A review of TSR's new Sci-Fi game
by Scott K. Bowden
Many people regard TSR as the great corporate evil of the gaming industry. Sure, why not? Others look upon TSR as the maker of some of the most Gawd-awful sci-fi games ever. Shouldn't they? How many attempts did they make at "Buck Rogers"? Answer: too many, and none of them good. The best thing I can say for the last edition of Buck they put out is that classifying Dexterity as a sub-attribute of Aim really made me laugh.
But enough about TSR's previous failures. I want to focus on Alternity. Despite everything you would expect, this game is actually good. Not excellent, but it shows some real progress on the part of the TSR game designers.
I know some of you are disappointed. You were all ready for a scathing review for those goop-heads who ruined AD&D, and here I say Alternity is good. At least you can rest assured they aren't paying me to say nice things. After all, TSR is one of our main competitors - I'm not gonna say anything nice unless it's really true.
Alternity is set up as a real-Earth future, rather than a completely fictional setting like that of Star Wars. I can tell you now, with the exception of two or three technological advances, this is a plausible future. This is one of the main strengths of Alternity (or more specifically, the first Alternity setting, "StarDrive"). Although the main alien races stick to the orthodox-if-boring standard of freaky looking humanoids, they are nicely differentiated. The most unfortunte thing about the alien races is that too many of them are easily analogous the AD&D demi-humans. This may be the result of expecting similarities, but if they shoe fits...
The system, in short, seems to work nicely. Two dice are used in any roll. One is always a d20, the "control die". The other is the "situation die", which will apply a negative or positive modifier of varying scale, from d4 to 3d20. Like attribute checks in AD&D, you try to roll a number lower than your applicable attibute or skill. Again, TSR has settled on the quirky notion of a negative modifier being positive. That is, since you want to get a low number, having a -d10 for your situation die is good. That's not so bad, really, once you settle into the low-is-good mindset.
The strange, and perhaps innovative, thing about die modifiers: a -1 bonus does NOT mean you subtract one from your two-die roll. Instead, you change your situation die from whatever it was to the next better one (keeping in mind that you want a low number.) If your situation die was a d8, a -1 modifier means you change your situation die to a d6, which improves your odds of getting under your target number. If you had a -d12, a -1 bonus means you have -d20 now! If you end up with modifiers this good, you could fairly often end up with a 1 on the control die, and a 20 on the situation, giving you a -19. Remember kids, a result of -19 always succeeds. Although it's somewhat counter-intuitive (and what TSR system isn't?), I imagine that with use it could easily become second nature.
As for the old debate between level-based and skills-based advancement systems, Alternity is both. Although you increase skills independently in whatever way you want, characters only receive skill points a discreet intervals (aka levels). It allows more freedom than the AD&D proficiency system, while still giving an quick impression of a characters power and status. A 5th level "Combat Specialist" is almost always going to be better at what he does than a 1st level ComSpec - unless you REALLY screwed up your character creation!
Although this is probably of less concern to most players and GM's, there's also less bookkeeping involved with this style of advancement than in many purely skill-based systems. You don't need to determine how much X, Y, and Z skills improve every session, and it's about two minute's work to check if a character has too many (cheater) or too few (getting cheated) points allocated to his or her skills.
The actual books are hard-bound much like the AD&D core books, which promises some degree of durability. It's well indexed and cross-referenced, and the typeface is easy to read. About the only complaint about the layout (and it isn't mine) is that the artwork doesn't have a uniform feel. Of course, someone else said they loved the art. Just goes to show how factual anybody's opinion is! (Including mine!)
All in all, it's a much-evolved form of 2nd Edition AD&D, showing many signs of improvement. Apparently someone at TSR decided it was high time to catch up with industry trends. The StarDrive setting is rich and believable, and the plot possibilites are almost endless. As someone once said, space is a very big place. I give it 7-out-of-10 Gold Apples, and recommend that you at least give it a good look if you're into sci-fi games. This is no Buck Rogers.
Scott Bowden is a long-time geek, and almost dangerously devoted to the gaming hobby. He has written almost nothing of any importance, but DOES know his games. If you are interested in Mr. Bowden's work, please notify the FBI, and they will take care of you.