The art is a little quirky but generally of fair to quite good quality, featuring for the most part assorted women with a somewhat mischievous demeanour and firearms. Layout is largely clean and simple, although the choice of Comic Sans MS or something similar as the font throughout is perhaps a little unfortunate given the length of the game.
The foreword is brief, and slightly off-putting, hinting as it does that the main reason you should play this game is that the designers have incorporated the radical step of having only one roll to hit and damage the opposition. This does rather suggest that they haven’t played very many RPGs, given that such an approach whilst uncommon is certainly not unheard of. I hoped at this point that there would be more innovation than this one new rule, given that otherwise I was going to be ploughing through 256 pages of otherwise generic modern RPG material.
I was already feeling slightly patronised by the time I finished reading the half-page foreword, and the Introduction to Roleplaying didn’t improve matters, starting out as it does with an attempted humorous explanation of exactly what roleplaying isn’t, according to the authors. The note that “roleplaying is not cool” didn’t help matters. Game designers! If you don’t think roleplaying is cool, it’s quite likely that your game is not cool either. If that is the case, I don’t want to play it. You’re right; there are uncool games out there. I want a cool game. I want a hot new cool game. If you can’t offer me that, I’m going to look elsewhere.
The core mechanic is described next. This is pretty simple in concept, although the execution is unnecessarily complicated by using subtraction rather than addition (anyone would think that D&D 3.0 had never been released).
The core mechanic uses the character’s relevant skill (a Core skill, which covers a very wide range of skills, such as the Use skill for operating mechanical devices; plus any applicable Aptitude, which narrows things down a little, such as Target for shooting things; plus any applicable Focus, which narrows things down a lot, such as a named gun type), with a modifier between +15 (Simple tasks) and -20 (Impossible tasks) for the difficulty of the task. You then attempt to roll the target number or lower with 1d20.
Hmm. As I said, it’d be a lot easier on the maths (but with identical probabilities) to just roll your 1d20, add your total skill, and try to beat a number (let’s call it a Difficulty Class) ranging between 6 for Simple tasks to 41 for Impossible tasks.
For those who don’t believe the probabilities are identical, here’s a couple of examples:
With a total Skill of 3, in the Alice system you add 15 for a Simple task, and try to roll an 18 or lower, failing only on a 19 or 20 (90% chance of success); in the more user-friendly variant, you roll 3 + 1d20, and try to roll a 6 or higher, failing only on a 1 or 2 (1 + 3 = 4, for a failure; 2 + 3 = 5 for a failure; 3 or higher is a success; 90% chance of success).
With a total Skill of 24, in the Alice system you subtract 20 for an Impossible task, and try to roll a 4 or lower, failing on a 5-20 (20% chance of success); in the more user-friendly variant, you roll 24 + 1d20, and try to roll a 41 or higher, succeeding on a 17-20 (20% chance of success).
(With the user-friendly variant, you’d probably want to reduce the typical character’s skill totals by 1 each, and change the DCs to range from 5 to 40 rather than 6 to 41, just for neatness; still, it would save on the maths for those of us who really don’t want to be bothered with subtractions as well as additions, and it also allows for the more intuitive “high roll = good” approach.)
Minor point, but again it does illustrate that these guys need to play a few more different RPG systems rather than assuming they’ve found the Holy Grail here.
Anyway. The only complication at this point is the addition of a non-open-ended additional die, to be subtracted on a roll of 1 or added on a roll of 20. I quite like this kind of setup (first seen I think in Shadowrun).
As Alice only uses one die roll, you have to suss out how many Success Points or Failure Points you got with the task too; essentially, this is the difference between your target number and what you actually rolled.
A lot of the time you will be making an Opposed Roll against someone else, as might be expected.
Character generation is fairly simple. There are 16 different Core skills, each of them very broad in their application except for the Spiritual skills (which let you do magic/psionics/whatever and are a lot narrower than most other skills). Each has a number of Aptitudes, so for example the core skill of Athletics relates to such aptitudes as Throw, Melee, Unarmed, and Acrobatics. You can choose specific Focuses that narrow things down still further.
So, to take an example as a combat skill, you might have Athletics 3 (Core skill), Unarmed 4 (Aptitude) and Wrestling 2 (Focus). So, any time you try to do a spinning piledriver on your opponent, your total skill is 3 + 4 + 2 = 9. If you just try to punch him on the jaw, though, you won’t be adding your Wrestling Focus, so you only get a skill of 3 + 4 = 7. And if you attempt a high jump, you add neither Unarmed nor Wrestling, leaving only your basic Athletics skill (3).
This is all pretty neat and simple, particularly compared to some of the more arcane and weird modern-day based systems that have appeared (Alice, despite its authors’ claims, is best suited to modern-day gaming in its basic form). The first problem arises with character generation costs for skills. You start out with 2 points in each of the Core skills except for Spiritual ones, and then have 99 Character Points to improve your skills and buy Aptitudes and Focuses. Core skills cost 3 character points per level, Aptitudes 2, and Focuses 1. This gives absolutely no reason for most characters to pick a Focus.
