Alternity Player's Handbook: 1997 Gen Con Limited Preview Edition

Alternity RPG

by Bill Slavicsek

Which future do you want to play? The Alternity Player's Handbook provides everything you need to explore any type of science fiction, from modern-day campaigns to far-future space operas. This full-color book, written especially for players, features a "fast-play" introduction that allows you to start playing quickly. This isn't the AD&D "RM" game in space; this is a brand new skill-based game that puts any future in your hands

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming, Games, Science Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published April 20, 1998

About the author

Bill Slavicsek's gaming life was forever changed when he discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 1976. He became a gaming professional in 1986 when he was hired by West End Games as an editor. He quickly added developer, designer, and creative manager to his resume, and his work helped shape the Paranoia, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Torg roleplaying games. He even found some time during that period to do freelance work for D&D 1st Edition. In 1993, Bill joined the staff of TSR, Inc. as a designer/editor. He worked on a bunch of 2nd Edition material, including products for Core D&D, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape. In 1997, he was part of the TSR crowd that moved to Seattle to join Wizards of the Coast, and in that year he was promoted to R&D Director for D&D. In that position, Bill oversaw the creation of both the 3rd Edition and 4th Edition of the D&D Roleplaying Game. He was one of the driving forces behind the D&D Insider project, and he continues to oversee and lead the creative strategy and effort for Dungeons & Dragons.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an RPG veteran from the early 80's, I love this RPG. I wish my 5e D&D group (all newbies to the game) would get spines & try something new! I even have the Game Master's Guide, plus many source books, to have very interesting games. Ah,well. Back to throwing Ogres & Demons at them.....

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sci-fi in RPGs and video games has been a harder sell than fantasy for quite a while. I suspect that's because when you say "fantasy," there's an agreed on template that people think of. Bearded wizards, and pretty elves, and vicious orcs, and majestic dragons, and so on. Sure, there are IPs that break this cycle, but they're often less popular.

Sci fi is quite a bit harder to pin down, since it varies so much from universe to universe. Who else is out there other than humans, or is anyone? How do people get around the universe? What is possible technologically, and what is ridiculous: FTL travel? FTL communications? Psychic powers? Strong AI? Gravitic manipulation? Grey-goo nanotechnology? Transhumanism? There's no agreed-upon standard for any of that, so it's not surprising that TSR's generic sci fi game was less popular than their flagship fantasy game.

Of course, it may also be because when WotC picked it up, they killed it in short order after they acquired the Star Wars license to avoid competing with their own products.

Anyway, Alternity. Characters are defined by skills, classes (well, they're more like archetypes), and levels that are just a vague indication of character power and how many skill points they have. The basic mechanic isn't so bad; it involves rolling a d20 and then adding or subtracting another die, with the size changing depending on how difficult the action is. It's a little gimmicky, but it works pretty well and has a kind of curve to it, unless the die size is a d0. It also allows for multiple actions with a single die roll, just by using different difficulty dice: rolling a d20, d4, d6, and d8 all at once, for example, and then adding the results of the d20 to the other three dice to get different numbers. Those numbers are broken into degrees of quality often abbreviated MOGA: Marginal is higher than the associated stat + skill, Ordinary is equal or below the stat + skill, Good is equal or below half the stat + skill, and Amazing is equal or below one quarter the stat + skill. This is a neat way to break down success levels with a single die roll, and also gets used elsewhere in the system--equipment is rated on the MOGA scale as well, for example.

There are a few problems that creep in due to its attempt to be generic, though. One is the breadth of the skill system. The system of broad skills with specialty skills underneath them--for example, Interaction with the subskills Bargain, Charm, Interview, Intimidate, Seduce, and Taunt--is well-organized and works fine, but there are too many skills and far too few points for them.

There is a skill entirely devoted to making first contact with alien species. There are separate skills for Perception and Intuition, with the first defined as things you could pick up on using your physical senses, and Intuition as things you could not (which does lead to the question of how could one train their Intuition). The Stealth skill specifies that it has to be rerolled every round, which makes any kind of prolonged stealth impossible since failure is automatica if the d20 ever comes up as a 20. There's a Deduce skill, which implies that it's used for things the character knows but the player doesn't. The specific examples are things like an engineer having to repair the warp core and needing to use Deduce to figure out how to do it, which makes me wonder what the point of that engineering skill is. Hacking and Computer Operations both exist, but Hacking is specifically called out as being able to do everything Computer Operations can and more. They are under separate broad skills, but still.

