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INTRODUCTION

The name's Davenport. I review games.

So the other day I was goin' over my schedule, and I see this appointment with an outfit called "Green Ronin". I was lookin' forward to it, tell you the truth. I'd done a gig for their boss man, Chris Pramas, back in my rookie days. Back in the days before all the d20 hubbub started – back when "Green Ronin" was "Ronin Publishing", and they'd just picked up a game from Pariah Press called Whispering Vault.

Now, Pramas and his boys seem to stick pretty much to d20 these days, but they had this one oddball game in the mix they wanted to get the ol' Davenport Touch.

Oddball or not, I wasn't expectin' the GR rep to show up wearin' a nice, shiny spaceman get-up, complete with a great big fishbowl of a helmet.

"Fire up your engines, cadet!!" the guy yells, walkin' in like he owns the joint. (Funny how often that happens. I should sublet the place.) "Space Captain Glenn Stackhouse is on the bridge! And it's time to review... Spaceship Zerooooooooo!!!"

"Huh??" was my snappy comeback. Not my best work, but the whole Buck Rogers routine kinda threw me for a minute. And besides, part of my brain was tryin' to count the "o's" in that name.

"DAMMIT, man, there's no time for your space dust!" The guy actually pounds on my desk as he's sayin' this. "Spaceship Zero! The sci-fi serial roleplaying game! Don't you recall the legendary 1950s radio serial??"

"The wha-?"

"The cult-classic German television remake??"

"I don't watch a lot of-"

"GREAT COMETS, cadet!" There went the desk pounding again. (Which reminds me: I need to send Green Ronin a repair bill.) "HOW can you expect to be ready for the forthcoming feature film, let alone the GAME, if you haven't done your RESEARCH??"

"Feature film?? Look, pal, I just heard the name of this show five seconds ago! How'm I supposed to-"

"NEVERMIND!" he says. "There's no time for this astrogarbage! Do you think the evil Hydronaut Empire is just going to sit still while you twiddle your space thumbs??"

"'Space thumbs'…?"

"You heard me, mister!" He throws the book onto my desk. "Now get to reviewing!"

Then he storms out before I can get a word in edgewise.

I just shrugged and started readin'. Ordinarily I wouldn't take that kinda guff, but a job's a job. And besides, it wouldn't do to keep the Hydro-whatzis waitin'.

Introduction

This brief chapter begins with a chipper welcome to the reader, explaining that the game draws most heavily on the 1950s Spaceship Zero (hereafter "SSZ") radio serial but incorporates some elements of the cult-classic German TV show as well. (It also suggests that elements of the forthcoming movie will be incorporated into future supplements.) I think this was probably the best choice, since the 1950s retro-future style is one of the game's biggest point of difference.

Next up is an amusing little interview with Heinz Heero, who played Gearbox on the German TV incarnation of SSZ. He offers some mildly creepy insights into the setting and how the questions it raises can adversely affect the mind. (Apparently, Heinz has done a wee bit too much thinking about said questions.)

Finally, no less a gaming luminary than John Tynes tackles the obligatory "What is Roleplaying" section, comparing it to, appropriately enough, improvisational radio plays.

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Playtest: The chapter also includes a little image of a hand-written ship's manifest for Spaceship Zero. This came in extremely handy for reasons that will be apparent below. Suffice it to say that the Zero isn't exactly an Imperial Star Destroyer, and available supplies are going to be a critical issue. I would have preferred that this appear in the Technical Manual chapter for easier reference.

* * * * *

The World of Spaceship Zero

SSZ is somewhat unusual in that the setting is very closely tied to a story in which the PCs are assumed to be the stars. Accordingly, this chapter introduces the setting by telling the beginning of that story.

The year is 2025. Earth spacecraft routinely crisscross the solar system, but leaving its confines has remained impossible until now. A scientist in the employ of SpaceCorp, a firm recently in dire financial straits, has invented the Better-Than-Light (BTL) Drive. If successful, it will usher mankind into an age of interstellar travel and SpaceCorp back into the black. The drive will be tested on a spacecraft designated Spaceship Zero, a Space Hopper Mark V stripped of weapons to accommodate the BTL Drive and the generator for the Bendall Field that protects the craft from the extreme gravity the BTL Drive creates. Presumably, most or all of the PCs are members of the Zero's crew.

