Even You Can Be an Alien Mechanic
In my last article, I talked about my personal decision to ditch D&D and focus on playing Alien RPG and other Free League games. Today I am going to focus on some Alien game mechanics to show you how easy they are to learn and how the fun they create make this game one of the best things you can do with your roleplaying time.
What is a YZE? And Why Should You Care?
To understand Alien RPG and its mechanics, you don’t need to understand the system upon which it is based. But it doesn’t hurt to know about it and there’s a good reason why you might want to learn it. That system is the Year Zero Engine designed by Free League Publishing, or Fria Ligan as they are called in their home of Stockholm, Sweden. The YZE is designed with the intention of being easy to learn, quick at the table (IRL or digital), empowering for taking chances, oriented on player characters, exciting, and portable to many genres. I think it achieves all of these intentions and works extremely well for Alien where action should be fast, brutal, and decisive.
You can read the entire YZE SRD (system reference document) in minutes and then pick up any of Free League’s games and know what’s going on. Now if they only had a couple of games, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. However, Free League now has more than 15 RPGs covering genres of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, folklore, and post-apocalyptic survival. And they have some pretty big IP games including Alien of course, as well as The Walking Dead, Blade Runner, and The One Ring. When you learn one YZE RPG you actually learn a dozen more for the same effort. That is a huge reason to invest your time in the YZE and I recommend starting with Alien because it’s very close to the base YZE, minus the magic rules. For the rest of this article, I am going to focus on the basic mechanic of testing skills.
Less Math Is Fast and Fun
One thing I don’t relish is doing calculations at the gaming table. There is NOTHING wrong with a super crunchy game [for any non-gamers a crunchy game is one with lots of rule and calculations]. It’s just not my thing. I want to roll some dice and immediately know my outcome both as a player and as a GM. I want to get away from the dice quickly and see what my players are thinking, how they’re reacting to what just happened or how they’re going to cope going forward.
Alien gives you this because a 6 on any die is a success and anything less isn’t. Plain and simple. No plusses, minuses, math etc. Roll and know. Now, there are modifiers for gear and situations and things that just come up, but again, you’re not doing math calculations on the result of a roll, you’re just rolling more or fewer dice.
Dice Pools Are Easy to Learn and Create Exciting Moments
I wrote previously about my sweet spot in RPGs being a game where each player is NEEDED. In Alien, you create characters that fit a certain archetype or ‘career’ as it's called. Careers are similar to classes in other RPGs, but they really do tend to culminate in characters that are good at a few related things; not anything and everything. To clarify this, let’s look at an example.
Let’s say we’re creating a character named Hopper who is a Roughneck, which is a character like those played by Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Koto in the original Alien film. These are people who get things done. They are good at working with machines. When creating a Roughneck like Hopper, they are going to be strong and good at a skill called Heavy Machinery. Specifically, Hopper might have a Strength attribute score of 5 and a Heavy Machinery skill score of 3. When a GM calls for a skill test of Heavy Machinery, Hopper will add those scores together for a total of 8 and that’s how many dice will be rolled to pass the test.
I gotta tell you when that big moment arrives, and you are called upon to solve a critical challenge, there’s nothing better than grabbing a pile of 8 dice and letting them scatter across the table! I love that as a player and watching it as a GM as well. When a player rolls 8 or more dice and gets 4 or more successes when only one is needed, OH MAN! That is some excitement at the table. But for me as the GM, when a player rolls that many or more dice and doesn’t get a single 6, wow! That might be even more fun. It’s such a shock for everyone. And it’s not the end of the action…
Pushing Your Luck is Scary Fun
When you don’t get a success in Alien, and other YZE games, you have the option to “push your roll”. That means you roll all your dice again. Yay! You can even do this if you did get a 6 but want or need more successes, but there’s a cost. In Alien your character starts to become stressed by the situation. So, you immediate add one point of stress each time you do this. Other things can happen that give you stress points too, like getting attacked by an alien creature, hello!
Stress is represented by additional dice you roll (equal to your current total stress points) each time you test a skill, and they have a special effect when a 1 comes up on those dice.
When a 1 comes up, represented by the iconic Facehugger symbol on the official game dice, it means you panic from the stress of the situation and you either “keep it together” and move on without effect or enter a panic state that could even lead to something awful like attacking your teammates! The determination is made by rolling a single stress die (official dice are a different color than your pool dice), called a ‘panic roll’, and adding the current number of stress points you have to the result.
