Deconstruction: Alternity

Because I like to keep current, I want to talk about Alternity, a ten year old sci-fi roleplaying game published by TSR. I’ve recently got a chance to play in a game of it, and the system has several unique things worth talking about.

The Alternity system is meant to be a “generic” sci-fi rules set. There are classes (which I’ll go over later), but things are primarily skill based. The classes just give a few small features and discounts on some skills. While they present multiple races to use, I haven’t looked over them in great detail, and they’re mostly a side thing. Alternity also uses D&D’s six attributes, slightly renamed – Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Will, and Personality. Skills are divided by attributes, and each attribute has a fairly large list, except for Constitution’s, which is tiny. In addition, skills are divided under Broad Skills, which are groupings of them – you get six broad skill groups for free, and then have to purchase others individually. If you do not have a skill’s broad group and try to use it, you take a +1 step penalty (see next paragraph) and add only half of the appropriate attribute to the skill ranks. If you do have the broad group, but not any ranks, you just take the +1 step penalty. With any ranks, you suffer no penalty; your skill total is the number of ranks you have plus the appropriate attribute.

When it comes time to use a skill, you roll 1d20 and a situation die and try and roll under your skill total. If you roll higher, you fail – if you roll under, you succeed with an “Ordinary” success. If you roll under half your skill total, you get a “Good” success, and under a fourth grants an “Amazing” success, with each progress step giving some sort of extra boon. If you roll a natural 20, you get a critical failure – more on these later. The situation die starts at d0 by default, and is modified based on what you’re doing. A more difficult task, being untrained, shooting an agile enemy, etc, makes the die higher – from +1d4, to +1d6, and so on. If the task is easier, or if you have a special class or racial feature or a large number of ranks in some skill, you instead apply a penalty to the roll in the same manner. While it’s a neat idea, this tends to be kind of slow in play. When you’re taking a shot, you need to calculate autofire penalties, range, any modifiers you get from your class or dodging, the enemy’s defensive bonus, and so on. It can be a bit of a pain.

Classes in Alternity are called Professions. There are four primary ones – Combat Spec, Diplomat, Free Agent, and Tech Op. There’s also a psionic one, the Mindwalker, which I won’t be covering – I haven’t given the rules on psionics, cybernetics, or mutations a strong look-through. Combat Spec characters get a bonus to initiative, discounts on combat related skills, and a permanent step bonus to a combat related skill. Free Agents gain a bonus to action points and a defense of their choice, and a wide variety of “roguey” skills like stealth, security, and deception discounted. TechOps get bonus skill points at level up, and basically every intellect skill discounted. Diplomats gain all the personality skills discounted, as well as the skill discounts of another class of their choice, and either resources or contacts.

And this is where the problems start. Right away, the Combat Spec class gets only combat skills discounted, and no real utility skills, heavily encouraging a player who sits around asking “Is it time to shoot something yet?”. The Diplomat especially gets to grab another character’s shtick, as well, while the Free Agent doesn’t have enough to truly distinguish him. The Tech Ops gets absolutely nothing to start except a wider skill list to choose from, which is problematic if a Tech Ops and a Diplomat who chooses Tech Ops skill are in the same party. The Diplomat starts with all of your bonuses, and then more.

The skill groupings also cause some issues. Like many skill based systems, individual weapons are their own skills under the same broad skill. If you want to use guns, you first need the Modern Ranged Weapon skill group, where Pistol, Rifle, and SMG are all their own skills. Want to use a crossbow, like JC Denton? That’s under Ranged Weapon Primitive, and is its own skill (with Bow, Flintlocks, and Slings also individual skills). A Stun Baton too? That’s under Melee Weapons, Powered Weapon – and if you want to be able to use a club as well, that’s under bludgeon. And yes, Blade is different if you want to use a knife. Note how we haven’t even gotten into grenades, unarmed combat, wearing armor, or dodging attacks, all of which have their own skills. If your Combat Spec character wants to be able to use Pistols, SMGs, and Knives – which I feel is totally reasonable – he’s paying more than a Tech Ops that has Hacking, Forensics, and Charm. One of those groupings is a nice, wide variety, the other is boring. Simply put, “Combat” needs to be its own skill, with Melee and Guns as the individual skills. Ending up with a super-SMG user with beyond human levels of handling those guns, but completely incompetent in assault rifles and pistols is silly. It’s not worth the points to buy all of those skills, and its immersion breaking for them to be separate. There are other skills that suffer from this problem, too. Buying Air, Land, Space, and Water vehicles separately is just too much. Survival Training requires you to treat it as a different skill for each environment. Do Botany and Biology really deserve to be separate? While it may seem like a lot of skills suffer from this, there’s enough that don’t, combined with the number of skill points you have, that show the spread out ones are problematic.

