Alternity

The last RPG from TSR.

In 1998, after TSR had been bought out by WotC, but before it was dropped as a separate brand, it released a generic rules set for science fiction role playing game. It was written by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker. Characters would be created by a points system for six statistics (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Will, and Personality) and take on one of five classes (Combat Specialist, Tech Operator, Free Agent, Diplomat, and Mindwalker). Classes were rather weakly defined with each class having an innate benefit and a discount on their appropriate skills, and except for psionic skills any character could eventually excel at anything they wanted to spend points on.

Despite being a nicely-illustrated book, having good reviews, and a well executed, unobtrusive ruleset, it had little in the way of actual sales on account of being dropped by Wizards of the Coast to focus on Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and D20 Modern. Most of the materials for Alternity were ported into D20 Modern and Future, although the transition put on full display the direction 3rd & d20 were taking with strongly typed classes and feat fetishism.

In 2018 Richard Baker released a new edition of Alternity through Sasquatch Game Studio.

Mechanics

Alternity used a dual dice mechanic of rolling a control die (d20) and situation dice (such as d4) for resolving tasks but the dice size and number rolled could change due to circumstantial modifiers. The aim being to succeed by roll low under a target number (such as a skill) then working out what degree of success or failure occurred.

The dice used were the d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. The d10 was excluded. The situation dice could be subtracted to make the roll easier or added to make it harder. These were described as difficulty "steps", with all the factors that affect the complexity of attempting an action expressed in how many steps they add or subtract to the roll.

The use of positive and negative dice meant that there was some value to having two or three colors of dice when giving multiple players dice to roll, to represent positive, negative, and control dice.

Dice Actually Rolled	Situation Dice	Description	Step Modifier	Notes
d20-d20	-d20	No Sweat	-5
d20-d12	-d12	Cakewalk	-4
d20-d8	-d8	Extremely Easy	-3
d20-d6	-d6	Very Easy	-2
d20-d4	-d4	Easy	-1
d20	None	Average	None	Base situation dice for specialty skills.
d20+d4	+d4	Tough	+1	Base situation dice for untrained skills and broad skills.
d20+d6	+d6	Hard	+2
d20+d8	+d8	Challenging	+3
d20+d12	+d12	Formidable	+4
d20+d20	+d20	Grueling	+5
d20+2d20	+2d20	Gargantuan	+6
d20+3d20	+3d20	Nearly Impossible	+7

The add or subtract nature of dice in Alternity produced a very different probability curve from dice pooling. Dice pools will always form a bell curve, where an add or subtract system produces a plateau where the probability of any outcome within the plateau is equal.

Skills

Alternity was an entirely skills based system with no class feats. Perks and flaws were minor feat-like effects priced in skillpoints (ambidextrous for example), but combat was resolved with skills, including armor operation and martial arts, and psionic spells were treated as skill-like except that they consumed psi energy, which if overused resulted in fatigue damage. Certain skills however have feat-like rank benefits which become available once a certain skill level is reached.

This "everything is a skill" approach greatly simplified the system (the core players handbook was barely 250 pages), but also meant that aside from mindwalkers the classes were pretty similar and it was largely up to the player to skill out the character they wanted to be.

Most skills could be used trained or untrained. When a broad skill is untrained, your score in that skill is equal one half of your character's ability for that skill, rounded down. When a specialty skill is untrained, the difficulty is increased 1 step (so +d4 instead of +0). For example, if you want to use the jump specialty of the athletics broad skill, and you have not trained either of the skills, and your strength score is 7, then your jump score is 3 (7/2 rounded down). Not a very good score, especially considering you'll be rolling a d20+d4 and need to get a 3 or less. Probably not gonna happen. If you've trained athletics but not jump, then your jump score is your strength score of 7, but the dice roll is still d20+d4 because no specialty. If you've trained jump to rank 1, then you get to add that 1 to your score, making your score 8, and since you've trained the specialty the +d4 drops off, meaning you need an 8 or less on a d20.

Combat & Damage

Damage comes in three flavors, low impact (LI), high impact (HI), and energy (EN), and in three levels of firepower (ordinary, good, amazing) and three levels of damage boxes (stun, wound, mortal). Armor also comes in three levels (ordinary, good, amazing) and has armor values for LI/HI/EN. In general, ordinary scale corresponds to individual equipment, good to vehicular equipment, and amazing to starship grade equipment although these aren't fixed.

When damage of a higher grade meets armor of a lower grade, it is increased in which type of damage it does. So if an amazing weapon deals four points of wound damage towards good armor, that armor needs to deal with four points of mortal damage. Conversely, if an ordinary firearm strikes a starship's amazing hull for 4 points of wound damage, the damage is downgraded twice, meaning it's not even enough to cause stun damage.

There are some individual weapons that do good grade damage. The star sword for example is an energy melee weapon that deals good grade damage and thus could conceivably inflict wounds on a starship if it rolled mortal damage, as can most heavy ranged weapons.

Profession (aka Class)

Combat Spec: All-purpose meathead murderhobo. Depending on skilling this could range from a roided-up spess mehreen with a railgun to a catsuited death cultist.

