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In our previous post celebrating Alternity, I talked about the general core mechanic – the d20 +/- step modifier dice and the triplet theory of results, damage, effects, and qualities.

So now let’s talk more about characters and character generation. As an example, we’ll use my character, Captain Ken Takashi of the Concord space station Lighthouse, at level 1.

As you’ll notice, Alternity PCs have the usual six D&D stats, with Wisdom renamed to Willpower and Charisma renamed to Personality. Fair enough. They are point buy, though, and normally can range from 4-14 though 8-13 is the typical spread. Int determines your number of skill points and this is a skill based game so you really can never afford to go under about 10 in it.

PCs also allegedly have classes and levels but frankly this is cruft bolted on to the system to make it friendly to the D&Ders. The class gets you a bennie at first level and then makes certain skills one point cheaper to buy. Ken is a Diplomat (Tech Op) – diplomats suck enough that they get to take a secondary class to get cheaper skills from, in this case the techie class. Other classes include Combat Spec (fighter) and Free Agent (thief). That’s it in core but you can also become a Mindwalker if you are into psionics.  No multiclassing or whatnot, you choose and that’s it, but it doesn’t matter later on except for skill costs.

You have a bunch of calculated values off your skills, including your Action Check (initiative), number of actions, speed, durability, and Last Resort (hero) points.

Skills

The heart of the system. Now, the core rules are a bit stingy with the skills.  You can only have about 5 discretionary broad skills and about 50 skill points (assuming an Int of 11) when you start. With the Alternity errata, the authors got the hint and immediately published the “optional rules” which are really law in all games – see Optional Rule Set 2 which gives that same character 7 discretionary broad skills and 66 skill points. You are still not uber or anything but you don’t suck so bad.

Keep in mind the skill system is VERY granular.  Want to shoot a pistol with a basic level of competence?  You’ll need to spend 6 points on the Ranged Weapon, Modern broad skill and then 4 points to get 1 rank in Pistol. That’s 10 points down already. I count 41 broad skills in the game with hundreds of specialty skills.

As you can see, for Captain Takashi I mainly had some basic broad skills at first level. I gave him a point in pistol and in a smattering of space navy type tech skills, a point of Leadership/Command since he’s in charge, and a point of defensive martial arts and intuition to simulate his pastime of Tai Chi. Bang, done! Simple enough, though there’s a lot of point fiddling.

Besides skills, you can buy a couple perks and/or flaws to round things out.  I didn’t, at least not at first level.

Walter

But there’s no sense in doing the math yourself! Because Alternity has the best fan-made character manager next to Byakhee, the awesome Call of Cthulhu character manager. It’s called the Alternity Character Manager, or Walter to us fans. Download and use it!  Some of the weapons listings are messed up but you can edit the XML yourself to fix them easily enough.

Kill

Is Captain Takashi too prosaic for you?  Want to see how much you can combat-optimize? Well, here’s my other starting character for the campaign, the Thuldan Warlion Markus Oroszlan. He is a mutant who was a shock trooper for the Thuldan Empire before moving to the Verge to find his own way in life.

Note his 16 STR, two points above normal human max, made possible by both mutation and Thuldan origin. He’s not great at shooting normal guns but in melee and with heavy weapons he is hell on wheels. Markus is the go to guy when our group needs to blow the bejeezusfuck out of something.

Leveling Up

You get XP, and when you get enough, you get a level.  For getting a level, you get skill points, approximately equal to the XP. Why wait for levels?  No good reason.  Anyway, you get better at skills but you don’t really become much more durable – see Takashi at level 10 and Markus at level 10 to see how much ten levels, the result of a year of playing every other week without fail, looks on you.

And that’s the Alternity character! Not, like Over the Edge simple but simpler than some games nowadays. Not as complicated as GURPS characters but more complicated than Silhouette characters; I’ve played space games with both.

Let’s ask you for Alternity Week here on Geek Related – have you played Alternity?  Did you enjoy it?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

This week, we celebrate the Alternity sci-fi game that has given many gaming groups years of fun.  I’ve played in and run a number of Alternity campaigns over time – most recently our two year long campaign The Lighthouse, but a fair number of others too.  I even played in the Living Verge campaign – they had an RPGA campaign for Alternity back in the day.

Today let’s explore the Alternity system itself. It is an interesting departure from most systems, and especially for the D&D-haunted halls of TSR/WotC! In terms of other major systems it is probably most similar to GURPS (strongly skill based, roll under) but has a lot of unique aspects to it.

The Core Mechanic

The core mechanic of Alternity uses a d20, but to roll low under a skill. Die rolls are modified not by flat numbers but by die “steps” (d4, d6, d8, d12, d20) where a negative is a bonus. Therefore if you are rolling your skill at “-1” you roll 1d20 -1d4.

