Forum

Some feedback for the Beta V3 PDF

Overall I am a fan of most of the changes, I am aware it is too late to make significant changes but thought I would add a few things here regardless and worst case I homebrew it.

I prefer the new ammo supply and was planning to homebrew it regardless. Also the addition of the flowcharts throughout the rulebook is great and very much needed.

I don't mind the look of the new books although I find it odd the way art is now split over two pages, especially as the book has already been cut down significantly.
One thing I think is not on however is effectively advertising in the middle of the book. I can let it off slightly with the references to the Alien books out there as these are not your products but advertising the minis is not okay. Maybe a page at the end of the book with "here is some of our other products" but putting advertisement saying "hey this works great with these cards so buy the starter set" or "hey look at these minis you can buy" is a massive let down. We have already purchased your product, stop trying to force other purchases directly in the rules.


Resolve/Survival
Survival already feels rather strange. It almost seems like a replacement for stamina checks but relies on wits? Having a lot of wits mean you're able to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere better? I am surprised it wasn't shifted more towards the will/ability to survive in the sense of quick thinking and stress.
Again I can homebrew this to replace resolve and probably will but why resolve isn't replaced with survival I'm not sure. This then also relates to stealth as well which seems strange. If you are "stealthy" the opposing players get a negative two which effectively inform the players there is something here. It is metagaming but why it is a negative on the searchers as opposed to a positive on the person hiding I am not sure. This further relates to using survival as a form of quick thinking under stress, we have all been there in Alien Isolation and had an unexpected enemy pop around the corner, just to in the panic of the moment forget where the last cabinet to hide in was.

My homebrew plan is to have standard opposed observation roles when two characters unexpectedly come into contact. If the player character wins they can choose to stealth which is then a survival roll with +2 if stealthy talent taken. For a person/creature to discover the hidden person/creature they must then make an observation roll with a number of successes equal to or greater than the number of successes from the survival roll. Effectively acting as how well of a hiding place that person chose . E.g. hiding under the floor vs behind a cabinet.


Talents
Not sure why these were stripped, I think they were good and to be honest could have been extended out rather than cutting content.

Terminology
Changing from slow/quick action to full/quick action. To me seems less intuitive and I am not sure what purpose it serves.

Critical injuries
I agree with others around reducing the lethality not being the right move but it did have some merit. I for one would have been interested to see the existing chart be for whenever you take damage vs the more lethal version now for when you actually go to zero. Also if the aim of this edition was to reduce the odd situations that can occur I am surprised the tables weren't split into rough injury types, e.g. to borrow from 5E , bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage. It's a bit odd when you are impaled by a Xenomorph and suffer a broken toe?

General note
Numbers on armor weapons etc. have been mostly fixed but slightly concerned as to how they were like that in the first place. Same with stress. It does in some cases feel like numbers were just chucked out there. In particular xeno armour for queen originally goes against what your own rules conversion from 1E to 2E state.

Dogcatchers
Nice addition to give them acid proof armour, also then provides a reason why they have such a low armor value but I agree with others that making it purely acid proof and not resistant (e.g. provides 3 'acid armour' that is reduced as it loses acid resistance potency)I think is not quite right. Acid resistant is already present in the lore but not acid proof and works well in my opinion in the books **spoilers** E.g. in Alien Phalanx
Also another upvote for provide weapon stats for their gear.

I apologise if this comes off as primarily negative but it felt more prudent to highlight a few issues I personally still see with the game although at the end of the day everyone has different interpretations of what the game should be. I wish free league luck and I hope you continue to work on and expand the game.

Ammo.

I stopped replying as much since the second beta as I didn't have much to add beyond my feedback already stated for the first. And I don't want to argue against anyone else's feedback. But a question someone asked on Reddit about something I said made me realise something isn't quite as obvious as I'd thought it was. So I'd like to offer some concerns about the Ammo Supply system.

Previously my observation was simply that this adds a lot more rolling. That still stands. Especially with Full Auto in which a character's firing action can easily be six dice rolls! There's a mitigation in that sometimes extra hits will allow the player to forego the ammo roll but that's only occasional and actually less of a mitigation than people might think because of reasons related to the other issue I'm about to raise.

Statement: The design intent of the ammo rules is to create the tension for the players of running out.

I don't think that's controversial and it's a staple of the genre. The current edition rules achieve this by having the possibility of running out present at any moment. Technically any moment when the PC is stressed but when aren't they stressed in a combat? It can throw people who aren't used to a more abstract rules system and used to counting numbers but - barring the infinite ammo exploit with Synthetics - I would say the rules achieved their design intent.

The issue with the new rules is that they don't achieve that design intent. Perhaps for the less mathematically focused players it will at first but they'll quickly learn through experience that running out of ammo is a rare thing.

Worked example: A pulse rifle has an Ammo rating of 3. Rolling 3 dice it's going to be an average of 2.4 rolls before you drop down a rating. So lets say 2-3 rolls. With 2 dice it's going to take long. 3.3 rolls. Lets just note that one down as 3. With the final one die rolls it's going to take an average of 6 rolls before you run out. In total therefore starting from a fully loaded pulse rifle you're going to get off 11 to 12 shots. And due to the large number of dice rolls involved, you're not going to see much variance from that number. Even firing on Full Auto every time, you'll be good for four rounds of combat. Which I think is longer than a typical encounter lasts at most tables. And frankly if you're rolling six times for every shooting action you're not going to want to do more than four rounds of it!

