Thaluikhain wrote:So...are you going to tell us you've been driven to drink by bizarre demographics, strange economic systems or racial stereotypes? Aren't there even any gratuitous insertions of the author's fetishes? Overwhelming nostalgia for a time not overwhelmed by nostalgia?
I know this isn't exactly an OSSR, but still...
The drink tonight is nyquil, because I have a cold.
I'm going to include some of that racist, sexist, Ayn Rand goodness in this review - but it will
all be lies. This product is meant to be retro, so it has some dribs and drabs of squick that AH either glossed over or didn't think about. I'll mention those without focusing on them, and instead, I will tell horrible, deliberately hurtful lies, motivated by a callous indifference that is worse than hatred. Anyway...
DrPraetor
There are two pages describing the engine. It's okay. AH forgot to say in the main text that dice pools are typically attribute + skill, but uses it in the examples? A real novice would find this confusing; I'm an old hand, and I'm not sure from this how group challenges are supposed to work. This is a hack on After Sundown, AH might've been better off with a function call to Frank's intro.
More structural whinging - this is a bit out of order; it's throwing attributes and skills and tags and stuff without explaining them concurrently; a single-sentence explanation with a ping to the fuller explanation would work fine.
Okay, on substance. Space Ranger characters are made by a series of palette selections that both define their background (Lunar, Martian, Earthling,
etc) and also include jobs as well as which flavor ("order") of space ranger you are.
It's fast and it works at all, which is better than most such systems shake out, but it also has problems.
For example, if I want to play a Martian Scientist with a lot of Azathoth functions:
https://www.absoluteanime.com/nadesico/inez
this is a bit of a problem, because Martians don't get engineering or medicine, and are only +1 Intellect.
This isn't insurmountable, but it will sometimes place game-mechanical penalties on you because of your character conception, which I dislike.
The other issue is that they don't really substitute for character classes. If you sit down and say you are a Belter, the other players need to triangulate a bunch to see if you are the best pilot in the group or
etc.. As a general principle, if you have a list of choices that don't convey useful information to the other players about what role you can fill in the party, those choices should be scrapped in favor of some kind of points buy.
Other quibbles - in step four, when you customize, I think if you don't pick "+1 to two attributes" you will feel robbed in short order.
On balance, though, you get a reasonable character, reasonably quickly.
Also, I think AH has done a reasonable job of dividing the character's competency into roughly equal pie-slices for the Skills. I think it's fair to say that Combatives and Deception will come up in more adventures than will Intimidation and Therapy, but you want characters who are competent in all of these. Not all of the names are obvious (the "Screen" skill is particularly non-obvious from the name; you use it to resist torture and such) but the descriptions are reasonably clear. My biggest complaint about the skills: there is a "Visualize" skill that ends up working a lot like Sorcery. Not all of the wand functions seem to use it (in particular, the various mind control spells use Law or Deception typically), but I'm not a fan of the "use your superpowers" skill.
There are also Certs, which are a grab-bag of special abilities. Several of these are cool, some of them are just "you are more focused on (pick a skill)". I regard this as a mostly-successful implementation because it opens up new character concepts that would be hard to access otherwise (especially the ones that let you swap attribute+skill combos around; more on those later). But, thematically, there is a bit of an over-emphasis on Certs that are basically, "you are hardcore": Commando, Pain Focus and Unfazeable don't strike me as certs that a different character concept would take. Nonetheless, you can differentiate characters with them, so that's good.
There are also "tags" which are a combination of languages and background skills, also shadowrun. They don't generally bother to have ratings.
Something to keep in mind when I math-hammer later - do you want to uber-specialize in one skill+attribute combo (my instinct is: yes), or do you want to be spread out? If you have a "big enough dice pool to succeed", more dice can be diminishing returns (Frank makes sample After Sundown characters who spread their dice pools out a bit for exactly this reason); but, depending on the downside if you
do fail, that can also be a case of diminishing returns. If you make a pilot test and fail to get 3 hits, does the entire party die? I assume not, but similarly bad outcomes would mean that swinging 15 pilot dice instead of 12 would be worth reducing the already-small risk of only getting 2 hits.
AH came up with a cool conceit for equipment - your equipment list is very short, because you are being schlepped around space with very limited kit in the spaceship. This is solid design and I approve: it means that people will pick their equipment carefully and remember they have it and use it when it comes up. I see a lot of benefits to this in terms of play.
There's a big section on cats which I will also return to later.
Right after character generation we have character advancement. I don't like these advancement rules (Continuous Learning Points) - character generation is linear while advancement is quadratic. That's bad, for all the reasons we know it to be bad. I would use some variant of After Sundown's advancement system instead of Continuous Learning Points, which work more or less like Karma in Shadowrun.
The Nyquil is really kicking in, so I'll resume wherever it is I left off. Some of the material in character generation (cats, cybernetics, the wand function stuff) makes more sense to call back to later in the text.
Should I edit this to include sarcastic images? That's hard to do when I'm sleepy.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek