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I'm still not sure what they were thinking when they tried to revive the booster packs for RPGs thing that flamed out so greasily during the big CCG boom. Gamma World was going to be a niche enough game that no retailer would have seriously bothered ordering a box of boosters. The gimmick was interesting, basically drafting the powers and tech that fit your play style, something like a randomized version of the magic item wish list that some 4E groups use. My gaming groups have always tended toward long-term play with lots of power inflation, but my impression of the 4E game is one of one-shots and short campaigns with fire-and-forget character generation... and that's great! It does make me wonder why they spent so much time on the Cryptic Alliances in Legion of Gold, but I suspect that's equal parts call back to earlier editions and part of the inventory of optional rules. Unfortunately, being based on 4E, stock Gamma World is stuck with its wretched skill challenge system. While everything else has been trimmed down and streamlined to both make games play quicker and the text fit neatly in the roughly paperback sized rules booklets, it remains as turgid and awkward as it ever was.
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Jul 8, 2013 05:13
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Wow, even the rulebook says you'll be fine with the stock deck. Sure it says that on what's basically a full-page ad for boosters, but still! If you really want more cards, you can always sleeve the core ones with blank paper backs, and proxy your own. I came across a Doctor Who-inspired batch of fan-made cards, so there are probably more kicking around out there too.
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Jul 27, 2013 01:52
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PeterWeller posted:If you want a more long term and serious version of the game, you should look into the 4th edition from 1992. It has a broad spread of character options, huge room for character and campaign development, a fairly large line of supplements and decent rules in the form of a sort of proto-D20. Actually, I find the beer and pretzels, short advancement table approach refreshing. I do find it fascinating how the game has changed from edition to edition. A friend had what I think was a first edition box, back when there were three or four different sorts of power cells, and Death Machines roamed the wastes with one-shot-kill Black Ray beams, the only mutant plants were wildlife, and figuring out old tech involved a decision tree that was scarier looking than the one from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. There's a copy of the core book for what I think is 4th Edition around here somewhere. I remember it had a rising Armor Class (which was a forehead-slapping moment when I first saw the THAC table), and a surprising array of shiny old tech lavished with technobabble, but no Black Rays or Tarrasque-caliber Death Machines. It was still cool, character creation seemed a lot smoother, and the rules for acquiring mutations during adventures were amusingly intriguing. I really like this new edition, partly because it's even easier to roll up a character, and you really don't have to worry about statting out mutations for individual monsters. I think I mentioned before, but I feel kind of weird about how the old Cryptic Alliances were added in-- they seemed like a major influence in earlier editions, with groups like the Bonapartists or the Purists being downright scary; there isn't really much room given to them this time around, and with Gamma Terra being a much sandboxier setting they don't offer the same sense of urgency. They feel more like Fallout's regional bandit tribes and rad cults than major threats. Or maybe I misunderstood them the first time. 
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Jul 29, 2013 20:43
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Ah, that's it! Clearly, my memory isn't what it's been. And now I'm disappointed that I never saw any of the other 4E stuff for sale around here. Rebuilding-- that's precisely the tone I've been groping for, trying to compare the new game with the older editions. There's a sense of the characters being adventurers because... they're adventurers, and not because they've just passed their rites of adulthood in 1982's version of Far-Go and their home needs a not-GECK to survive. Some sort of settlement advancement system would definitely be neat. There's nothing wrong with one-shots and short campaigns, but giving the characters somewhere to hang their hats and a kind of shared character for the players to get attached to, that you could threaten with the machinations of Cryptic Alliances or the inexorable plod of an Ancient highway-paving machine would be... intriguing.
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Jul 29, 2013 23:08
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Photocopy the origins so you can pass 'em around, or just jot up a short stack of sheets yourself and hand 'em out. The link to the character generator in the first post still works too.
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Oct 5, 2013 08:07
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Man, I loved Alphaman. Could never beat it, even cheating shamelessly, but loved it all the same.
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Dec 20, 2013 21:02
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I made it to Elvis; the impersonators were tough bastards. I think I skipped past some necessary information by accident after that, because I remember getting stuck and not going much further. I remember reading a couple of the Gamma World Endless Quest books, too; got Light on Quests Mountain at the school bazaar one year. It's still floating around here, though I'm not sure where.
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Dec 21, 2013 06:50
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According to the Wikipedia page for the Endless Quest series, there were a total of four Gamma World books: Light on Quests Mountain, Mystery of the Ancients, American Knights, and The 24-Hour War. The EQ books were strictly Choose Your Own Adventure-style books-- no stats to track, no random rolls, about the same size and page-count as a classic CYOA, and most if not all of the time you were a named, youthful protagonist who has deliberately set out for adventure in whatever form it happens to take. They had about the same success/loss ratio as a 'proper' CYOA book, some of which could be pretty drat grim, like losing one of your companions on your Gamma Terra adulthood quest, or drinking a poorly-labeled potion of growth in a closet... which really kind of fit with the 'dice fall, somebody dies' attitude that RPGs in general espoused in those days. The writing assumed that the characters some degree of familiarity with the world, and would briefly narrate that for the reader's benefit, but the really scary, high-level stuff they encounter, thanks to that same 'dice fall' attitude, only gets a name if it's inclined to provide one itself. Otherwise it's just scary description and potential threat the reader has to eyeball. They're long out of print, of course, but it isn't too hard to find them (and cheap) on eBay.
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Dec 22, 2013 05:05
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There's been like... seven or eight editions over the years actually, each building on the last and occasionally making heavy rewrites. There are a few things that stand out for me, though. First is that Gamma Terra used to be the result of a nuclear exchange, so there was a larger focus on Hollywood radiation and none of the weird dimension overlapping stuff there is now. Second is that character creation was a lot more granular: you had Pure Strain Humans, who were tough survivors and immune to mutation; Mutant Humans and Mutant Animals, the latter of which were somewhat under-detailed in the earliest editions; and Mutant Plants a few editions in. Mutants rolled randomly for their powers on several different tables; power potency varied highly, with some marked outright as 'sucks to be your character' curse-grade stuff. This applied to NPCs and monsters too, which was realistic in theory but annoying to roll for all the time in practice. Mutants could acquire more mutations post-chargen with exposure to dangerous amounts of radiation in some editions. Mutations were permanent, unlike the weird rotation of Alpha Mutations characters get in the new edition. The whole ancient technology thing was a lot more complex-- lots of prewritten devices and D&D-style weapons lists, and three or four different styles of energy cell that one or another would demand. Where a new edition character can pick up a piece of Omega Tech and hit the ground running, there was a much greater focus on the characters having to puzzle their way through with sensory cues and flowcharts for the DM... which would occasionally break the item or injure the characters with bad rolls. Compare with Omega Tech and the generic weapons players are asked to skin themselves. Cryptic Alliances seemed a much bigger thing, but I suspect that's because older editions of Gamma Terra were a lot more detailed, and they were a part of the core book instead of a few pages in the latest one. I don't recall them having powers, like the cards that came with this time around, and the powers on those cards felt a lot more 'screw your buddy' than I would have expected... but that's me.
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Jan 14, 2014 13:57
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I always had the feeling that sideline games like GW and Star Wars were test beds for new D&D mechanics near the end of 2nd Edition and during the run of 3.x. I remember sitting in the school cafeteria with a new copy of the GW corebook, seeing ascending armor class, and thinking, finally.
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Jan 14, 2014 16:56
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