Let’s go back to our example of Hopper the Roughneck to take a look at this. For the example I am using screenshots from the Sebedius Discord Bot that enables online gaming of multiple YZE games. Check it out here.
Hopper is standing on the exterior hull of a space station. They’ve been tasked with repairing a communications array that was damaged in a recent meteor shower. To make the repairs the GM asks for a Heavy Machinery roll. Hopper adds his Strength (5) and his Heavy Machinery skill (3) for a total of 8 and rolls his dice pool. He gets the following result:
Dismayed but undeterred, Hopper’s player decides to ‘push the roll’ and immediately adds one stress point and rolls again, including the stress die!
Hopper is panicking a little because of the situation, their adrenalin is pumping, and that could have helped them because a 6 on the stress die also counts as a success, but in this case they rolled a FACEHUGGER! So, they need to roll a single stress die as a panic roll and add their total stress to it, which is 1.
Adding Hopper’s result of 5 to their current stress of 1 is a total of 6. The GM checks a table at this point to see what the result of the panic is, and the outcome is that they are “keeping it together” and because they did roll a 6 as well, they are able to repair the comms array.
Ok, who’s keeping score on doing math? Cause, yeah, we had to do a little math there. So I bent the truth a little bit and if I’m honest, I would love to have players roll two dice and look up their panic result on a table rather than do math. But that would break the magic of the stress/panic system.
Wait, Is there Magic in Alien or Not?
No, not real magic. I mean, not in-game magic…and not in-real-life magic. There’s no magic! But there is a magical experience at the table that occurs when your character gains stress.
You keep track of stress by gaining yellow dice and/or recording it on your character sheet. And the more your character gains, the more stressed you become as a player.
Remember the panic table I mentioned? That table’s results get worse and worse the higher your panic roll result is. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun by revealing everything on there and I highly encourage new GMs to not tell players what is on there before playing the game. But I will say that characters (and people in real life) do crazy things when they panic that make in-game situations a lot worse.
Let me wrap up the stress/panic topic by just saying that playing a game where you can lose control and are trying to survive against all odds is something every gamer should do because it’s an inverse type of fun to being a superheroine and it is every bit as amazing and fun. For many it will be a really refreshing change.
But Wait, You’re a Talented Person
Alien also includes a way to differentiate characters with another mechanic that kind of cheats or breaks the rules a little bit. These are called Specialties in the YZE SRD and in Alien they are called Talents.
Let’s go back to Hopper for an example of the talent True Grit, which enables characters to push skill rolls based on their Strength attribute twice, whereas normally you can only push rolls once.
Hopper is still outside the ship and the meteor shower is imminent. In fact, they receive a message from shipmates that there’s only got 2 minutes to get back inside before the meteors arrive! The GM says this is scary and they should take another point of stress. So now they’re at 2.
Hopper wants to move fast so they make a MOBILITY skill roll to get back to the airlock quickly. Hopper’s dice pool will be AGILITY (2) and MOBILITY (2) for a total of 4 and they will roll 2 stress dice.
Succeeding Hopper gets to the airlock and discovers the airlock has jammed! They need to use HEAVY MACHINERY again to force the door open and that skill relies on strength.
Improbably, Hopper has failed this roll and didn’t get any Facehuggers either. They must get inside so they push the roll.
Against all likelihood, Hopper failed again, but all hope isn’t lost as they have the TRUE GRIT talent and can push this roll one more time.
Success comes at last and Hopper is able to get inside the ship to safety. But now they’ve got 4 stress points for all future rolls!
So, What Have We Learned?
Alien and the YZE system are super easy to learn and fast to play at the table. The results are decisive and can be very deadly and dangerous and that is thrilling. The stress system in Alien creates a whole new element of game play where players will feel the game mechanic while playing.
And yes, there is a little math, you caught me, but the math is just figuring out how many dice to roll and there’s a big difference in doing that and seeing sixes or ones versus calculations against a “to hit” target that is constantly changing based on the encounter. For me, that difference is anticipation and fun.
What’s more, the action is player-facing. That means the player’s roll determines success not a mathematical comparison against the GM’s value(s). Player-facing determinations in RPGs are a whole other topic so I’ll just say I think they are more fun and empowering for players.
All in all, Alien is closely aligned to the YZE and everything you’ve learned reading this article will help you with any of the other Free League games. And that’s the focus of my next article; a brief tour of the portfolio of RPGs from Free League Publishing.
