Alternity clone?

[Nagol]

IIRC, Wizards started production on 3E almost immediately after acquiring TSR. It really makes me wonder how far they really wanted to push Alternity. I think they could have still stood behind it, but jettisoned it due to not wanting one of their rpg systems to compete with another in house different ruleset system.

To have the D20 system to stand behind this was a minimal worry and Alternity got upgraded to the D20 system. I just don't understand why some companies don't like having diferrent rulesets under the same roof.

It's likely it was a consideration of resources -- both cash and personnel. Much like Everway, the WotC RPG that was released and abandoned as soon as D&D was acquired and Ars Magica which was acquired and sold by WotC about the same time.

WotC simply didn't have the resources to spread to the other products while attending to their premier brand.

 

[DMH]

Just because nobody is currently publishing a "clone" of the Alternity system is no reason for disappointment.

Sure there is. I would like to legally write supplements for it. I would give my eyeteeth, left arm and both legs to be able to write up a post apocalyptic setting ala Gamma World and get paid for it.

As for Starcaft, the boxset was [censored]. The hardcover planned to follow it would have been much better, but the line was canned and the designers, rightly, gave it their all to get The Final Church for Dark*Matter and Externals for Star*Drive out.

 

[darjr]

Wasn't the successor to 2nd ed D&D being worked on even before TSR was acquired?

 

[CarlZog]

Sure there is. I would like to legally write supplements for it. I would give my eyeteeth, left arm and both legs to be able to write up a post apocalyptic setting ala Gamma World and get paid for it.

Fair enough. My point was simply that folks shouldn't let Alternity's out-of-print status keep them from playing the game. Admittedly, for a professional in the industry, there ain't much profit in OoP.

Carl

 

[El Mahdi]

... I missed Alternity ...snip... What made it so great?

The question to me is - what makes Alternity such a stand out? Was it the mechanical system? Was it the setting?

The system incorporated a mechanic for degree of success rather than just a binary hit/miss system. Based on your roll, you had three different categories of success. Depending on your degree of success, you inflicted a varying amount of damage, inflicting more with a higher degree of success. Surprisingly, it wasn't exceedingly complicated. Personally I think it actually moved faster than D&D 3E with iterative attacks. It modeled modern weapon combat (fire arms, energy weapons, etc. - even light sabers/star swords) very well and made it quite simple.

Honestly though, it wasn't the mechanics or system that really attracted me to it, it was the campaign settings. The two main settings for the system, Star*Drive and Dark*Matter, were simply outstanding. I still have all of my books for both settings and easily ported them to D20 Modern/Future.

Star*Drive was just an incredibly huge and adaptable setting. I even prefer it to Star Wars. It's a huge setting with seeds and material for just about any type of sci-fi game. It's only limited by the GM's imagination. There's enough material just in the core Star*Drive setting book to provide for years of gaming. And, the adventures (there's only just a few though) with the Externals plots, were really good. Unfortunately, the system died before they were ever able to really culminate the adventures plots, in both the published adventures and the novels. Although, there's a massive amount of fan made material at some of the links that others already posted in this thread.

Both the settings and the system still have many devoted fans that continue to generate material for them, and very willingly share it with the gaming community.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Yes, Alternity is a great system. It also had it´s share of problems:

The dice mechanic was pretty non-intuitive - easy to use once you´d got it, but not as easy to pick up and use than others. Reminded me of the Victory Point System from Fading Suns in that regard.

The Corebooks repeated themselves, the DMG revisting most chapters the PHB had already described, adding on rules and clarifying things. I (and many others) hate this approach, because it means very often that you don´t really know where the rule you´re currently searching for is mentioned.

The alien races where as shallow as it gets: "hello we´re smart and frail, and called Fraal!" "No, i´m not a Klingon! Yes, well, i look like a werewolf and i´m called Weren, and yes, maybe i´m aimed at the 'Hulk Smash!' players, but..."

The character system is pretty much a hybrid, saying "no, i´m not a class system though we were afraid to not include something that at least looks like classes." Unnecessary, in my opinion.

These are minor niggling things - a great system, but i know many RPGers which didn´t really get into it because of one of these points.