This kind of extremely-specific specialization isn't so bad if the system allows a character--called a hero in Alternity--enough points to cover a reasonable basis of competency, but that's not the case here at all. The number of starting skill points is based on your Intelligence, and most characters will have ~40 or so. Skills typically are ~3 points, +1 per skill level past the first (a starting skill level of 3 costs a total of 12 to buy, 3+4+5), -1 flat if it's in your archetype. So, a starting character can buy 13 skills at level 1 out of several dozen skills, less if they want to buy any perks or broad skills other than the six everyone starts with.

Advancement is pretty limited as well. Second level provides six more skill points to spend, +1 per level after that. Taking account the costs given above, and the rate of progression, a hero could get to skill level 12 (the maximum possible) in a single skill only after spending all their skill points for the first nine levels they attain. They wouldn't be able to buy any other skills, or any of the advantages possible with level, such as acting faster or raising their attributes, or any new skills.

Some heroes.

As befits a game designed to be generic, the aliens available to play stick to familiar archetypes--the greys, the cyborgs, the big furry killing machines, the lizard people, the creepy flying guys--but the choice of those specific examples is still a bit odd because two chapters of the book are listed as optional, but are required if you use the aliens as written. The greysFraal require the psionics rules and the CylonsMechalus require the cybertech rules. There are also no rules listed for making up your own aliens to play and balancing them with the existing ones, though perhaps the Alternity Gamemaster Guide contains them.

The computer and hacking rules are basically the same as those in Shadowrun, and other than the obvious change in system, if you know one you can understand the other. DeckersGridpilots plug into their cyberdecksgridcasters with datajacksneural interface jacks, using them to tap into the MatrixGrid and projecting their avatarshadow in and using various programsprograms to manipulate, fight, hide from, steal, and otherwise interact with what they find there. Or, if you like, it's all ripped off of Neuromancer, which admittedly is a pretty good place to go to for inspiration.

There is a note that hackers can't break into financial systems because they're so secure, which is incredibly hilarious based on developments in the real world. And much like characters, AI limits on how many skills they have leave them about on the level of a blind idiot savant--the best AI in the galaxy can match the best human in the galaxy at one specific subskill, but can't do anything else. Otherwise, it'll have no more than three or four skills at any competence. There are some rules later to mitigate this, but as written, an AI with access to the Grid, a being that can think thousands of times faster than a human and access the sum total of human knowledge, probably won't know as much as a character with a Ph. D will. That's really, really odd in a sci fi game.

Much of the technology is classifed by Progress Levels, which are pretty similar to GURPS tech levels. This is mostly functional and works okay, though there are some oddities--Lawyers are listed as PL4, the Industrial Age, which would have surprised the Romans.

The assumptions that go onto the Progress Levels come out in the equipment chapter, though, and that's where you can see how the mechanics of Alternity constrain the types of stories you can tell with it. The way weapon damage and health are structured, a single shot will put someone into serious hurt, and a single well-aimed shot--an Amazing one, in the game's terminology--will probably kill its target outright, unless the target is wearing armor. Even then it might knock them out, and since both armor and damage are random rolls, armor is no guarantee of protection. Furthermore, FTL interstellar travel and communication are assumed, whereas transhumanism beyond cybernetic enhancement is not, making it very difficult to use Alternity to play something like Revelation Space. The low competence and fragility of characters also makes Star Wars pretty hard to do, though it would be well-suited for, say, Alien. Or Firefly . Wash is a good example of the guy mentioned above who dumps all his XP into a single skill.

The last three chapters are all optional rules, containing mutations, psionics, and cybernetics. The mutations could be used to model transhuman enhancement, but there's no mechanism for point buy, unlike everything else in the game. That makes it hard to play a character who's been purposely enhanced, because there's no way to determine how balanced they are with the other characters.

