Alternity

The art looks badass.

>>54469484
It's the first RPG I ever played, which was also the first ever time I GM'd. I absolutely love it, and went through a mad collecting phase a few years ago. I own all the alternity and Star*Drive books luckily.

Star*Drive is one of my favorite RPG settings.

It's a great system, and remains my favorite, probably partially due to nostalgia. It has a few flaws but nothing worth dropping it completely over.

They recently did a 2.0 rule set over kickstarter, but in reading the test documents I wasn't a fan of some of the changes, Like the new initiative system is stupidly complex, and I have no idea what possessed them to change the names of the degrees of success. I am good with my old books.

What actually introduced me to the game and system was the StarCraft RPG box set they released back in the day.

>>54471281
Nice, I just finished reading the character creation chapter, and I think I've got it down. Looks unique and fun.

>>54469484
Our group played it when it first came out. We thought it was a interesting mechanic but found that it was real easy to min-max (some times even inadvertently). It got to the point were the GM gave up and stopped.

We got play group meme out of it. Our pilot got the nickname "Launch pad" based on the ducktails cartoon character of the same name. Not once during the campaign when asked to do a landing roll did he roll anything other than a 1 (critical failure).

It was my first RPG and very fun. My group was a team of space mercenaries running through a weird, mass-effect like setting back in the 90s. The team committed a number of war crimes before dying to a man as their ship burned down and melted in a sun, after taking our rival's ship with us.

Great times for a bunch of 12 year olds.

>>54471281
yeah, I backed the kickstarter for it. not a fan of going from roll under to roll over, and having the books be digest size isn't something I'm thrilled with either.

I used to have the complete run of the books, would carry them to the place where I was running the game every week.
"Rem, those books are heavy, why don't you leave them here?" said the host.
2 months later he skips town with all my books.

>>54473189
wait, a 1 is a critical success, are you sure you don't mean he rolled a 20 (which is a crit failure in Alternity)

>>54469484
I've owned those books for over a dozen years now.
Always wanted to play it.
Never have.
Sad.

>>54476651

Same boat. Mostly it's a matter of teaching people the system- it works, but it is REALLY unintuitive.

Also the settings are really geared towards people who like reading and are going to dive deep before crafting a character.

Alternity kicks ass on several levels. It's skill-based so you're pretty free to customize a character to fit any concept. The core mechanic allows for more detail than pass/fail on a roll. And it adheres really well to reality; being high leveled doesn't let you laugh off getting shot in the face.

The downsides are that character creation is a slog that scares off a lot of newbies, automatic crit fail on a 20 is too harsh (I house rule that it's only a crit failure if the roll was already a failure, it won't turn a success into a crit fail), and StarDrive is boring as fuck. It's got like 25 stellar nations in it, and of those about 20 don't do a goddamn thing and are tedious to read about. It's up to the GM to provide a more interesting setting than that; thankfully anyone with some imagination can do that without much work.

So what's the setting like?

>>54477728
Dark*Matter is pretty much an X-Files meets Men in Black setting, you play as agents of an organization that deals with weird shit.