Last summer I played Alternity almost exclusively. My wife's brother and his friends all really enjoyed the modern X-Files feel of Dark*Matter and I had brought my laptop but no gaming books ... I'd bought a few Alternity things to convert, and for about 15 bucks I picked up the core books as PDFs and a few other things. It was alot of fun.
I really enjoy Alternity, on the whole, and find it a very usable and elegant system ... but there ARE a few flaws with it that I don't think others have really pointed out.
1) "Saving Throws" ... while everything is "skill based", and that's a good thing, there are some problems with it. It's very easy to ignore or forget about skills that may come up very often, slowing or stopping games entirely if the GM isn't good about reminding players they need them. This couples largely with my next problem. So you can do a CoC style game, but if one player doesn't realize that he needs "Mental Resistance" and puts no ranks into it, well, he's well and truly buggered.
2) Untrained Skill Checks -- Making a check untrained involves rolling at HALF the matched skill. With abilities ranging from 4-14, the best you can really hope for is to shoot for a 7. The base difficulty for those checks is 1d20+1d4 ... so the chances of making an untrained check are abysmal. As above, if you don't buy up a few "saving throw" type skills, you may find yourself entirely defenseless against something that comes up regularly. This is all well and good if a player knowingly makes that decision, but playing a "rough and willful" character and only realizing halfway in that he forgot Mental Resistance and gets dominated by psionic creatures constantly could be rough.
3) Combat bogs down quite a bit. You roll to shoot, unless they rolled to dodge, then your roll to shoot is changed, you hit, so you roll for damage based on the SUCCESS of that hit, and they roll Armor to absorb your hit, so your hit might be entirely unaffected. 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. While some damage will get through on smaller tracks, we found it quite possible for people to take LESS damage if people regularly rolled Amazing successes against them. Even moderate armor then created situations in which people soaked up a rather extraordinary number of "hits". 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.
--fje
