don't really foresee having a chance to in the near future, but I'm glad I own it anyway.

 

[aramis erak]

This weekend I played the Alien RPG, which was the third Year Zero Engine derived game I've played (following Forbidden Lands and Vaesen). We played a "one-shot" adventure from the Starter Box (maybe it was our style of play, but it took us the entire weekend to finish - close to 14 hours of play). The Cinematic style used for one-shots included agenda cards to pass out in secret to each player.

14 hours is about right - I've run Chariots 3 times, and it's always been 12+ hours.

Your characters are weaker than in other Year Zero games (you have health points equal to your Strength score, but no other ability scores are tied to health - so you only take damage to your HP).

While accurate to the math, yet ultimately false due to misused/misunderstood rules.
Firstly, each attribute in MYZ (see p. 87) or FL (p. P84) is damaged by a different damage type. It's not like Traveller where you pick which takes the gunshot.
Second, all three have very similar crit tables.
Third, in Vaesen, pushing does the same damage as a weapon hit.

You're not going to have access to weapons or armor, and you're going to be constantly outclassed by your opponents - which I guess is the point of the fiction.

Overall, False. In Chariots, you won't, unless you improvise some, but in Destroyer of worlds, all the pregen PCs are armed, armored, and skilled in combat, and mostly facing non-xenomorph foes... until the last chapter.

The agenda cards were wholly negative, creating a constant PvP environment. Agendas included: you want to kill the rest of the party, you must do anything you can to preserve the xenomorph, etc. Every character death was because another character killed them. In this way it feels more like a board game than a typical RPG.

That's an extreme reaction by players to them. About as subtle as a bull moose in a glassblower's storefront. The only point where the PVP combat happened prior to the very last scene, in 3 plays of Chariots was when it was a reaction to stress... And that in the run where the Synthetic drew the "Preserve a specimen" ...

Just for my playstyle and preferences, maybe a single 4-hour game would be okay. I wouldn't want to get invested in a longer story, however.

Note that campaign play is not a constant stream of facing xenomorphs; the campaigns I ran were two merchant campaigns, where it really felt more like YZE does Traveller, at least until they encountered a xenomorph, and one abortive Marines campaign... where they were on a non-XX-xenoform mission against the Progressive Peoples Union...

It's very different. Intentionally so. And called out as such in the GM's section of the corebook.

 

[Digdude]

I think the best way to run alien is to not let your players know they are playing alien. Just make up a trad traveller story.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I think the best way to run alien is to not let your players know they are playing alien. Just make up a trad traveller story.

Means not being able to use the Panic rules in something like Alien or Mothership. So just another trad SF game where everyone's unnervingly level-headed at all times and calmly sweeping and clearing all hostile targets.

 

[Retreater]

While accurate to the math, yet ultimately false due to misused/misunderstood rules.
Firstly, each attribute in MYZ (see p. 87) or FL (p. P84) is damaged by a different damage type. It's not like Traveller where you pick which takes the gunshot.

Right. Perhaps I didn't elaborate completely enough. I get that in Forbidden Lands that most attacks damage Strength - though a few damage Agility, Wits, or Empathy. This is most commonly due to pushing skill checks. Pushing skill checks in Alien is a good way to collect Stress - which impacts every die roll on a downward spiral. And you're less likely to have a chance to heal HP or Stress than you are in Forbidden Lands.

Overall, False. In Chariots, you won't, unless you improvise some, but in Destroyer of worlds, all the pregen PCs are armed, armored, and skilled in combat, and mostly facing non-xenomorph foes... until the last chapter.

And I said in my first post that I was reviewing it based on my experience with the Starter Box.

That's an extreme reaction by players to them. About as subtle as a bull moose in a glassblower's storefront. The only point where the PVP combat happened prior to the very last scene, in 3 plays of Chariots was when it was a reaction to stress... And that in the run where the Synthetic drew the "Preserve a specimen" ...

Most of the agenda cards were "you'll do anything to X" which you have to assume means up to killing off the other players - especially when your character is described as unhinged and greedy.
Leaving things vague to dodge spoilers. Including both pregens and the stable replacement NPCs, we had 3 characters killed by space poison administered by another player. We had another 2 trapped in a room with the alien to be killed, at separate times. We had another shot in the back of the head with a shotgun at point blank range, another thrown down a shaft as he was bleeding out.
That style of play - I just can't do it. It's not fun. It's the bleakest form of entertainment in the guise of cooperative fun.

 

[payn]

Most of the agenda cards were "you'll do anything to X" which you have to assume means up to killing off the other players - especially when your character is described as unhinged and greedy.
Leaving things vague to dodge spoilers. Including both pregens and the stable replacement NPCs, we had 3 characters killed by space poison administered by another player. We had another 2 trapped in a room with the alien to be killed, at separate times. We had another shot in the back of the head with a shotgun at point blank range, another thrown down a shaft as he was bleeding out.
That style of play - I just can't do it. It's not fun. It's the bleakest form of entertainment in the guise of cooperative fun.

I actually like this kind of thing in a one shot, particularly an Alien one shot, but can totally see how secret agenda cards are just promoted PvP.

 

[Retreater]

I actually like this kind of thing in a one shot, particularly an Alien one shot, but can totally see how secret agenda cards are just promoted PvP.

I have a very clear line of where I'm okay with it. A competitive board game with a traitor mechanic, I can handle about 2-3 hours. I don't want to invest myself in it more than that. A 14-hour RPG that took an entire weekend was excessive for this style of play (for me). To be fair, I also wouldn't want to do a 14-hour session of a deathtrap dungeon with expendable characters.
If I'm going to be playing 4 or more hours, I want a decent chance of success in a mission. This is why games like Arkham Horror don't appeal to me (6+ hours just to know you're all going to lose at the 2 hour mark, and you have 4+ hours of sitting there feeling hopeless).