Those of you who read my review of
EAVA v2 will already know that I was involved in it and so the same caveats about possible bias and my determination to be harder than normal to avoid favorable bias remain in force here.
EABA v2.01 is a small but quite significant revision of EABA v2.0 that makes enough changes to warrant a supplemental review of its own. Basically everything said in the EABA v2 review I did earlier still applies except where amended below.
EABA v2.01 adds about 10 pages to the game's length. Most of this added material deals with explaining how the new and quite revolutionary turn scale system works.
The author appears to have a fear of appearing pedantic and at times tends to under explain things rather than risk over explaining, and that was the biggest problem with the original version of EABA 2. The turn scale system, while explained, was not explained well enough, leaving a lot of room for people to game the system and play the rules instead of playing the game.
This created a case where there were rules loophole to exploit, and under the auspices of "If you build it they will come" apparently some munchkins smelled new opportunities for munchkinism and began to wander off their usual reservations towards EABA 2.
So the new pages mostly expand upon how the turn scale and turn mod system works. I'm assuming you read my initial review of EABA 2.0 so I will expand on that here for the revised edition review.
Turn mod points can be spent to enhance actions in longer turns, but -and this is the important part!- turn mod in and of itself does not do anything at all. Turn mod points are not some sort of bizarre malarkium particles that produce enhanced effects on actions by interacting with the sub-quantum manurite field when the phase polarities are inverted. All turn mod points do is let you spend time or ammunition, or some other expendable item, to get a bonus. You have to have the turn mod points and the time, ammo, etc, to get a bonus. You do not simply spend turn mod points without saying what you are spending them on.
A real world example is not too easy to find, but if you're familiar with the history of WW2 you'll know a lot of economies used rationing during the war, so in order to get certain things you had to have the money and the ration stamps to buy it, and of course the item had to be actually available.
That's a little like how turn mod points work in EABA 2. Your turn mod doesn't do anything in and of itself, it lets you spend time or ammo to enhance an action, but you have to have the time or ammo to spend.
So if you want to spend some turn mod on a shooting attack, you have to have the turn mod points to spend, and you have to decide if you want to spend it on time (for careful aiming) or ammo (to fire a lot of shots in order to get one or more hits.).
Now let's give some examples of how turn mod works and how you can spend it. The first thing you must understand is that tactical time in EABA is counted in turn levels that double each turn, thus the first turn is 1 second long, the second is 2, third is 4. The fourth turn is 8 seconds BUT the fifth turn is 15, this is to round it off to an even minute at turn 7.
(Note that the universal chart in EABA v2 has time levels, and some of them are marked for the turn number and turn mod points you get in them. Ignore the usual time levels when counting turn length and turn mod points. The universal chart's time levels are still used to calculate if you have enough time in a turn to spend all your turn mod on things that take time as will be explained below. I admit that at first the issue of time levels on the universal chart and time levels in turns can cause some confusion, but once you understand it there's no problem. Also the turn levels are marked for you on the universal chart.)
Let's see this in action. A soldier is wounded, fatigued or otherwise at a point where he cannot be sure he can automatically succeed at reloading his heavy machine gun, but he must keep his gun firing or the nazis, zombies, alien bugs, etc, will overrun his position and kill his whole unit. He expended his last shot on the prior turn and now has an empty machine gun and a big, fresh ammo box just waiting to be hooked up to it.
We are at turn 5, which is 15 seconds long. It takes 10 seconds to connect a fresh ammo belt to the machine gun and is normally an easy task, requiring a 7 on your best 3 roll. But again, out soldier is in some way not sure he will succeed at the task. Say he's just one point short of being able to auto succeed by taking two's because that would give him a 6 and he needs a 7. (In other words his maximum roll is 3d 0 for some reason, poor guy.)
He has a turn mod of 8 for this turn. If he spends 1 point of it to raise his chance of succeeding it will have two effects. One, it will increase the time he spends on the task from 10 seconds to 15 seconds by raising it from a time level of 7 (9-11 seconds) to a time level of 8 (12-15 seconds) and this extra time will raise his roll to 3d 1, enough to auto succeed at his reloading task. Yay!
