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I'm going to step out of my role as Toy Guy for
the Collector Times this month and instead focus
on one of my other passions and that is Role
Playing Games.
In this series of articles I'm going to look at
the amount of time and other player controlled
criteria it takes to design a first level
character for the various role playing games that
I happen to have lying around the house. Some of them might be vary old school, like
the Marvel Super Heroes RPG by TSR, or some of
them might be very new like the Stargate RPG by
AEG.
I'll look at them with the following criteria:
Stats: Choice or Random. In other words can you
choose how many points to spend on your stats from
a point pool or are they a random roll of the
dice?
Class Selection: Can you choose a character class
or is it left up to chance?
Race Selection: Does it stick with the theme of
the game or are there some races that just do not
fit with some of the class selections?
Skills/Powers: Is the system for making your
character more skills driven, super power driven,
or a combination of both?
Advantages/Drawbacks: Is there an advantage and
drawback system to make your character
multi-layered?
GM: How much of the character's background is left
up to the Game Master/Dungeon Master?
Chance for Min/Maxing: Is there a chance for you
as the player to Min/Max your character?
This month I'm going to look at the Stargate RPG
from AEG. I picked up the Stargate RPG on the used
book shelf of my friendly Local Game Store for 40%
off. I would have liked to get it at Half-Price
books for 50% off, but since they only have things
like D&D I doubt I would find it there.
The Stargate RPG is based off the Spycraft gaming
engine, which in turn is based on the D20 gaming
engine. So you might say Stargate is a D20 game.
First up are the stats. There are three ways of
rolling stats. The first is rolling 3D6 and using
the number that comes up. This has a tendency to
come up with numbers less than ten and that causes
you to throw the character out. The second is
rolling 4D6 and throwing out the low die and using
the three highest numbers. This makes for a
slightly better character giving you stats in the
low teens most of the time which makes for a
better gaming experience. The last way is called
the heroic way in which you roll 1D10 and add 8 to
whatever you throw. I've, in the past, used the
4D6 drop the lowest die and had some pretty good
success with it. I tried the heroic method this
time around and found that it produced higher
stats for my character for the 3D6 or 4D6 ways.
Class and Race selection is handled with a three
tiered system in the Stargate RPG. You first
select whether you want to be a human from earth,
an Asgard (like Thor from the TV show), a Jaffa,
Tok'Ra, Reol, or a near human species from the
worlds that they have explored throughout the
shows many years. I, for brevities sake, took the
human route since I like playing human characters.
Then, as a human, you get to choose if you want to
be Air Force, Army, Marine, Navy, Civilian, CID,
Engineer or Diplomatic Corps, and from there a
specialty like Para Rescue for the Air Force,
Officers for all the branches, Enlisted and
Technicians for all the branches, or Special
Forces like Ranger or SEAL depending on what
branch of the military you want to be in. For the
other races they have their specialties but none
of them as plentiful as the human choices. The
final tier is what character class you want to
play; there's the Explorer, Guardian, Pointman,
Scientist, Scout or Soldier. I choose the Human,
Pararescue, and Soldier.
Skills/Powers: The Stargate RPG is a skills/feats
based system rather than a super power based
system. I prefer my games this way because it
keeps things from getting out of control with the
number of powers you can take, and juicing them up
to ungodly levels. The skill levels are added to a
stat that you rolled up based on what kind of
skill it is. Swimming for example is a Strength
based skill while Piloting is a dexterity based
skill. With the number of skill choices I got I
decided to go for a medical based soldier with
some piloting skills as well with one of the two
cross-class skills that I get at first level as an
Air Force character.
Advantages/Drawbacks: The Stargate RPG has no
system for advantages/drawbacks. This really bugs
me because something like that where you spend
skill points for advantages and gain skill points
for drawbacks would be a good thing and make for a
more unique character.
GM: The GM control for your character is minimal
if at all and I think this is a good thing.
Chance for Min/Maxing: While the game is not as
focused on combat as most of the other D20 games
there is still a remote chance for min/maxing. I
choose a mix of skills, combat and non-combat
feats.
That's all for this month; look for more next
month.
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