I spent some time last night reading through the starter set for this game and I had a couple thoughts.
They call this the 2d20 system, but pushing your roll allows you to roll up to 5d20. It seems odd, especially since the game only comes with 2d20. Now, if you play tabletop games, you have extra d20s lying around, but I thought this felt a little strange. Now I am trying to build a decent 5d20 set to play the game with.
The game has six primary ability scores. Six secondary scores act as skills and can be combined with any ability score given the type of roll. Granted, some will be more common than others, like Control + Security for ranged combat, or Daring + Security for melee combat. It leads to some strange combinations, such as Security + Fitness for climbing or swimming, which feels like an easy one to forget.
The rules are simple, and the combining of primary + secondary is the heart of the system.
Two pools are tracked, one for momentum and another for threat. Momentum is a beneficial pool that caps at six points, is reduced by one point per scene, and is refilled by excess successes at skill rolls. Immediately I thought "do not try to game this pool" and would enforce a "meaningful skill rolls only" rule at my table, as the natural incentive is to game the pool by making lots of easy rolls and banking momentum. Threat starts at two per player, and is increased by critical failures, hazardous situations, or if the players push their rolls and opt to increase the threat pool instead. Momentum is used to add dice to rolls, remove complications, create advantages, create problems for enemies, and obtain information about the scene. Threat works sort of in reverse as a hinderance pool doing roughly the same things, but penalizing the characters.
The momentum and threat pools are the mechanical guts of the system and the storytelling engine. I can see how some B/X fans would be like, "You don't need all this fiddly mechanical stuff! Make it up and just tell a good story!" This was my first reaction to this part of the 2d20 system, and it made me wonder if a B/X system that relied more on just making it up as the situation called for would be a better call. I will hold off a final judgment on this part of the game until I try it, and I can see how it creates that "TV reality" of overcoming a huge threat pool and building up a bonus pool to fight through an impossible situation.
Yes, while in B/X you are solving a situation presented in an adventure, the momentum-threat system starts your "TV episode" off at a disadvantage and lets you pare that down and build up successes to push the tide in your favor. And all specialties can contribute, such as a science officer analyzing a poisonous flower, so the system is not just combat-focused in contribution and usefulness. It also feels appropriate to the "many coming together to solve problems" theme of the show and movies.
The small font on the black pages is hard to read. The PDF version has a printer friendly version without the black background.
Where are the cover rules? I can't find them.
The starter set covers a lot of ground, and even includes ship combat rules. It comes with dice (but not 5d20) and is a good deal.
I am looking forward to having fun with this, and those are my first impressions.
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