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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 6150705" data-attributes="member: 93119">I played a bit of Alternity when it came out. It had/has some features I appreciate as well as some I just loathe.Some stuff I liked:The settings were really good in my opinion. Dark•Matter and Star*Drive are both awesome. Dark•Matter was basically X-Files with the serial numbers filed off which was great in my mind because it allowed for mystery and exploration games without being actual horror. Star*Drive was similar for sci-fi. It was an amazingly fleshed out universe that didn't have to deal with the external needs of some media license (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc). It felt very much Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica.The fact the game was fairly modular, in that you didn't ever need to include the paranormal or supernatural in a game if you didn't need them. The game could be totally playable as just a straight modern era setting. In fact this is setting a lot of my games used.Stuff I did not like:The situation dice to me was one of those things that looked interesting on paper but turned out to really suck in actual play. It made results more swing-y than they needed to be. You could spend all of your time developing a skill, roll well on your control dice, only to be completely screwed up by the situation dice. Luck is already built into the roll of the control dice the situation dice was unneeded.Alternity's interesting ideas:Despite the situation die being a pain in the ass I found the system's degrees of success to be really interesting. Since you were rolling under your ability or skill score, if you rolled under half the value you got an excellent success, and if you rolled under a quarter of the value you got an amazing success. This made for some good "yes and..." narratives.In combat damage was informed by the level of success. An attack like a punch normally did only stun damage but with an amazing success it did wound damage. This was a great system to allow differentiation in weapons. Two weapons might do the same amount of damage but the better one might do a worse type of damage at a lower threshold of success.A lot of the core of Alternity got ported to D20 as D20 Modern. While I'm not the fondest of D20 Modern's rules if you're itching to play Alternity and don't want to spend as much money on old books you can go the Modern route. There was a <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20modern/we/20031007a" target="_blank">web enhancement</a> that covered the conversion of Alternity to AD&D 2E which allowed for the further conversion to D20 Modern.</blockquote>

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