Regrettably, when the BTL drive is activated, it doesn't move the Zero at better-than-light speeds as advertised. Instead, it gives the ship infinite mass, creating a gravity well that destroys the entire universe and making the ship ground zero (pardon the pun) for a new Big Bang.

Once the crew is through freaking out, they decide to use the Deconstitutor – the setting's equivalent of hypersleep, which works by reducing people into their essential salts (sound familiar, Lovecraft fans?) for storage – and wait for the new universe to re-evolve into what should, theoretically, be a carbon copy of the original.

Well, like the BTL Drive, it was a nice theory.

The crew does automatically revive at Universe 2's equivalent of the time at which they destroyed Universe 1. Unfortunately, in this universe, the frog-like aliens known as the hydronauts have conquered Earth.

Now what? Well, that's up to the players…

Game Mechanics

The Spaceship Zero system might best be described as a cross between Basic Roleplaying (Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, et al) and Unknown Armies: make a percentile roll that's as high as possible without going over your skill (a.k.a. The Price is Right method).

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Playtest: This makes degree of success very transparent – on a success, your roll is how well you do. In our game, this didn't come up outside of contested rolls or combat (see below). Even if it had, success levels are pretty open to interpretation, given the lack of definition for them (e.g., a Perform roll of 75 doesn't have any kind of quality label associated with it – it's just a little better than a 74, and not quite as good as a 76). That doesn't really bother me, however.

* * * * *

Each skill is linked to an attribute on a 1-20 scale for humans. I'll explain more about that under character creation, but for now, it's important to understand that characters without a specific skill can default to the linked attribute. The odd part is that the difficulty of the task works differently depending upon whether a skill or an attribute is used. If the former, the difficulty is a flat bonus or penalty (e.g., +20 for a really easy task). If the latter, the difficulty is a multiplier (e.g., 1/2 of the attribute for a difficult task).

I'm assuming that this is designed to keep even difficult tasks in the realm of possibility when defaulting, but it has the odd result of making defaulting possibly more attractive if a character's skill is less than or equal to his linked attribute. For example, if your skill and its linked attribute are both 16, an "extremely difficult" task using the skill gives you a -40 modifier for a final score of -24, while the equivalent task using the attribute gives you a 1/4 modifier for a final score of 4.

Regardless of any modifiers, a roll that matches the unmodified skill score is always a critical success – i.e., in the above example using the skill of 16, an unmodified roll of 16 would be a tour de force regardless of the hefty modifier. While I do like having a chance for success always out there, I'm not fond of rules that make incompetent characters succeed brilliantly when they succeed at all.

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Playtest: I considered using the Fading Suns method – doubling the result on a critical – but it seemed a little silly for a critical with a flat 1% chance. Eventually, I decided to set up an open-ending mechanic, allowing players to re-roll and add the result on a success if the initial roll was within 10 of their unmodified skill total. Given the nebulous value of higher results in most cases, this was more trouble than it was worth outside of combat (see below).

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A roll of 100 is always a failure, and an optional rule makes it an automatic fumble as well.

Zero Dice

What sets SSZ apart from other percentile systems is its version of the Drama/Fate/Hero Point, known as the Zero Die. Zero Dice can be used in three primary ways:

• Seize the Day: Add an extra 1d10 to the standard 1d10 the character rolls for initiative.
• Play the Percentages: Before a roll, a player can spend a Zero Die to roll 3d10 to get a percentage total, taking two out of the three dice in whatever order he likes.
• Be Amazing: After a roll, a player can spend a Zero Die to bump up a roll one success level: a fumble becomes a failure, a failure becomes a minimal success (result of "1"), a success becomes a critical success, and (optionally) a critical success can become a result that's just this side of impossible.

Other Zero Dice applications scattered throughout the rules include ignoring modifiers for multiple actions or for pain.

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Playtest: Zero Dice highlighted the gulf in the importance of success levels between combat and non-combat actions like nothing else.