The Skills

Alternity sports a very detailed skill system which covers combat as well as other skill use, an approach much more appropriate for modern and future games than normal d20 in my opinion. First, there are general broad skills and then ranks in specialty skills, all based off a relevant stat. Let’s say you want to shoot someone and have no skill in it.  You roll versus half your DEX stat, with a one step penalty – in other words, 1d20 + 1d4 trying to get under 1/2 your DEX.  If you have the broad skill “Modern Ranged Weapons,” you roll against your full stat with a one step penalty. If you have a specialty skill such as “MRW: Pistol,” you roll 1d20 versus your Pistol skill, which starts at your stat and adds skill ranks.  This provides a nice differentiation of levels of mastery in the system, and since you have to buy the broad skill to get specialty skills, it helps ensure that you aren’t great at one skill and awful at another that are very, very closely related. In this case, if you have ranks in Modern Ranged Weapon: Pistol, you at least have the broad skill for firing rifles or SMGs. A common weakness of granular skill systems is that you are pathetically unskilled in otherwise logically clustered skills.

Degrees of Success

The most unique part of the skill system is the precalculated degrees of success that the rolling scheme makes possible.  If you roll under your skill, you get an “Ordinary” success.  If you roll under half your skill, you get a “Good” success and under 1/4 your skill gets you an “Amazing” success. These numbers are precalculated on your character sheet and don’t change, the die step modifiers just affect your roll.

So let’s say you have Modern Ranged Weapons: Pistol 14. You write this on your sheet “Pistol: 14/7/3”. You can then see at a glance which threshold you roll under.

Different skills behave differently in terms of degree of success; in the case of weapons they actually do different amounts and types of damage. Let’s say you are firing a 9mm pistol at someone, it does d4+1 points of wound damage on an Ordinary success, d4+2 points of wound damage on a Good success, and d4 points of mortal damage on an Amazing success.  You write this “9mm pistol: d4+1w/d4+2w/d4m”, matching the O/G/A format of your skill entries. For more techie skills, you often need a number of successes (perhaps before another number of failures) to accomplish a task, and Ordinary successes give you one, Good two, and Amazing three successes against the total, which lets you go faster the better you are.

As a result, the runtime complexity of the system is mainly figuring out the relevant die steps of bonus and penalty. Then you roll, get your degree of success, and look up the right result. This encodes a lot of complexity in the system while making most of it not burdensome at play time.

Effects

The theme of “three kinds” carries through the system.  As there are the three levels of success, there are also three types of damage – Low Impact (LI), High Impact (HI), and Energy (En). This is an innate characteristic of a weapon – an axe is always LI, a 9mm pistol is always HI, and a plasma gun is always En.

Similarly, there are three different degrees of damage a weapon can do – stun, wound, or mortal. (Characters have stun, wound, and mortal damage tracks.)

Armor is damage ablative and has three ratings, for LI/HI/En.  So a specific type of body armor might be statted as “Battle Vest: d6-3/d6-2/d4-2” which means it will soak e.g. d6-3 points of LI damage every time you get hit.

And still more – there are three different levels of quality of damage, Ordinary, Good, and Amazing, designed to level set personal vs vehicular vs starship combat.  So a 9mm pistol does HI/O (High Impact, ordinary) damage, a heavy machine gun does HI/G (High Impact, Good) and a starship’s rail cannon does HI/A (High Impact, Amazing). Armor is rated similarly, such that Ordinary damage against Good armor gets automatically degraded a level. It’s like a more well thought out version of Palladium mega-damage.

Once you get the hang of the triplet system it flows pretty quickly. Its strength is that it encodes a lot of the desirable complexity in a semi-crunchy science fiction system without depending on exception based design.

There’s a blowthrough aspect to damage; if you deal wound damage to someone and their armor soaks it, they take half the damage one level down. So if you shoot someone for 6 wounds, that actually does 6 wounds (minus armor) plus three stuns (not affected by armor). This prevents armor from making you invulnerable, a problem with some ablative armor systems (old WFRP being a good example of that).

All this may sound complicated, but in the end here’s a meaningful combat stat block for a street goon.

Skills: Modern Ranged Weapon 12/6/3, MRW: Pistol: 14/7/3
Weapon: 9mm pistol (HI/O): d4+1w/d4+2w/d4m
Armor: Battle Vest: d6-3/d6-2/d4-2
Durability: Stun 11, Wound 11, Mortal 6

It Gets More Complicated From There

Yeah, OK, so many skills have unique little “rank benefits” where you get feat-like abilities when you have a bunch of ranks, and using things like grenades turn into minigames of their own. They had to fill 250 pages of Player’s Handbook and another 250 pages of Gamemaster’s Guide with something I guess.

