But it really isn't, and it has some interesting and useful properties. Instead of varying the difficulty by changing the target number, you add or subtract the result of one (sometimes more) situation die of a size according to the difficulty.Īt first glance, this appears similar to some dice pool mechanics. Here's where the system gets a little unusual. So far, this sounds like a standard "roll under target number" mechanic. If they roll one quarter of their skill total or less, they get an amazing success. To succeed at a task, the player must roll equal or under r the PC's skill number to succeed (I will detail how skills are handled shortly.) If the character roll half this number, they get a good success. The basic dice of the Alternity system is the D20. Let's hold of on specific appraisals of the books for a second and dwell on the heart of the Alternity system: its skills / task / dice mechanic. At the time of this writing, you can continue to buy Alternity material, but development of new material has halted. Eventually it was announced that Star Wars would be a D20 product and that Alternity's days as an officially supported product are numbered.
ALTERNITY GAMEMASTER GUIDE LICENSE
Wizards of the Coast had its business plans with the D20 license in the works then, a plan that Alternity didn't fit into. When I heard that Wizards of the Coast had acquired the rights to publish a Star Wars game, I thought that this, at last, would be a chance to get Alternity the recognition it deserved.Īlas, it was not to be. The X-Files-esque Dark*Matter setting caused a brief resurgence of the game, but ultimately it didn't change the fate of the game. Amid tales of waning sales, support for the Alternity line dwindled and nearly stopped. What could this mean for their second string adoptee that they didn't really ask for in the first place? Nothing good, I assure you. The company began to focus on fewer and fewer settings for its role-playing flagship, Dungeons and Dragons. Under the control of Wizards of the Coast, the landscape changed. It was a novel concept, one that players like myself who like home-grown settings could really appreciate.īut the approach had its problems. It was apparently an attempt to recreate what they had with D&D: a genre-specific but not world-specific system aimed at a given genre to which campaign settings could be tacked on to. Could this be the new Traveller on my gaming shelves?Īs was soon to be seen, it was going to be like Traveller in some rather unpleasant ways: an untimely demise.Īlternity is a game put out by TSR, whose design began before they were acquired by Wizards of the Coast.
I began to study its dice system and learned the beauty and genius of it. When they came out with the real version of the Alternity Player's Handbook, being SF-starved I picked it up. Its very strange dice mechanic seemed gimmicky to me at the time, something that will usually eternally doom a game in my eyes. To be honest, when I saw a preview version of Alternity that a friend got a GenCon, that didn't impress me at first, either. Likewise, many other offerings in the industry failed to impress me. I played with my own homebrew system, but never had the time or persistence to finish. I have never held a high opinion of GURPS, so even when I heard they would be licensing Traveller, I was less than enthused. A company called Far Futures Enterprises tried to bring Traveller back with T4 – the mechanics were an immediate turn-off to me. Though I enjoyed MegaTraveller for years, even that wonderful workhorse got tired. I ran a MegaTraveller campaign for many years after GDW first went on to Traveller: The New Era (often referred to by some as "The New Error"), which I considered an inferior edition both due to the poor system and due to the implausible backstory. Traveller (and its heir, MegaTraveller) was a big part of my "formative gaming experiences." Those were the days of wild and wooly space opera, intrepid investigation, and world rending warfare.
Though D&D was my first game, I soon started to branch out and explore other games. One of my favorites has always been Larry Niven, a very good storyteller with an eye for science as well. Much of my youth was spent watching Star Trek: TOS reruns after school and devouring books in the "space SF" vein. RPGnetters may find me to be one of those nutty D&D/D20 advocates. Well, I shall deliver! This time I take a look at a game I consider all too under-rated: Alternity. Recent complaints levied at the nature of RPGnet reviews aired a desire for less D20 stuff and perhaps a few out of print games. Alternity: Player's Handbook and Gamemaster's Guide