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Both are made by BTRC, in other words by Greg Porter. I have several other products by Mr. Porter, namely his “3G” weapon construction system and expansion for it along with “emperor’s arsenal” and “Central supply catalog” for T4, the best products made for the disastrous T4 line.
So when it came time for me to seek out a replacement universal system for GURPS I was naturally inclined to think favorably of the system Mr. Porter had created. (I must mention in passing that my decision to leave GURPS had nothing to do with the game, rather it was because of the pompous way some people at SJG act on their forums, combined with the decision to print SJG products in Asia instead of America.)
It was a good decision.
EABA, pronounced “Ee-buh” and standing for “End all, Be all” is a complete RPG system packed into a 159 page PDF that offers up a lot of gaming value in an economical package.
EABA uses a points based chargen system that has 6 stats, Strength, Agility, Will, Health, Awareness and an odd stat called “Fate” that is used both as luck and for other things, depending on the genre. In a fantasy setting, fate often becomes your magical powerbase, in a SF game it could represent psionic potential.
In a gritty, hardcore reality system, fate might be ignored, or used to represent “Adrenaline rushes” in combat. Each time you try to use the luck aspect of fate, it gets harder to do. This makes it a good candidate to simulate adrenaline rushes for hardcore games.
The skill system uses a roll over on 3d6 mechanic, with the number of dice rolled varying depending on skill and circumstances. You take your best 3 dice and any modifiers. Some characters can take an advantage called “larger than life” that lets them take the best 4 dice in all or some situations.
There are modifiers, but if they exceed a +2 they convert to another dice. If, for instance, you had an agility of 2d+2 and a gun skill of 2d+2 you would roll 5d+1 as the combined modifier of +4 becomes an extra die with a +1 left over.
As an additional note, if you roll more than 4 dice, you can opt to convert one of them to a +2 modifier if you don’t already have one on your roll.
There are built in limits to skills in general, with most skills being limited to no higher than the base attribute. Thus since using melee weapons in a function of Agility, your maximum skill with a melee weapon is equal to your agility. You can overcome this in some circumstances by specializing in a subset of a skill and gain an additional +1d in that specialization.
(BTW, all dice in EABA are d6. Dammit, another system in which most of my dice collection is useless!)
The skill list in EABA is fairly skimpy and a little coarse, but you are encouraged to make new skills as required. Skills come in 3 types: Regular, advanced and hobby.
Regular skills are, as one would surmise, regular. Advanced skills add to an attribute during an action, like Martial Arts adding to strength while making a melee attack. Hobby skills are things a character might pick up in various ways, but not be able to use to generate income.
Each skill type has a fixed point cost, which means it’s easy to add skills. It also means that acquiring a skill level in “Quantum mechanics” is no harder than acquiring a skill in “driving”. Also skills don’t require prerequisites, so you can get a skill level in Quantum mechanics without any mathematical skills being taken first.
The combat rules are next. EABA combat comes in two types, basic and advanced. This allows you to tailor the time, effort and detail level of combat to suit your group. It’s a fairly simple and clean combat system, with damage divided into two types: Lethal and non lethal.
Some weapons and attacks do lethal damage, like bullets, knives, etc. Some do non lethal, like fists, stunners, etc. Some do a combination called “Half lethal”. Now it’s important to understand that “non lethal” damage can in fact become lethal if too much of it is taken in one blow. If you take more “non lethal” damage in an attack than you have Health, half the excess becomes lethal. Thus healthier people are less likely to take as much lethal damage from many attacks, and stronger attacks are more likely to do lethal damage. I like this mechanic a lot.
Combat turns are 1 second long, and you roll initiative each turn, based on what your major action for the turn will be. Clunky? Maybe, but I like it.
One thing I don’t like in the combat and skills rules is the complete and utter lack of a critical success/failure system. There is none as written, and I kind of like the chance of a critical hit popping up now and then to keep things interesting.
On the other hand, the EABA combat system doesn’t use the horribly bad armor rules that some systems do in which armor just makes you harder to hit instead of reducing damage, thank god!
As you take damage, you become less effective, with “damage levels” that can vary based on the health and general toughness of the character lowering your dice pool as you reach them. However, the more damage you take, the less new damage affects you. If you are at -2d from injury, a 2d hit does less damage than it would if you weren’t already injured to that level. The rational given goes like “If your arm’s already broken, breaking it again will affect you less than the first time it was broken.”
Lethal and non lethal damage reduce your effectiveness the same way, but lethal damage takes much longer to heal after the battle.
( Note that a range limit on ranged weapons seems to be missing in the EABA rules, but is covered in the “Stuff!” rules.)
All in all the combat rules work quite well and offer flexible levels of detail for any game.
The “powers” rules is a huge part of the book, and allows all sorts of powers to be created and used. This is a large, complex and major part of the game, which is quite effective but could have been detailed and explained a bit better. Suffice it to say an experienced gamer will be able to create most any power, ability or handicap he wants, though with some effort.
Still, it’s not as bad as the Hero system. (The horror, the horror….)
All in all, I’d say that EABA is an excellent buy for the experienced gamer. It’s not quite user friendly enough for novices. For the experienced gamer willing to invest some real effort, it will yield up excellent results. It’s a basic system with few frills, but offers most everything needed for most situations. It even has a mass combat resolution system, for example, something that GURPS 4e still lacks despite repeated (and ignored) requests from it’s players to SJG.
Moving on to the second part of our double feature, we come to “Stuff!”, a system that allows you to build weapons, armor, gadgets, vehicles, creatures (yes, creatures) and even whole civilizations for EABA in a rational, consistent fashion.
At 234 pages, Stuff! is an add on that dwarfs the main rules it’s written to work with.
