Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 1218817" data-attributes="member: 14140">Short Version: While it does have flaws, the book is well worth its price and will serve a GM wanting to run a stargate game well from both a rules perspective and a genre setting perspective.Longer VersionPRO's1. Rules wise, this is one of the better iterations of the d20 system. Significant imporvements in terms of actions, feats and skills as well as a wonderful initiative addition stand out. The classes are good and the chargen fairly well developed. Its almost worth the price of the book, this cleaner d20, in itself.2. Setting background is fabulous. Mostly non-rules yet it takes up about a third of the book. Very informative and useful as both reference and inspiration. Again, alone almost worth the price.While i list these in brief, these two are big IMO. So, dont let the fact that I spend more bandwidth explaining the cons to give you reasons to believe the cons outweigh the pros.CONs1. While the non-mechanics Sg stuff is well done and researched, the mechanics were not. One of the mechanics lead guys admitted he had not seen most of the episodes "by a long shot" and it shows. The initial "in the book" write up of the alien stuff seems more designed to fit a generic scifi "alien stuff is real powerful" thing than to emulate the show. The staff weapons and goa'uld defense shields just did not match the clear evidence in the show. other items such as jaffa armor and naquidah generators were just missing. Some of this is being handled in pre-errata (staff weapon and pdf being almost totally changed) and will be corrected in full in their System lord nook (and in theory posted in an official PDF but that has yet to be seen.)2. The overall feel and sense of the book is one of a hard-military scifi game. it feels a whole lot more like say a hammer's slammers game or maybe a sgt rock on other planets. There is a lot of very precise rules for gear and equipment and it definitely seems to show its roots in the guns and war crowd. If thats your cup-o-tea, then it will be great. For me, thats not how i see the show, so I need to cut away some of their precision edges.3. In a couple of cases, they make rather uninspired or just plain silly rules decisions. Uninspired... they use hit points, called wounds and vitality with quite a bit of vaugery about what is a hit and what is a miss and they use an old "standard" autofire mechanic which IMO has only "thats how most games have done it" to go for it. (It definitely doesn't seem to be going to emulate how autofire is portrayed in this show.) Silly... well for all their precision on gear and encumbrance which tells you to track the weight for your jar of face paint and bottle of water purification tablets (listed at 1/2 lb each if i recall on their extensive equipment tables) they also acknowledge as intentional "conceit of the system" they carry over from spycraft. Specifically, ammo has no weight!!! Thats right, campers, if you spend your three gear picks on a jar of face paint, a bottle of water purifying tablets and an assault sling for your P90 (as opposed to a standard sling) you must track that extra weight for encumbrance purposes. However, if you decide to spend those three gear picks on 300 rounds of extra ammo (six clips worth.... tripling your standard ammo loadout) then this extra ammo is no weight at all.4. A pet peeve of mine is that the book did not include a sample startup scenario. I think such are vital for a game book core book to include because they give newcomers an immediate jumping off point to get an idea about actually playing the game. While it is becoming common for games to no longer include these, its a thing i think needs to be there. Their extensive combat example I think is intended to cover some of this but it is frought with errors.The "problems" are easy to fix (Well swapping out hit points takes a bit of effort) and relative to the good stuff are not that serious.As a final summary, i am using their book for my game, with my own house rules to plug the problems, so that should give you a rough notion of my overall feel. it is worth it.</blockquote>

Verification