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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5142546" data-attributes="member: 80487">Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) came and went pretty quickly. I don't remember the lack of "leveling up" being a common complaint. However, successor Gamma World (1978) added a system in which each experience-point level granted a roll on a table yielding +1 to an ability score, or chance to hit, or damage.Designer Jim Ward, though, was (really!) the original "Monty Haul". He liked high-powered games with lots of crazy toys for the players, and that's what he designed. One dice worth of hit points to start? Heck, no -- try a dice per point of constitution (or "physical endurance", as the case might be)! You can be a mutant with a few far-out powers, or a pure-strain human able to use the whole range of "high tech" magical gadgets to be found (and also possessing "leadership potential" to gather followers).Then there's the world to explore, full of places and people and monsters and machines with which to deal. Lack of interesting developments? Not likely!One concern I recall, looming even larger in the case of Traveller, was the sheer vastness of possibilities. Where MA confined itself to a single world, and a very small one at that -- a giant, but hardly planet-sized, starship -- GDW's game presented the GM with the task of running a universe of which a planet was but a part.The main problem with MA, I think, was one that continued to limit the popularity of GW through however many versions. It was just too wild for a lot of folks. Marvel Comics have nothing on Ward for sheer "Wah-Hoo!".Maybe the usual perspective back then was less laser-focused on "stats" and more interested in the bigger picture of what players do in the game.</blockquote>

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