Disclaimer: I apologize for any mistake, convoluted sentence structure and
other assorted "bugs" in the following text. English is not my first language,
and this is the best I can do...
Overview
EABA is the latest creation of Greg Porter, author (to cite a
few) of CORPS, Macho Women with Guns, and Slag.
Unfortunately
the EABA text does not include a "Designer's Notes" section:
apparently it is an attempt to rebuild CORPS from the ground up,
keeping most of the stuff that worked, and adding concepts and
sub- systems, including plenty of stuff which proved itself in
other games.
For the sake of readers who are not familiar with CORPS, it was
originally designed as a simpler, streamlined version of a rather
complex game (TimeLords) by the same author. In the original
version it included a specific background geared towards modern-
time conspiracies.
The second edition of the same game became a standalone, add-
your-background game system, sort of a condensed GURPS/Hero. As
such, it enjoyed a minor but steady success among people who used
it as an engine for different game worlds. CORPS (based on D10),
was pretty tight and realistic. As such (just like GURPS) did not
lend itself well to "cinematic" games.
Enters EABA: it now
uses D6, can still be adapted to a lot of different milieus, but
now it should work better for "pulpier"
games.
The author has dropped some hints regarding the fact that EABA
actually means something, but for now I have not been able to
figure out what it should mean.
EABA is available in electronic form only: it is a 15Mb pdf file
(you may choose between color and grayscale). For a modest
additional fee you may order it on mini-cd.
The pages have a two-columns layout. Text is well laid out and
organized, with few illustrations (mostly hex maps for combat
examples). Each chapter starts with a full-page color image (all
these have a common cyberpunk/science fiction look). There are no
sidebars (notes, examples and remarks are in the main code,
marked with specific icons and in a different color).
Being a "pure" rule systems, there is no game-related fiction.
Basic mechanics
EABA is a point based game with a classical "roll over difficulty
threshold" basic scheme.
Characters are defined by six attributes. The first five are
pretty self-explanatory: Strength, Agility, Awareness, Will and
Health represent more or less what you would expect. The last one
(Fate) is a sort of wildcard characteristic: it represents "the
ability to twist the natural order of things to your will" and
can, depending on the specific game-world, represent things like
Psi, Luck, Mana and even, in extreme cases, Honor or any other
intrinsic characteristic that is not influenced by your physical
condition.
Unless the gamemaster decides s/he wants to use it for world-
specific things (like the Honor example in a samurai RPG), the
"standard" use for Fate is to let you add or subtract 1D6 to any
roll you want. The catch is that in the course of a given
adventure, each time you want to use Fate you need to roll your
Fate value against an ever increasing difficulty
level.
Game quantitites are rated either in points (human average
characteristics, for example, are at 7) or in D6 (like skills,
damage, armor) are rated in d6. Characteristics are easily
converted to effect dice by counting a d6 for each three points,
so a Strength of 7 would give 2d 1, while an Awareness of 2 would
be 0d 2.
Skills adds to this (you can have, for example, 1d in Firearms).
Someone with 2d 1 in Agility and 1d in firearms would roll
3d 1 to hit.
The maximum level you may buy in a given skill
depends on the level of the governing attribute.
Character creation uses two distinct point pools for
characteristic and skills. You can also buy the usual
advantages/disadvatages (called Traits; depending on the specific
Trait you must pay Skill points, Characteristic points or a mix
of the two).
There around 40 skills. They are fairly generic and based on one
characteristic (i.e. "Water Vehicles" is based on Agility, and covers all
ships appropriate for a given era/milieu). You can further
specialize in specific subskills, like Pistol for Firearms.
Melee weapons are rated as an add to your strength effect,
much like GURPS (e.g. shortsword will cause "punch 1" damage),
while firearms have their own damage value (9mm pistol:2d 1).
Armor subtracts damage (Plate armor: 2d 0). The system
differentiates among lethal, non-lethal and semi-lethal damage.
Much of the bookkeeping of damage is done through a special
damage track on the character sheet, similar to the one used by
Silhouette (with further influence from TOP Secret S.I.), so the
damage you suffer is easily converted to a penalty to your rolls
(-1d, -2d and so on).
I have not playtested anything, so far, but the overall
impression is that the game complexity is somewhere between
Silhouette and the second edition of CORPS.
The author has worked hard to make most of the system work
according to a few simple principles, and you'll find everything
you need in the character sheet (which looks a little weird,
being hex-based like most of the game, but is well organized).
Skill use is swiftly dealt with in a short but
comprehensive section of the manual: there is the usual
difficulty threshold table, notes on trading time for quality,
help from other participants and so on.
Interestingly enough, this section uses an universal, logarithm-
based table which ties together time, difficulties, space, mass,
information and other game "units". This idea comes straight from
DC Heroes, and allows you to easily derive effects from known
quantities: so if you have an Awareness of 7 and want to read
EABA (information value: 32) you will need 32-7=25 time units,
i.e. 1.4 hours.