Stuff is based on units called “Hexagons” for volume and mass, and most large things will be measured in hexagons. A hexagon is a hexagon 1 meter from face to face, and 1 meter high. It comprises a total volume of 26.5 cubic feet. A typical car might have a volume of 8-10 or so hexes, for example. (BTW, Stuff! and EABA use metric measurements, but Stuff! gave the value of 26.5 cubic feet as an example of a hexagon’s volume for those of us who have not yet bowed in supplication to the almighty metric system.)
Personal gear will often be measured in millihexes, a volume roughly equal to a typical human fist. .1 millihex is the smallest standard measurement in stuff, and is roughly equal to a small watch and its strap.
Most items are created by either picking a size/mass limit, then determining what you can make something that big do with various mods, or by picking an effect you want and seeing how big you need to make the device to do it. Stuff! is based on modifiers, and there are a lot of them. Thus you might start with a rifle that masses, say, about 8 pounds as a base, but after applying mods you could end up with two radically different results. One 8 pound rifle could be an assault weapon with limited range and damage that had full autofire, while the other could be a bolt action sniper rifle that had vastly greater range and damage with a low rate of fire.
Stuff! also adds the rules for gun ranges to EABA and allows you to increase or decrease ranges to simulate various weapons or to try to match “real world weapons” more closely. The rules admit an M-16 made with the Stuff! rules will have too much range to be an accurate model of a real M-16, then shows how using a level of reduced range mostly solves the problem.
Stuff! won’t give you the level of detail that one of it’s competitors, Gurps Vehicles 3e, will. But then again it does give enough detail for most game needs, and you can design a Mk. XXXIII Bolo combat unit for the time and effort it takes to design a Sherman tank in Gurps vehicles 3e…
On the other hand, Stuff! offers details few if any other creation rules do. An example was given by showing how hard it would be to build a sensor array for a starship. It would be very hard to build it all as one unit, but if you divide the job into several smaller subassemblies it gets easier. (This is how many large, complex items get built in the real world, and why we have “subcontractors”.) The rules give you guidelines on how big a facility needs to be to complete a certain job and how many people are needed to work on it. This will usually be extraneous detail, but in some games it could be useful. Imagine a scenario where the players are assigned to sabotage a production facility that makes sensor arrays for enemy starships. If the players can knock out a few of the labs doing sub-contracting work it can shut down the production of starship sensor arrays for a time, slowing down the rate the enemy can produce interstellar warships.
I made a couple nice weapons for Stuff! fairly easily. One was a version of the Lawgiver pistol from Judge Dredd that left out some of the sillier rounds, the other was a man portable fusion gun from Traveller that had a special effect requiring (Or at least making it desirable for) the firer to wear full armor like in Traveller.
Stuff! allows you to make most things you’d need in any game setting from primitive, low tech settings to superscience SF settings. Rules for magic items are added as well.
Asides from being another vehicle/weapon maker, Stuff! allows you to create living creatures and civilizations as well, in plausible, consistent ways. If you create a large carnivore, it’ll tell you about how many a given area of land will support in a given eco system. Likewise, if you create a medieval society, you’ll know how many people each acre of arable land will feed, how many farmhands it takes to work each acre at a given tech level, etc.
EABA and Stuff! aren’t perfect, and I have a list of things I’d like to see changed if there’s ever a second edition. (Add a critical system! Put more detail in the skills section!) Both require the gamer using them to be fairly experienced and willing to put some effort into things. Both also offer considerable rewards for the investment.
As to things I’d like to see for now, a “Power up!” book for EABA listing a whole boatload of powers, abilities and disadvantages, with better explanations and examples, would be nice. Also, a “Big book o’ Stuff!” would be good for stuff!, and maybe a detailed vehicle combat system covering everything from chariots to starfighters would make a nice add on for the system.
EABA and Stuff! both, by themselves, offer a lot for their price. Combined, as they should be, they serve up a potent 1-2 punch that should leave the competition reeling. They then administer a coup de grace by costing so much less than their main competitors in the Universal RPG system field.
Consider: You can buy EABA for 13$ and Stuff! for 12$. At 25$ total they cost less than ONE of the TWO books you need for GURPS 4e, and a lot less than the monstrous tome that is the Hero 5eR book.
Sure you have to print them, but if you have a decent, refillable inkjet printer you can do it fairly quickly and cheaply as the two PDFs are made to be printed easily. I used a HP deskpet 3915, (a very cheap printer) used the fast normal setting to save time and ink, refilled my cartridges and got the job done in a couple hours at about 5$ or so in total cost for the ink and paper. (As a note, they should be printed in color.)
So even at 30$ EABA/Stuff! is still a bargain, and you can take the money you save and buy some great, original worldbooks for the system, like “Code:Black” or “NeoTerra”, both of which I’m planning to get.
Sure, there are disadvantages. You do have to work to get something out of EABA. It’s not as “user friendly” as some systems that have huge skill lists and such. You have to make your own skills usually, and the powers rules can be puzzling at times. (Though still not as bad as those in Hero…)
Also, you won’t get the slick paper and pretty color artwork you’d get in GURPS as the art in EABA/Stuff! is pretty sparse and basic. (But if you want art you can go to a museum.)
Lastly, if a hurricane hits your town, putting your copies of EABA/Stuff! on your roof won’t weigh it down enough to keep it from blowing off like the Hero 5eR rulebook just might, even if you used really heavy 3RBs to put them in.
Those issues aside, EABA is an overlooked and underappreciated Titan in the arena of universal RPG systems and if you’re an experienced gamer looking for a low cost, high value system you should check it out. To see for yourself, go to www.btrc.net and download some free sample of EABA, Stuff!, Code:Black and Neoterra.
