Okay, so looking at the alpha rules on character generation. I have some issues and wonder if anyone else noticed them as well.
If we don't use their 9 archetypes to play the game. Then you have to use the life paths. The rules as written doesn't have a character generation worksheet included to walk through this path, unlike what GDW did for us in V1 and V2.
So here is where I have an issue with the life path method.
1. There is only 4 major nationalities to pick from right now. Swedish, US, Soviet, Polish. There is a reference to a local militia; but that means nothing since the game is set in Poland or Sweden. Where are the Germans, the British, Danes, Czechs, Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. Basically, where is the rest of Europe? Heck at the most why not include the Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Baltic States at a minimum
2. Everything seems to be a D6 role to start with, based on that A-D attribute skill roll. Why not just say, roll a D6 or D12 to get this score? If the little attribute score chart isn't on the Ref's screen. It will be flipping back and forth too much to roll up my character.
3. Why the roll for the childhood on 1D6 well after one has filled out their attributes. That seems particularly silly, since I might have tanked one of my attributes scores that would give a reason for my skills. I am also troubled by the forced taking of skills via dice roll. It works in Traveller rules because you can at least select a broad category to roll in for skills that at least gives you some control. The way FL has written it, you have no control unless the GM allows you to make changes to what skills you want to pick.
4. The entries into the careers. I understand this is alpha and they are fairly generic. Yet, you only get a chance to pick one of 6 skills based on the career choices that I see. In addition it appears they made officer a separate category of career for the military paths. When it should have been pick a military path and if your attributes are B or better all across three of the categories then you can be combat arms and an officer or Special Ops and and Officer. With maybe a pair of 2D6 rolls for skills.
Similarly, their breakdown of the "Intelligence" civilian career field has the career path of "Assassin", which I am sure seems cool; but it also seems very Pulp novelist like. Also, why not have a similar path of "hit man" in the Crime field?
The whole thing for the civilian career paths makes no sense.
5. Aging rules seem overly complex. Why not just say that each term is 4 years like before? So you go from 18 to 22 to 26 to 30 and so on. By saying roll 1D6 for aging. Then roll again against the number of terms that I have completed to figure out if I have lost some attributes. If you do it this way from the start, then you could be figuring attribute loss on a 24 year old PC. I mean I know I probably was starting to lose something at 24, but I didn't feel it when I compared myself to being at mid 30s or even now in my mid 40s. The chart that was standard in V2 (page 24 of that rule book) made it very simple. They then want you if the war doesn't break out to add three years to your age. Seriously.
- Aging starts at 18
- Then roll a 1D6 to age your character
- Then add three years to that current age if war hasn't broke out
- Then roll 1D6 and if you roll <current number of terms you lose an attribute score by one step
- Then add three to your score.
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- So lets play this out. Start at 18. Roll 1D6 and I get a 6.
- Now I am 24 years old. Roll 1D6 and get a 3, so no attribute loss
- Roll 1D8 to see if war breaks out. Recieve a 2. No war. Add three to my current age.
- Second Term starts at 27 (since 24+3 is 27). Roll a 1D6 and I get a 1.
- Now I am 28, roll 1D6 again and get a 1. Now I have to lose an attribute? At 26? That makes no sense.
Again this is all being done without a worksheet for character generation like V1 or V2 offered. This should be simplified way down to either 3 year or 4 year terms to make the math simpler. With again the effects of aging starting at either a specific term or a specific age (say like age 34 or term 5)
5. Trying to figure out the hit capacity and stress took me a while. Their example wasn't clear. It appears the rules have you take one of the attribute types die size + another attribute die size. Average them together (say Attribute B and D, which is 10+6=16. Divide by 2 to find the average is 8) then divide that by 2 to get the half of that number (or 2 if I am using the example). Why not make it simple math and say "add attribute scores together and find the quarter of that sum"?
6. The unit morale, moral code and dreams and the other fluff listed on pages 16 and 17 of the Alpha players manual means nothing. Where are the contacts that used to exist? That gave my GM more meat than how I fell into how I ended up playing with these guys or what my big dream was? I mean in one of my games using the old V2.0 rules. We had a player who created a Russian. That joined up with our team while we were in Norway. He wanted to get away from the boomer and the all the other mad Russians, he wanted to get to Montana and marry a fat prairie girl. He happened to have known one of the submarine crew members as a contact from before the war that gave us an in for allow him in, after our GM and this player rolled off some skills with each other. That is the way it should work, besides you should have a little notebook, or at least the GM should, that has the PCs and some of that information so the GM can craft adventures which pull at the motivations of the characters. I can see all manner of things going wrong with this idea of the moral code and unit morale. This isn't DnD where you can have a chaotic evil player near a lawful neutral player and the absolute chaos that comes from them butting heads. This is a game where everyone is together trying to survive and get home or to some form of a home and survive. The boundaries of morals and ethics will be tested by the GM about trying to maintain a shred of civilization and sanity.
Similar the unit morale means what exactly? That can't be initiative since that is a 1D10 card draw (wait why card draw, why not a 1D10 roll???). It is dependent on the highest command skill. What if no one has a higher command skill than 1? Scrub the skills sets none of them offer a "command" skill to start with unless you create an officer or a civilian manager.
At this point, I am just lost with the character generation and it seems as if the rules are forcing the players to use specific archetypes and to have groups setup specifically with certain mandatory roles filled like some computer games mandated you needed to have a thief, tank, cleric, magic user.