It will also increase the time he spends from 10 to 15 seconds which means he can do nothing more this turn as while he still has a turn mod of 7 to spend he has no time to spend doing anything, so the 7 points are lost. Note that if he had needed more than a 1 turn mod to succeed at the reloading task he could not have spent it as the turn had only 15 seconds of time, and even with more turn mod available he could not spend more time that the turn had.
As to other uses of turn mod, if our soldier had not been debilitated and did not need to spend the whole turn reloading, he could have used his full turn mod of 8 and 5 seconds of time to lay down a covering fire attack that would have taken a lot of ammo but given him a good chance of scoring at least one hit on every target in his field of fire. Using turn mod to enhance a covering fire attack, especially with an automatic weapon with lots of ammo can be very effective against large numbers of targets as it lets you get possibly several hits on targets in a narrow field of fire or usually at least one hit on every target in a wider area of coverage.
Another important clarification was made regarding spending turn mod on tasks requiring significant amounts of time. You do NOT, contrary to a note on pg 4.7 of EABA 2.0, have to spend 8 points on turn mode on a task that requires a time level of 6 to get a 2 modifier. You do have to spend the time from the time available in the turn, but you only spend turn mod if you are spending extra time. Note that the time you spend on a task may limit the time you can spend on other things with or without turn mod.
So in general the turn mod rules are explained far more clearly in EABA 2.01 than in the earlier edition. This is a good thing in and of itself, as it was open to abuse in the earlier version and not as clearly defined. There is however more good news in this version. Other issues are clarified based on feedback, and a few small but very significant rules changes are made.
One of the largest is that now when using TM to fire multiple shots to score a hit, you now can score more than one hit. For every 2 points you beat your to hit roll by, you score an additional hit up to the number of shots fired. This encourages using the multiple shots option as now it not only increases your odds of a hit but can increase your number of hits.
This rules changes helps plug a reality gap as under the original rules if you wanted to fire a full clip at a target at point blank range you had to either fire each shot separately, at which point multiple action penalties would ensure most of your shots missed, fire them all and only get one hit or some combination of the two that would result in most bullets missing. (Of course a GM could just rule you hit, but this still fixes the rules error.)
Some may think that this makes semi automatic weapons now as effective as full auto weapons since both can now score multiple hits on a good roll, but fully automatic weapons still have advantages especially when using large amounts of fire.
There is another small but important rules change, you may now spend turn mod to lower a shot's difficulty by 1 for every 2 points of turn mod spent. This can be important in high difficulty shots where lowering the difficulty by 1 may be far more significant than adding a 2 to your hit roll.
Covering fire rules are enhanced, and a new rule, called “Cowering fire” has been added to reflect the effects of suppressing fire. Now to enter an area being hosed by suppressing fire you need to make a roll to overcome your basic survival instincts. This is a good way to reflecting the unwillingness of most people to run into an area where machine gun rounds are visible passing through or hitting things.
Another nice little thing added to v2.01 is the beta playtest rules for adapting the generic power and device rules in EABA 2 to modern firearms. This is a small rules module, only about 13 pages, that has some clearly defined modifiers for making modern weapons. It also adds some more detailed rules on range and damage loss at range. Using this module I was able to design some unusual modern weapons, like the Micro Tavor Assault Rifle, a neat Israeli bullpup carbine that can be converted from firing 5.56mm assault rifle ammo to 9mm pistol ammo in a few minutes, effectively allowing it to transform from a small assault rifle to a large SMG.
I also designed a double barreled .45 pistol, which is a real weapon available now.
http://www.arsenalfirearms.com/products/af-2011-a1-double-barrel-pistol
The enhanced modern firearms rules were a pleasure to use and showed just how adaptable the new basic power and device rules are to any milieu. If you want to make plausible, fairly accurate models of modern weapons with them you can. As long as you don't approach the rules with a munchkin mentality they will serve you well.
All in all the 2.01 update of EABA 2 is a needed and welcome improvement on an already great system. The enhancements on how the new turn scale works will prevent accidental or intentional misuse and make it run much more clearly and smoothly. The only complaints I have are fairly trivial. It's still labeled EABA v2.0 on the cover page and in most of the book itself. Also there's still no Monty Python reffs that I could find.