• Action Check Score Increase: A combat spec's action check score is increased by 3 points.
• Situation Bonus: Choose one specialty skill from those listed under these broad skills: Armor Operation, Unarmed Attack, Heavy Weapons, Modern Ranged Weapons, Melee Weapons, Primitive Ranged Weapons. That specialty skill's base situation die inproves from +d0 to -d4.

Diplomat: Smoothtalking murderhobo. Gets all the interaction skills, and pick a backup profession to fall back on.

• Action Check Score Increase: A diplomat's action check score is increased by 1 point.
• Contacts or Resources: A diplomat starts with contacts or resources described in the gamemaster guide.
• Secondary Profession: Select a second profession. Your hero can purchase skills from that profession list for list price - 1 instead of list price.

Free Agent: Shady murderhobo. Free agents are defined by their skill discount list. They get most of the interaction skills, but also a selection of tech and combat skills tailored to being a sneaky rogue.

• Action Check Score Increase: A free agent's action check score is increased by 2 points.
• Resistance Bonus: Choose one ability and improve its resistance modifier by 1 step.
• Last Resort Bonus: Free agent heroes start play with a number of last resort points based on their personality scores, but their maximum is increased by 1. Also, a free agent can spend 2 last resort points to alter an action instead of the usual 1 point.

Tech Op: Nerd murderhobo. Tech ops are the intelligence score profession, does all the sci-fi techie stuff. Not very good as murderhobos unless vehicles are involved.

• Action Check Score Increase: A tech op's action check score is increased by 1 point.
• Accelerated Learning: Every time a tech op hero reaches a new achievement level, he receives the usual number of skill points plus extra skill points depending on the level he just reached.

Level Attained	Extra Skill Points
2-5	1
6-10	2
11-15	3
16-20	4
21+	5

Mindwalker: Psychic murderhobo. Mindwalkers have four psionic broad skills reflecting different groups of powers. ESP deals in all sensing powers, Telepathy is for psionic effects involving other minds, Biokinesis is about controlling the physical form, and Telekinesis involves controlling the surrounding environment. A jedi-like character is likely to split between esp and telekinesis, a navigator would be deep on esp for navcognition and precognition, a bene geserit would go heavy on biokinesis, and a solarian would invest in the bioweapon speciality.

• Action Check Score Increase: A mindwalker's action check score is increased by 1 point.
• Situation Bonus: Choose one psionic broad skill. That skill and all its specialty skills receive a situation die improvement of 1 step. The broad skill now has a base situation die of +d0 and all its specialty skills have a base situation die of -d4.

Star*Drive

The main far-future setting of the Alternity line. Star*Drive is set at the dawn of the 26th century, and humanity has spread out across the Orion Arm.

Publications:

• Alien Compendium
• Arms and Equipment
• Star*Drive Campaign Setting
• Klick Clack - An adventure in the Hammer's Star system dealing with the invading Klick aliens.
• Outbound - A collection of several micro-adventures on unexplored worlds.
• Planet of Darkness - An adventure of the "get rich quick" sort set on an intrigue-filled mining world.
• Star Compendium - Expands out the Campaign Setting with six more worlds to explore.
• Threats from Beyond - A collection of partially developed adventure hooks.

Novels:

• Harbinger Trilogy (Starrise at Corrivale, Storm at Eldala, Nightfall at Algemron) - Marine gets set up as the fall guy for an assassination, but then becomes the pawn of a precursor alien AI that could tip the balance in a brewing war between the known space nations, and a unknown external alien threat.
• Two of Minds - Street urchin fortune teller gets caught up in intrigue and turns out to be a latent telepath.
• On the Verge
• Zero Point
• Gridrunner

Dark Matter

The X-Files except they couldn't call it that. Dark Matter is a present-day conspiracy setting where secretive state and corporate entities are keeping the paranormal under wraps.

Gamma World

A re-release of TSR's old Gamma World. Alternity included mutations in the core rulebook so it's likely a Gamma World redux was on the list from day one.

StarCraft

Literally StarCraft. It was a licensed tie-in.

Alternity 2nd Edition (aka Alternity 2018)

It's not as good.

Richard Baker was able to relaunch the Alternity name but all the legacy races were dumped. A few parts were ported largely unchanged such as the dice step system (which was merely reversed +/-). But most of the changes did not improve the system.

Skill rolling has been reversed so that your target roll is to be higher than 20-(ability+rank). This necessarily means that skills are limited to 10 ranks so that your target roll can't go negative. Compared to 1st edition this is extra math for the sake of cheering for a big roll instead of a small roll.

The gradient damage system of ordinary/good/amazing + stun/wound/mortal damage system that conveniently scaled from individuals up to starships is gone, as is the distinction between Low and High impact physical damage. In its place, players have a wound pool and armor has fixed values.

The perks and flaws system of 1st edition is gone, although these were pretty tangential even in the original system so it's no great loss. But so are the rank benefits of skills, and in their place is a talents system. In place of the VERY loose professions are archetypes which have mandatory and discretionary talents and skills. While this system isn't as bad as it COULD be (there are only 24 talents, it's not as bad as Starfinder where every class needs a chapter to explain its specific flavor of hit-with-stick), but it's still not as clean as the old system.

Mutations are gone, suggesting they weren't part of Baker's vision for the game and just shoehorned in for Gamma World. Psionics are back; the broad skills are fundamentally the same but like skills they've got some talents tacked on.