I’m still floundering in my perpetual quest to design my own personal OSR/NSR adjacent game system for my own personal OSR/NSR adjacent katamari game settings. Generally speaking, my design goals are: 1) a lot of character progression and character options with some bounded accuracy, 2) a unified mechanic that includes degrees of success, 3) a tiered, slot-based system for character options, maintaining most of the flexibility of point-buy systems like Player’s Option (and Alternity) but reducing complexity and trap options.
Lately, I have been really looking at Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game and its core systems-- it’s a TSR game from the same (post-WotC, pre-Hasbro) time period as some of my biggest influences: Player’s Option and Dragon Fist.
For those who don’t remember this underrated gem, the core mechanic of Alternity is a d20 roll-under; the player is usually trying to roll (equal or) under the sum of an ability score (4-14) plus skill ranks (0-12).
Difficulty is represented by an additional die added (for penalty) or subtracted from the d20 roll, ranging from ± d4 to multiple d20s. Degree of success is measured by MOGA, which stands for Marginal (or failure), Ordinary (under target), Good (under 1/2 target), or Amazing (under 1/4 target).
For instance, combat initiative (Action Check) is rolled against the average of DEX and INT, with some species and some classes getting a -1 step bonus. The combat round is divided into four phases: Marginal, Ordinary, Good, and Amazing. Your character can first act in a round on the result of their Action Check, and the number of actions they can take per round is based on their CON and WIS scores.
Every weapon or attack has three damage ratings, since Marginal is just failure. Basically, Ordinary hits do HP damage, Good hits do more HP damage, and Amazing hits jump straight to death & dying. It’s more complicated than that, and I’m not engaging with that system.
Alternity’s native character system is a hybrid class/point system where species sets your starting Broad Skills, profession provides a discount on class skills, and then every Broad Skill and Specialty Skill has its own skill point cost that increases with skill ranks. (Removing or mitigating that is a common house rule.) Like most point-buy games, combat skills and magical skills are included here.
Broad Skills are more expensive than Specialty Skills and the number a PC can have at all is limited by INT. The main benefit of a Broad Skill is allowing the character to roll skill checks using their full ability score (instead of half) and attempt untrained skill checks. Specialty Skills remove the +1 step penalty for rolling Broad Skills, and add their skill ranks to the target number.
As you level up your Specialty Skills, you also gain Rank Benefits which, contrary to their name, are actually pretty sweet. They let you do more things with your pre-existing skills (drink) or improve your character’s checks or resistance modifiers or whatever. You can buy Rank Benefits early by spending more skill points, though this is rarely a reasonable thing to do.
Next I’m going to start spitballing about what I’m thinking of trying to do with all this,