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Message: <blockquote data-quote="masshysteria" data-source="post: 3283420" data-attributes="member: 16055">Alternity1. The SystemIf you want to get away from d20, my suggestion is Alternity.Alternity has a unified game mechanic, like d20, so everything is resolved in a similar manner. This makes it easier to learn, GM, and pick-up and play. The game mechanic is to roll a control die (a d20) and then add or subtract a modifier die (d4-d20). That will then give you a failure, ordinary success, good success, or amazing success.Alternity was designed to support sci-fi and near-future games, but is expandable to all sorts of levels. I'd consider Alternity to be closer to cinematic realism that d20's heroic fantasy.To run an Alias type game, get the Dark Matter setting and just leave out the supernatural stuff. There are enough agent and conspiracy power groups to give you a good setting. On the character sheets just take a black marker and censor out the skills you'll never use or don't want the players to see (yet). It can help establish that a feeling of paranoia.Of course, the books are no longer published, but are easily found on eBay and often in used book stores.If you go this route, great support can be found at <a href="http://www.alternity.net/" target="_blank">http://www.alternity.net/</a>--OR--Check out Spycraft 2.0. Sure it is d20, but with some of the campaign options you could create an Alias type game quite easily.There are others here who are much more knowledgeable that me about Spycraft.2. The AtmosphereI'm not in favor of taking away the character sheets especially if your players will be learning a new system. But you know your players better than I do, so maybe it will work fine.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Perhaps you could cross everything out and just leave them the titles of the skills they have ranks in, so they have a general idea of what they can do without getting killed.Do you want you players to trust one another, or do you want to build mistrust?I've found with a conspiracy game, there are a few things that a GM can do from time to time that can help increase the tension:Give the occasional red herring - As a GM, enjoy the time the PC's spend researching and going in the wrong directions.Leave things unanswered - At the end of an adventure or episode, don't leave everything tied up nicely with all the questions answered.End on a cliff hanger - If you game frequently enough, cliff hangers can be great. If you don't, it can be painful if your player start the game forgetting why they are in their current situation.Force the PC to make morally difficult decisions - Do they torture the enemy in the interrogation because they need the information now and risk the loss of help/respect from "friends" within the agency? Do they shoot into a crowd hoping to stop the bad guy? Basically, do they resort to evil to stop evil and what are the consequences if they do?Have events happen around the PCs regardless of their actions - Bombs don't wait for the PCs to stop them, they go off at predetermined times. Enemies and allies put plans into action, sometimes without all the information. Create a time line of events and perhaps the PCs will prevent somethings, but not others. The PCs need to feel success and failure.</blockquote>

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