There’s also an issue with min/maxing the six attributes in the system. You start with 60 points to spread between these attributes, with a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 14 for humans. In addition, each class has a minimum attribute requirement.  Tech Ops need to have a 11 Int and 9 Dex, which they were probably going to anyway – meanwhile Combat Spec needs 11 Str, which can be a painful requirement, and 9 Con, which is likely a given. Then comes the min/maxing – for someone who wants to focus on guns, having a 13 Dex is a huge bonus, and 14 is enough of one to make it worthwhile. The higher your intellect, the more skill points you get – so everyone’s going to want a high intellect. Personality, though? It’s never used as a defense, and for people without social skills, it’s only really useful for “Last Resort Points”, the action points of the system. Only, those require you to pay skill points on a permanent basis. If you have a 8-10 personality (and you won't have higher than 10 as a Combat Spec or Tech Ops) it costs around a rank in a skill you want (or at high levels, half a rank) to buy a Last Resort Point,  and all they do is bump a result up or down one step. And by the time you have your stat in the 8 range, your chance on succeeding on untrained social skills is near nil – and the Diplomat can afford all those skills, anyway. So if you’re a Combat Spec or a Tech Op, you’re highly, highly encouraged to drop your Personality to 4, and use those extra points to buy up Intelligence so you can actually use more than one weapon, and maybe have some useful skills at a Combat Spec to help make your character interesting. The same thing goes for Strength for most characters except Combat Specs, who are required to have an 11. It’s almost the same thing for Will, if not for the fact that your Will+Constitution scores together need to equal 16 or you take significantly less actions, Will defense is actually used, and the all-important perception skills are under will. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, to see Tech Ops characters with two 4s, or close to. Encouraging such heavy min/maxing is annoying.

And finally let’s talk about what annoys me the most in this system – critical failures. Any system with critical failures is doomed to have them be horrible things that sap away the fun. On a nat 20, something bad happens. If you’re firing your gun full-auto, a critical failure means you have a jam. Due to the fact that highly skilled, and high level people are more likely to get extra actions, they’re going to get more jams than lower level people. And unjamming your gun is repair, a skill that Combat Spec characters don’t even get a discount on. A reasonably intelligent Combat Spec character that chooses not to buy repair can be looking at a 10-20% chance of unjamming their gun per action, so you better bring a few spare SMGs with you. Other skills have it even worse. Resist Pain is a trained only skill that you roll as soon as you suffer enough damage to cause a wound penalty. You can only do so if you spent skill points to allow you, and succeeding on a check lets you ignore some pain penalties. But if you critical fail – you lose several rounds, stunned by the pain. Yes, for some reason the designers thought it would be a good idea to make characters who spent skill points on “Resistant to pain” to occasionally act out the Family Guy knee-injury scene, but weak, 4 constitution hackers would never be stunned by such pain. It’s ridiculous.

Overall, while Alternity has a lot of things that make it interesting, like it’s dice system, it’s also filled with things that are simply terrible. When you strip out and fix the skill lists, professions, horrible min/maxing encouragement, you don’t have much left. It’s an interesting framework, and one of the few sci-fi RPGs without a heavy implied setting, but it’s still largely forgotten for a reason. I'm still enjoying using it, but I see a lot of room for improval.