Attributes & Skills
I haven't read WEG's d6 Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Species or Tankgirl in a while, so I don't remember if these skills are
exactly the same, but generally speaking this is pretty generic skills-stuff. Most of your combat skills are covered under the Agility attribute, including Archaic Weapons, Firearms, Throwing, Brawling, Martial Arts, and Melee Combat. If it sounds like there's a bit of overlap there - and if you don't know what the difference is between Firearms and Archaic Weapons in a setting that includes directed-energy weapons and laser swords...yeah, I don't know if I can help you. Specific weapons covered by "Archaic Weapons" include swords, bows, axes, muskets, and crossbows, while "Melee Weapons" covers modern bullshit weapons like the "combat shock-knife" and "quiver-shiv."
Weirdly, all successful Archaic Weapons rolls deal damage relative to your Strength.
The difference between Brawling and Martial Arts is that you can both use them for unarmed combat, but Martial Arts is better and you double your bonus for spending Character Points for extra dice. On the downside, if you hit somebody so hard with your martial arts that their head explodes, that's a ding against your honor and you lose an Amarax point. Also, it lets the Gamemaster fuck with you if they decide you're not using your martial arts
enough.
I'm getting mixed messages from this RPG.
Really, there's too fucking many skills. I think there's honestly more skills than in D20, and some of those are very marginal like "0-g maneuver" and "Exoskeleton Operation." Plus, the skills are in no-wise balanced between the attributes - all the combat skills are under Agility, Strength has a grand total of
four skills (Climb/jump, Lift, Stamina, and Swim), Psionics has
three (Energy, Influence, Self-Control), and I don't understand the difference between Technical attribute skills and Mechanical attribute skills.
LANGUAGES
Time Taken: One round.
Specializations: Specific language.
Most people throughout human space understand Universal, the basic language used to communicate among pirates, spacers, and mercenaries as it is among politicians, traders, and the nobility. Even aliens speak Universal, though often with accents or awkward grammatical formulations.
The languages skill represents a character's familiarity with and ability to use various forms of foreign communication, including written, spoken, and non-verbal. Like the aliens skill, assume a character knows her own language and other common tongues like Universal. Use this skill to understand a language or dialect unfamiliar to the character in a setting where a translator (living or computerized) is not available.
Characters must make languages skill rolls when they want to understand something in an unfamiliar tongue, or communicate with alien words and gestures.
There's sadly more of this, but I like to call this the "Talk Slowly And Loudly" school of language assimilation. The problem is that most games are not going to take long enough for your character to meaningfully pick up an unfamiliar language, and while most folks understand that different levels of fluency in languages exist, it sucks to actually roll to see if you remember enough Paleo-French from highschool to impress the Neo Shabda-Oud novitiate into dropping her space-panties. On to of which, tey don't even give a list of different languages you might encounter, so this whole thing is bullshit.
Ironically, and I think almost by accident, the d6 system in
Metabarons RPG actually makes you want to have a full bridge crew. This is because every single fucking skill you need to plausibly run a ship - particularly through combat - is a separate skill that benefits from having a specialist. Piloting, Sensors, Gunnery, Shields, Comm, and Astro-Nav are all separate skills which you'd plausibly need if you wanted to engage in even basic space ship combat.
Alternately, Kirk might be the only PC and using the Command skill to control the NPCs. That would make a lot of sense.
The Repair skills goes on for fucking pages, and I'm not going to try and parse it all. I think a lot of it might have been borrowed from Star Wars anyway. It basically represents a mini-game where a hot-shit engineer can pimp your spaceship as well as repair it.
Psionics
Psionics gets its own chapter.
You've read a few chapters, played a little solitaire adventure, and learned something about your character's mundane skills. So, you think that makes you ready to venture out into this cold, harsh universe? I wouldn't bet on it.
The game had the habit of in-universe characters addressing the reader directly. Aside from breaking the fourth wall, this has all the subtlety of Superman reminding you to floss, and I don't like it. I'm going to pretend this was written by some French people that thought it was acceptable, then translated into English by a Spanish company that didn't know any better, and the WEG guys just decided to roll with it because they were getting paid anyway.