When you roll for a skill, you only keep the best three dice. If
you have more than 3 dice to roll, though, you can drop some of
them (before rolling) in exchange of an additional fixed bonus
( 2 for each dice you choose not to roll). So even if the maximum
possible roll is a 18, characters with an high number of dices
can aim to much higher values.
Oddly enough, the system does not have any critical/fumble
mechanism.
The lion's share of the manual is devoted to combat. Just
like the original GURPS, or Silhouette, the game seems rooted in
a tactical design (including hex maps) and sports two separate
section, one for basic and another for advanced combat.
I will not describe much of this, let me just add that the
system, as a whole, is fairly modular, most rules are optional,
and the layout of the text allows you to focus easily on what you
need. This is true for all the contents of EABA, and it is not
just for the combat section. Most of the typographical ideas
(using different colors for notes, examples and warnings) were
pioneered in CORPS 2nd Edition, and again are put to good use in
this game.
Combat is acted out in 1-second turns. In each you have one major
and one minor (look around, change facing, walk a few steps...)
action. The roll for the major action is also used to adjudicate
initiative, so if you roll low you will probably fail, and also
act later in the turn.
The system seems sound. The only complain I may have is that the
way most things work, players and GM must learn to convert dice
and plus/minus values on the fly: as an example (taken by the
rulebook) a dodge versus an opponent is 5D 1 (skill roll) 2
(dodge action) -1 (extra major action in a turn), this becomes
4d 3 which in turns becomes 5d 0 (each 3 is an extra dice). On
top of this the player could drop two dices and roll 3d 4
instead. Nothing major, but could require some
time to get used to.
After combat there is a detailed discussion of powers.
Anything which is not covered by skills, characteristics and
combat effects may be modeled as a Power. This may be a spell, a
psi power or any kind of superpower. The method is similar to the
one used by Champions (you buy a base effect, adding details
which either limit or increase it, and cost a variable amount of points).
There around 80 powers, but being fairly abstract you need to
combine at least three or four of them to get something usable
(e.g. Invisibility would be modeled as "Subtracts from
attribute", "Sensory targeting", "Powers lasts as caster wits",
"Takes a minute to use" and "Requires gestures"). Note that EABA
has not been designed for deity- level games, so while you can
probably hope to mimic Spiderman with it,
Silver Surfer is definitely out of scope.
The Power system include some brief but well thought guidelines on how
to use it to build both magical and non-magical gadgets.
Next comes the Minutia chapter. A catch-all section
which includes stuff on tech eras, rolls required to notice
things, vehicles, a battle system, drugs and diseases and natural
forces (weather, effects of thirst, fatigue and so on). Note that
the vehicle part is an extremely condensed (yet usable) vehicle
design system.
The only glaring omission (at least to me) is
that there is practically nothing about animals in the manual.
Gamemastering covers most of the usual advices, notes on how
to work with players, the 36 plots table. Not much to add here,
it is competently written and, as the rest of the manual, packs
an amazing amount of stuff in a relatively short space.
The
Gear chapter lists tables of weapons and armor stats,
other assorted equipment, plus sample character sheets, blank
maps and other useful tidbits. The volume (149 pages) is fully
indexed, so even if you print it out and cannot use the
internal pdf indexing, you will still find your stuff easily.
Extra Stuff
Apart from the main manual, BTRC has already some additional
stuff for EABA: there are conversion notes for other game systems
(at the moment Timelords, Corps, D20, plus notes for
Guns,Guns,Guns a weapon-design supplement by the same author).
These are all freely available at the
BTRC site.
You can also buy a complete, separate fantasy world (called Ythrek).
Taking up Goliath?
Apart from the electronic format, EABA has another interesting
characteristic. It comes with its own Open Supplement Licence
which seems similar to the D20 OGL.
If you are interested in
this, I urge you to consult the BTRC site (www.btrc.net). I don't
know enough of the original D20 licence to offer any useful
commentary on the EABA version.
Summing up
EABA (just like CORPS) sports and extremely high contents
density, so my review will probably not do enough justice to it.
The author has showed in the past to be very good at covering a
lot of points with just the right amount of rules and details. I
have cited many similarities with existing game systems, but this
does not mean that it is an hodgepodge of ideas "lifted" from
previous designs.
I think it is a good idea, from a designer point of view, to
incorporate "prior art" which proved useful for specific things,
like the "universal table", instead of either shoehorning
everything in an existing (but ill-fitting) in-house system or
desperatey churn our gimmicky rules trying to set himself as
"different".
If you liked CORPS you will probably find yourself pretty
comfortable with EABA. If you like the idea of "generic" game
engine (like Fuzion, or GURPS) to power different campaigns, and
prefer detailed rules to more abstract systems like Tri-Stat, I
think you should give EABA a try.