Psionics is pretty comprehensive, though the Biokinesis skill gets a bit far from conventional sci fi psychic powers. Creating a staff of glowing psychic light or absorbing other people's diseases is a bit more supernatural than scientific--to the extent that psionics and scientific belong in the same paragraph, anyway. In addition, psionic powers require skill points to buy, meaning any psychic hero who wants to actually be able to use their powers well will be completely incompetent in the physical world. That does fit the closeted mystic archetype, but it's a bit different if the game includes an entire race of psychics.

The chapter on cybergear is basically straight Shadowrun, including the various modifications and the overall limitation on having too much chrome. Not being able to replace too many parts shows up in tons of RPGs, but I haven't really seen it in much of the source material. I suppose it's primarily a game balance consideration.

There's also a psychological affliction called "cykosis" that causes poor impulse control, anger issues, and other movie insane people symptoms. Its sufferers are called cykoteks, pronounced--and this is a direct quote from the book--"psychotics."

I've seen cheesier things in RPGs before, but I certainly can't call them to mind.

To summarize, Alternity is a high crunch, "generic" system, for a subset of generic that includes gritty, low-key sci fi with assumed FTL and a high focus on using the rules as a physics simulator. That's still enough to fit rather a lot of series, though, so if you love skill-based systems and rules for basically everything, take a look at it.

[David Sarkies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, a sci-fi ropleplaying game I can work with
9 August 2013

For quite a while I had been looking for a science-fiction roleplaying game that was more like Dungeons and Dragons than a roleplaying game that involved either this:



or this:



and while I might think these are pretty cool:



as well as these:



this really annoys me:



as does this:



and while talking about science-fiction characters that tend to rub me up the wrong way, I simply cannot forget him:



Anyway, enough of all these pictures, and more on this particular book. Anyway, most of the science-fiction roleplaying games tended to all be single setting games, based around (usually) Star Wars (and while there may have been a Star Trek game around, I am not sure whether it was all that popular). What I was looking for is something more generic, much like Dungeons and Dragons. While Dungeons and Dragons did have their own specific worlds, what I really liked about it was that you could, and were encouraged to, create your own. This means that if you wanted a world without elves, you could create one (and while I did create some worlds, I generally included elves, though one of them the elves were arrogant, stuck up creatures, that believed themselves to be superior to everybody else, so while players could play elves, they tended to be treated with hatred and contempt).

Science-fiction poses a different problem because the scope is much larger. You could create a space opera, much like Star Wars (or Star Trek) or you could create a near future dystopia (such a Nueromancer) or even a modern setting where you are investigating alien sightings (much like the X-files). You could even create a amalgamation of all three (though that would be quite difficult).
However, what I wanted was a system that was generic that I could and and remove what I wanted to create a world (or universe) that I liked. I tried it with Traveler, but the rules were so complicated that I ended up ditching it. Shadowrun was cool, but once again, it was a single system setting, and to turn it into a space opera with magic was simply too difficult to do (since you have to create rules for space ship combat, which can be very difficult if it does not exist in the system).

Alternity actually provided everything for that, but the only problem with this was that it appeared and then pretty much disappeared quite quickly after that. It has since been replaced with the much more generic d20 Modern and d20 future, which I have played recently (though not since I left Adelaide). Also, while the rules were similar to Dungeons and Dragons, it was somewhat difficult to amalgamate the two systems since there were enough differences to end up making them incompatible. Anyway, when it comes to magic, I do end up preferring the Shadowrun system of magic where spell casting tends to exhaust you, and while you can theoretically cast any number of spells that you like, the more you cast the more dangerous it becomes. Such a system, unfortunately, does not exist in Dungeons and Dragons and I also suspect that it does not necessarily exist in Alternity either because when you come to science-fiction roleplaying you tend to discard magic in favourite of mind powers

[Mark Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alternity was the first generic Scifi RPG we discovered or the first Scifi in general if you consider Star Wars to be SciFantasy as I do. While by today's standards the character creation was labored and time consuming, some character creation options and stats were unbalanced, and systems sometimes a bit clunky, at the time it was cutting edge.

While now it's outdated and a few attempts to try it out again fizzled, I still haven't seen anything that seems to replace it for IP-free generic Scifi systems. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but in my mind Alternity sits on its moldering throne, now rendered useless and doddering by age but with no clear successor to replace it.