In combat, players figured that they'd get more than one chance to hit an opponent and wanted to get the best success possible, making them more inclined to Play the Percentages.

But when degree of success wasn’t a factor, they had no incentive to Play the Percentages in lieu of Being Amazing. And the latter took its toll on drama, since a character in dire non-combat straits could always succeed so long as he had a Zero Die.

For example, one character needed to make a desperate leap from a second-story platform to grab the reactor switch below and turn it off. It didn't matter how difficult I made this task – she had a Zero Die handy, so she would succeed. It would have been a minimal success with the Zero Die, but that would have been meaningless under the circumstances.

To counter the problem, I decided to implement a rule stating that a Zero Die spent to turn a failure into a minimal success results in a "skin of your teeth" success – the action succeeds, but the character is left in a precarious position. (For example, a character leaping over a chasm would make it across but would be left clinging to the ledge on the far side.) This seemed to encourage players to spend Zero Dice on the riskier "Playing the Percentages".

On the whole, though, I liked the way the Zero Die mechanic gave players more control over their characters' fates. It got generally high marks from the group as well.

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Characters get Zero Dice in two ways: through GM awards for good roleplaying, and through successful Zero Skill rolls that include a zero (e.g., a successful roll of either 7% or 70% would earn a zero die). Players can choose to make from 1-4 skills into Zero Skills at character creation (see below). These skills, presumably, are those key to the nature of the character, and the Zero Die mechanic encourages their use.

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Playtest: I adore the concept. It almost works like a very loose class system, albeit by nudging characters in certain directions rather than outright restricting them in others. In practice, however, I found some players getting frustrated due to extended periods in which their Zero Skills weren't applicable. The Pilot had a lot of trouble in this regard, since most of our trial adventure took place on a space station. I wouldn't call this a system flaw, exactly – it's just something a GM should keep in mind, like the utility of certain classes in a given adventure in class-based systems.

* * * * *

Characters can save up only a limited number of Zero Dice based upon their Bravado attribute, topping out at 5.

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Playtest: Now here is a mechanic that concerned me even before play – justly so, as it turned out. The text encourages spending Zero Dice freely – and, in fact, the system makes such expenditures desirable, as I'll explain shortly. But the fairly low cap on them made the players really hesitant to use them.

* * * * *

My qualms about the skill/attribute modifier differences aside, I do have to say that modifier application is something the game does very well.

I particularly like the way the game handles assisted skill checks, for example. A character making a skill roll can have a number of relevantly skilled assistants equal to his Zero Die cap, adding +5 per assistant to the his effective skill. However, an assistant making a successful Persuade: Leadership roll (for short tasks) or Administration (for longer tasks) can add his own Zero Die cap to the number of possible helpers. I have to admire any system that can make a skill like Administration practical rather than simply colorful.

I also like the modifier table for taking more or less time to perform a task. The table divides time increments into steps ranging from 1/4 round to 100 years, assigning each step a corresponding modifier. So, taking the standard 1 round to perform a simple task has no modifier, but taking 10 rounds (1 minute) to perform the same task adds at +30 modifier. If the task ordinarily would take more time, you simply start the 0 modifier at the normal amount of time required for the task and move up or down from there.

* * * * *

Playtest: This is another mechanic that saw a lot of use due to the competence level of the characters. In particular, the PCs had a hard time getting unpowered airlock doors open in zero gravity and often had to spend several minutes struggling with them.

* * * * *

One of the more unusual optional mechanics involves "On The Air" play. (I say "unusual" rather than "unique" only because Puppetland's basic mechanic is quite similar.)

During certain play segments bookended by a GM warning of "Z-minus five seconds… four… three…" and a "cut to commercial", the players must do everything not just in character, but in character as if starring in a radio show. Instead of saying, "I open the door," for example, a player would say, "If I can just… get… this… door… open!" Likewise, the GM must speak as the show's narrator. All out-of-character communication – particularly references to game mechanics – must be done silently with hand signals and cue cards.

I can't comment on how this works in practice, since I didn't come to a spot during our game where it seemed appropriate, and since the dynamics of this method would have been a little different for our online game anyway. Still, it does sound like an awful lot of fun.