In fact, most characters will be best off spending their points solely on Core skills. The sample character, for example, has the Core skill of Athletics 4, at a cost of 6 points (you get level 2 in it for free, then spend 3 points for each extra level). He also has the related Aptitudes of Melee 4 (with the further Focus of Combat Knife 4) and Unarmed Combat 3 (with the Focus of Silent Take-Down 2). So his Athletics-related Aptitudes and Focuses cost a total of (4 x 2) + 4 + (3 x 2) + 2 = 20 points. He could have dropped all those Aptitudes and Focuses and simply raised his Athletics to 10 (it was 4 to begin with, so the extra 6 points will cost 6 x 3 = 18), making him astonishingly effective with all melee weapons, all forms of unarmed combat, and of course acrobatics, dodge, climb, lift, run, throw, and sneak (all of which would usually be separate Aptitudes). OK, his attack with a Combat Knife is slightly lower than it would have been (10 rather than 12), but he is now vastly more effective in every other Athletics-related activity, including attacking with every other melee weapon – and in fact he has 2 spare points anyway, so if he really wanted to keep his Combat Knife total at 12 he could spend them on Combat Knife 2 – a vastly more efficient use of his 20 points. From a game balance perspective, the points costs for raising skills are way out. Something like 8/3/1 for Core/Aptitude/Focus would make a lot more sense, though of course one would need to raise the starting Character Points totals considerably.
Combat uses opposed d20s as for other skills, but complicates matters somewhat with armour, assorted special actions, and Injury Rolls for the victim. This is probably acceptable; it’s still not very complicated, and the system does have the advantage that you could reasonably simplify things without any real effort if you wanted to speed up some less crucial combats. Combat does rely heavily on the death spiral effect, whereby characters become significantly less effective the more they are injured; I don’t like this, regarding it as neither especially realistic nor especially cinematic, but YMMV and it should be possible to remove without too much tweaking.
The weapons are a bit odd; the authors confess (quite reasonably) to not really caring that much about how much damage a bar stool does. However, they then go on to have a Fencing Foil (Damage 4) do more damage than a Bowie Knife (Damage 3). I sure know which one I’d rather be hit by. I get hit by a Fencing Foil several times every Tuesday, and even when it hits the bits of me that aren’t covered by mask, glove, and jacket I always seem to be able to walk home again afterwards. On the other hand, I really don’t want anyone hitting me with a Bowie, ever, even if I’m allowed to wear my fencing jacket. It appears too that in the world of Alice, a Bar Stool (Damage 6) is more dangerous than a .357 Magnum round (Damage 5), although it’s possible that I’m missing some intricacy of the gun rules that alters things… again, though, I know which one I would rather be hit with.
The game is rounded out by all the usual stuff: recommendations for very detailed character backgrounds, quirks etc. (usually with no particular game effects, although a particularly odd quirk might justify your starting out with a Core Skill at less than the usual base of 2 and getting a few Character Points back for it); examples of play. Additional rules are provided, generally either illustrating how to apply the game’s standard d20-based mechanic, or elaborating on it: these rules cover running and using vehicles (each with a “light” version and a “full fat” version); tracking and counter-tracking; theft; sneaking around; and the use of research. Given the game’s claim to be usable for all settings, information on antique arms and armour, as well as suggested skill changes for non-modern settings, are included.
So. I’ve niggled a bit, but then I always do, a bit. I still quite like this game, and would happily use it to run modern or moder-ish games – for example, I love the settings for Dark Conspiracy and SLA Industries, and reckon that with a tweak or ten, this system could probably operate better than the workable but occasionally clunky systems those games use. Is it worth a fiver? Probably. Could it be improved? You betcha – streamline it a little, make it more user-friendly, and give it a more specific setting or two (plus maybe an intro adventure) and it could be a lot better. I’d love to see someone edit out all the patronising crap too, but that could just be me.
Is it truly a generic system? I’m not sure. The absence of any game stat other than skills could, to my mind, be a killer for some genres. Basing the whole game on skills works well in a modern setting, but as soon as you make things a little more fantastic it does fall down a little. How do you model different character species, for example? What about the ones who are just plain stronger than people, or who have four arms? So, given that, I would far rather see this game play to its strengths – realistic, modern or near-future games, with the option for a spiritual/supernatural dimension if desired.
On balance I’ve given it 4/5 for Substance – there are some good ideas here, and there is a neatness to a lot of the core system that I find appealing. Still, it’s a low 4, verging on the 3, because there is a lot of tidying up that needs doing to the systems built around that core. Style is 2/5, basic but serviceable. I would probably up this to a 3 if they’d used boring old Times New Roman throughout instead of wacky and annoying Comic Sans.
You can download a free introductory 34-page version of the game from the website, which is handy for finding out whether you’d like this game or not.
