What was Alternity like?

[Staffan]

With the success gradient system you often roll SMALLER dice as your success increases. The damage that gets done is more severe, but of a smaller number, which makes their armor MORE likely to entirely absorb it.

That actually makes sense, in a way. An Amazing hit means you hit the guy somewhere where it really hurts - center torso or head, basically. If you're wearing armor, it's pretty likely that those areas have extra protection.

One common "fix" that made this situation somewhat more palatable was to change Mortal damage so it inflicted secondary damage on a 1:1 basis instead of a 1:2 basis. That might have been part of the same rule patch that changed skill points (except option 1 instead of 2), but it's been a while so I can't remember really.

For those uninitiated: if you were hit with X points of wound damage, you also took X/2 points of stun damage, and if you got X points of mortal damage you also got X/2 points of wound and stun. This secondary damage ignored armor - basically, even if your armor stopped the bullet, you still got bruised (and maybe a concussion or cracked rib). However, characters only had half as many Mortal points as Wound and Stun, and the damage values reflected this - things that did mortal damage generally didn't inflict as many points of it. The "don't do as many points of mortal as you would do wounds" thing combined with the "halve secondary damage" rule combined to sometimes make Amazing hits do less damage than Good hits or even Ordinary hits - but changing secondary damage so mortals do it on a one-for-one basis fixes that.

 

[Starglim]

Hmm. It's interesting how some of Alternity was stripped for d20. I guess i'm trying to wrap my mind around how the multiple dice difficulty setting is any different than bumping up or down the DC in d20. Or how a d20 combat attack really is just a skill check against variably hard to hit opponents. Sounds like it was the writing and creativity behind the system that was so fantastic. Of course, all those guys still put out fantastic stuff.

Any dice system can be tweaked by skilled design, of course. I think that the Alternity mechanic has some good effects though.

• By rolling a separate die, particularly as a penalty, you have the chance for a low-skilled person to roll low on a penalty die or a highly skilled person to take a large penalty. That means there is a much wider range of skill difficulty before you reach the equivalent of a character in d20 who must roll a 1 to fail or 20 to succeed.
• The number required for a given character to succeed at a given skill is always the same. No DCs. Think about that for a second.

You're quite right about the level of creativity, though, which was superb.

 

[Starglim]

Or, if somebody was even moderately dedicated to not getting hit, situations in which the enemy had to roll up to 3d20 to attack, making that character more or less immune to ranged combat.

I'd say that there's a general problem in Alternity with tasks that have a lot of small penalties stacked on them becoming more or less impossible, unless you're Great Cthulhu . That was the reason for my house rule that someone else mentioned earlier: penalties of +5 and higher are rolled on an increasing number of d8s rather than d20s (+5 = +2d8, +6 = +3d8 and so on). I've found that it reined in a character with the specialty of not being hit that you mentioned (high DEX Free Agent with good levels of dodge ).

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I'll chime back in and say one thing I LOVED about Alternity was the scaling between character/vehicle/starship combat.

The difference between getting shot with a pistol and getting shot with a ship-bound laser cannon were logical and easily plotted. Not that it ever came up, but I liked that I could roll a few dice for starship damage and have it STILL fold downward to PC-scale damage without the need for buckets of dice or base multipliers (or both, in SWRPG) to keep the two in check.

--fje

 

[DMH]

Yes that is a cool thing about Alternity- the most dice you will roll in an average session is 4 (for powerful armor). When you start rolling more than 4, it is a really bad sign.

I like Jim's idea of using d8s instead of d20s for difficult rolls- keeps the curve.

 

[YoungAtHeart]

I have "Walter" and I agree that functionally it is a superb program. My problem is that I haven't been able to get it to generate a usefully formatted character sheet that I can print. I admit that I'm no expert at using this program so there may be a method that I don't know about. The author's website has little documentation and the link to the forums seems to be broken. Henry, how did you print your character sheets?

Do you have the program to upload? I've searched everywhere for it,even The Castle.

 

[Alzrius]

Do you have the program to upload? I've searched everywhere for it,even The Castle.

I think you can find it over here:

Downloads - RPG Programs

 

[Thomas Shey]

Probably not. Wizards cancelled it because they had no intention of providing needless alternatives to d20, since that was their focus RPG. Also, it really wasn't doing that well, from Wizard's POV. Wolfgang Baur and I think a couple of other authors tried to license DarkMatter so they could produce books for it (no idea what system they were intending to use), and it was priced prohibitively. Alternity is sadly dead, dead, dead.

Try local used book stores like Half-Priced Books, I see Alternity books in those kinds of places pretty often.

It was pretty odd, if I'm remembering correctly; the first print run of the Alternity books sold out perfectly fine. Then they did a second print run and it just--stopped. It was like there was a group that was quite interested in it, but the size was simply not as large as they wanted.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Alternity wasn't very well marketed to begin with, IMO. TSR created it and produced a confusing array of introductory products for it, many of which featured watered down aspects of the game's richest material. WotC treated it like a Cinderella stepchild -- a side cost to acquiring D&D -- but is still cannabalizing its great ideas for its d20 products.

Carl

There's also indications that in-coming Star Wars game--which the licensor apparently insisted use a D&D direct derivative for public recognition--was not something they wanted an internal competitor for. It might have been a different situation if they were able to use Alternity as the base for that instead.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And now I notice this is a necro and I'm responding to fifteen year old messages. Sigh.