Anyway, Psionics aren't a direct riff on the Force. They's supposed to be your untapped spiritual resources and capabilities. Jodowrosky himself likes to use the Rule of Cool when it comes to this kind of thing, but whoever wrote the game felt that anyone developing awesome powers should come up with a bunch of roleplaying hang-ups that go along with it, like people being freaked out or seeing you as the messiah or some shit. Seriously, there's the better part of a page devoted to that. It also says that characters with psionics are inherently competitive, like kids in Pokemon, and will demand random duels with you to see who has the mightier brain and spirit.
I don't know why this is happening either.
Psionics are divided into three skills: Energy, Influence, and Self-Control, which characters roll for a wide variety of effects. In keeping with the idea that you shouldn't have nice things, the target number for any given effect is variable like you're building a spell in Shadowrun, except without all the nice details that make it easy to determine what you need to roll to set shit on fire - instead, you're basically expected as Gamemaster to pull numbers out of your ass, with a few guidelines to help you along your way.
Energy represents the character's ability to sense and manipulate energy - the three effects tied to it are "Detect Energy," "Mental Blast," and "Shield", which are pretty self-explanatory.
Influence is explicitly the Jedi mind trick. 'nuff said.
Self-Control is pain-control and physical enhancement. The latter gives you bonuses to your other attributes, which also boosts the associated skills...not a bad way to go.
Litany against fear, check.
Mak'tar chant of strength, check.
There's some noise about creating new powers, but it's all mindcaulk. Moving on!
Honor, Amarax, & the Necro-Dream
This review needed a bit more fanservice.
I have
briefly touched on the Code of Honor and Amarax points. The latter are something created basically uniquely for the RPG. The gist is, the Code of Honor is how you're supposed to behave. Amarax Points are like Action Points in D&D3.x or Willpower in WoD, which you can spend to boost various tests - with the caveat that you only
regain the Amarax points if you spent them doing things in accordance with your Honor Code (in which case you get more!)
However, if you act like the Paladin in strip #3, you not only don't get Amarax points, you might earn a
Necro-Dream point.
Characters get Necro-Dream Points for giving into the temptation to imerse themselves in the apathetic forces in the universe, choosing inaction over action. hey represent how lose a character comes to drifting off into a life of passive pleasure in the oblivious stupor of the Necro-Dream.
Gamemasters should always warn characters when their actions risk earning them a Necro-Dream Point. Give the player the option to change his mind if he wishes. If he continues, he does so at his own informed risk.
If you end an adventure with no Amarax points, or more Necro-Dream Points than Amarax points, your PC becomes an NPC. Characters can also roll
willpower to resist the temptations of the Necro-Dream (examples given include "taking a drink of Cocolo; spending the night with a homeoslut; participating in holovid gambling; sitting down to watch holovid for the aternoon.") You can also spend two Amarax poins to remove one Necro-Dream point, which sounds like a bad deal
and it is a bad deal.
I'm not going to say that the whole Code of Honor/losing yourself in passive pleasures thing isn't present in the Jodoverse - they totally are. But they're also from completely different series. Di Fool in
The Incal has to deal with a penchant for passivity that would make a hobbitt proud; he starts the adventure just wanting to get drunk and get laid and has to spiritually advance from there. The Metabarons, by contrast, are all about a brutal warrior code and its long-term consequences of the Bushitaka philosophy. They sort of cross, a little bit, because the Metabaron first appeared in
The Incal, but the themes of the two works are otherwise largely very different.
And from a roleplaying game point, I can empathize with the designers - they want to create a fast-moving game that encourages players to do stuff. But when do you threaten PCs with Necro-Dream points? When they get up from the table to take a piss? When they want to play with their mobile at the table? Because most PCs don't decide that they're going to tell the adventure to fuck off and wait while their PC gets high and bangs a couple of homeosluts. They save that shit for a lull in the action, when they
can't do anything. So I have to give this whole Amarax/Necro-Dream subsystem a big "choo choo" on the Fuck You Train-O-Meter. Suck gamemaster's cock or...what? You stop playing? Shit man. I can get up from the table whenever I want!
Shit, when I finish a book I can just go back and start another one! There are more! I don't need your half-assed space opera adventures! There are plenty of homeo-sluts in these pages already!