Flaws

Probably the single biggest frustration players find with the system is how granular the skills are.  There’s between 100 and 200 skills, of which  you only have a dozen or so, and sometimes it’s unclear what the right one is in a given situation.  And stats are not high – though the game uses the familiar 6 “D&D stats”, they don’t go from 3-18, they hover more in the 8-13 range. So if you are relying on broad skills with their one step penalty you usually have a very poor chance of succeeding. The main mitigations for this is the more generous optional skill point system we’ll discuss in my next post on Characters, and the GM being generous in letting related skills be used to achieve tasks. “I want to disconnnect the shuttle’s security computer” could arguably use Security: Security Devices, Technical Science: Juryrig, Computer Science: Hardware, System Operation: Defenses, and probably several more skills (Demolitions!). A GM that takes a very exclusionary approach and says “Security Devices is the right skill for that so it’s the only one that can be used” is likely to piss off players.

A slightly lesser concern is how effective and mandatory armor is. A lot of foes end up having good armor and it turns shootouts into whittling-down fests decided by secondary stun damage.  We’ve been known to joke after bombarding an enemy with attacks that do mortal damage but all get ablated by armor that “at least my bullets are making him sleepy!” On the other hand, it makes character death less frequent – Alternity has “levels” but you don’t get D&D style hit points as you go up, you have the same ~10 wound points at level 10 that you do at level 1, so it could be a very deadly system.  Well, it is a deadly system, it’s just that good armor is not a luxury, you have to have it. If you are wanting more of a Star Wars feel, you are probably out of luck; any sane player gets as much armor on as they can; even moderate armor takes combat from 1-2 shot kills to 5-10 shot stun takedowns. In our game we’ve mitigated this a little by making armor half as effective against mortal damage. Mortal damage is “worse” so usually the system does fewer points of it – like that pistol above that does “9mm pistol: d4+1w/d4+2w/d4m” – but that means that RAW, armor effectively almost always does away with  mortal damage, which is supposed to be the coolest Amazing result.

And the final concern is more of a packaging/formatting concern – they smattered a bunch of fundamental rules into the Gamemaster’s Guide instead of putting them in the PHB. You can see the standard TSR “well you need to sell them both a player’s book and a GM book right” philosophy fray in this game; a proper redesign would put a lot of the GMG content into the PHB and then turn the GMG into more of a resourceful campaign and opponent book.  As it is we ignore the GMG most of the time until we have to look up a picky splash diagram or range modifier table. Hell, you could do without the GMG just fine as long as you don’t mind off-the-cuffing some of that other stuff.

Conclusion

These two flaws can be worked around, and in the end provides a quite satisfactory system, in the same weight class as GURPS. I’ve played a variety of other SF systems – Traveller, Traveller d20, Star Frontiers, Silhouette, GURPS – and I put Alternity right up there next to all of them for overall quality and play experience. It was quite a departure for TSR, too, who then fell into the trap of “d20 Modern” and killed off Alternity when they got the Star Wars license.

Let’s hear it for science fiction gaming.  Our group has been running a campaign using the venerable TSR game Alternity for, goodness, nearly two years now!  The campaign is called The Lighthouse, as it is mostly set aboard the eponymous Galactic Concord space station in the Star*Drive universe. Paul is our faithful GM, who is using pretty much all the extant Alternity sources as part of one huge megacampaign.

It’s an interesting game that has a good bit of Babylon 5/Star Trek flavor.  Each player has two characters, in fact.  One is part of what we have taken to calling the “A Team” which is mostly command staff aboard the Lighthouse.  I play Captain Ken Takashi (since promoted to Admiral), the commanding officer. Patrick plays the faithful station pilot Commander Martin St. John, Bruce plays the eccentric mechalus engineer Taveer, Tim plays Haggernak, the weren station Concord Administrator (police chief). Chris was playing a CIB spy who died, and now it’s arguable which of his characters is “A team” – we’ll call it Drest, the Pict warchief who has come aboard with a task force of Picts from Lucullus who are flinging their bodies into the interstellar fray. You can check out our character sheets here.

Our second characters come from the seedy underbelly of the station. Disaffected diplomats, criminals, and other miscreants.  I play Markus the retired warlion shock trooper (who is bartender of the station bar/casino The Corner, and deals arms on the side), Patrick plays Lenny the T’sa “diplomat” (a semiretired master thief), Bruce plays Lambert Fulson the demented illegal merchant, Tim plays Ambassador Peppin (a dissolute professor who spent most of his career preying on coeds), and Chris plays Ten-zil Kem (apparently a VoidCorp diplomat but really a sleeper agent for an opposing faction).

The Lighthouse is a space station with a stardrive, and it wanders the Verge, a poorly populated part of space cut off from the main galactic civilization by a galactic war some time ago, spreading the law of the new Galactic Concord. We have been caught up in a holy war spearheaded by a variety of demented alien races who seek humanity’s death and/or enslavement. Unfortunately, they did not count on our resourcefulness, tenacity, or enormous capacity for violence.

We write up each of our adventures in some detail; you can read each session’s delightful mix of adventure and in-jokes on our session summary page.

This week will be Alternity Week here on Geek Related; we’ll celebrate the the game with some in depth looks at the system, characters, and campaign. Chime in with your experiences if you’ve played it too!