There is still an element of tension, but it revolves very much about how many reloads you have rather than uncertainty of running out in combat. The new Ammo rules are not necessarily wrong (other than increasing the number rolls when shooting from one to anywhere up to six separate rolls), but re-reading them I wonder if people realise just how much less tense they are than the current edition. And logically, a PC should rarely reload except when they actually run out because presuming finite ammo packs (which rules imply when saying you need to track them), using one to reload before hitting actual 0 is likely giving up a lot of shots you would have had from the old one. Similarly, to bring this back to my opening comment, it's rarely statistically in your interest to actually spend spare hits on skipping the ammo roll and paradoxically, the lower on ammo you are, the less worth it is (depending on how likely you are to die immediately if you lose a firing action).

There's also the weird diminishing returns of the Ammo rating. A gun with an Ammo rating of 3 doesn't fire three times as much as a gun with an Ammo rating of 1. It fires less than twice as much. A gun with an Ammo rating of 4 isn't the endless bullet stream you imagine it to be - it has around twice as many shots in it as that gun with Ammo of 1. Though this is something common to all the Consumable rules and I'm not against it exactly, but Ammo throws it into starker relief than with Oxygen or Water where it's a little more nebulous.

Again, I'm not saying the rules are inherently wrong but they are FAR lower risk than the current rules. Not slightly less, a lot less. Factor in the ability to forgo ammo rolls entirely with an extra hit and PCs are going to be firing all night long!

I've always felt that an easy solve for the synthetic infinite ammo exploit in 1E was to add in a simple Supply roll at the end of any combat sequence in addition to the existing facehugger result prompt. It makes sense to me that a super computer could keep better track of its ammo than a human operator (especially a stressed out human), but a firefight is still going to have a chance to run through ammo.

Ammo.

I stopped replying as much since the second beta as I didn't have much to add beyond my feedback already stated for the first. And I don't want to argue against anyone else's feedback. But a question someone asked on Reddit about something I said made me realise something isn't quite as obvious as I'd thought it was. So I'd like to offer some concerns about the Ammo Supply system.

Previously my observation was simply that this adds a lot more rolling. That still stands. Especially with Full Auto in which a character's firing action can easily be six dice rolls! There's a mitigation in that sometimes extra hits will allow the player to forego the ammo roll but that's only occasional and actually less of a mitigation than people might think because of reasons related to the other issue I'm about to raise.

Statement: The design intent of the ammo rules is to create the tension for the players of running out.

I don't think that's controversial and it's a staple of the genre. The current edition rules achieve this by having the possibility of running out present at any moment. Technically any moment when the PC is stressed but when aren't they stressed in a combat? It can throw people who aren't used to a more abstract rules system and used to counting numbers but - barring the infinite ammo exploit with Synthetics - I would say the rules achieved their design intent.

The issue with the new rules is that they don't achieve that design intent. Perhaps for the less mathematically focused players it will at first but they'll quickly learn through experience that running out of ammo is a rare thing.

Worked example: A pulse rifle has an Ammo rating of 3. Rolling 3 dice it's going to be an average of 2.4 rolls before you drop down a rating. So lets say 2-3 rolls. With 2 dice it's going to take long. 3.3 rolls. Lets just note that one down as 3. With the final one die rolls it's going to take an average of 6 rolls before you run out. In total therefore starting from a fully loaded pulse rifle you're going to get off 11 to 12 shots. And due to the large number of dice rolls involved, you're not going to see much variance from that number. Even firing on Full Auto every time, you'll be good for four rounds of combat. Which I think is longer than a typical encounter lasts at most tables. And frankly if you're rolling six times for every shooting action you're not going to want to do more than four rounds of it!

There is still an element of tension, but it revolves very much about how many reloads you have rather than uncertainty of running out in combat. The new Ammo rules are not necessarily wrong (other than increasing the number rolls when shooting from one to anywhere up to six separate rolls), but re-reading them I wonder if people realise just how much less tense they are than the current edition. And logically, a PC should rarely reload except when they actually run out because presuming finite ammo packs (which rules imply when saying you need to track them), using one to reload before hitting actual 0 is likely giving up a lot of shots you would have had from the old one. Similarly, to bring this back to my opening comment, it's rarely statistically in your interest to actually spend spare hits on skipping the ammo roll and paradoxically, the lower on ammo you are, the less worth it is (depending on how likely you are to die immediately if you lose a firing action).

There's also the weird diminishing returns of the Ammo rating. A gun with an Ammo rating of 3 doesn't fire three times as much as a gun with an Ammo rating of 1. It fires less than twice as much. A gun with an Ammo rating of 4 isn't the endless bullet stream you imagine it to be - it has around twice as many shots in it as that gun with Ammo of 1. Though this is something common to all the Consumable rules and I'm not against it exactly, but Ammo throws it into starker relief than with Oxygen or Water where it's a little more nebulous.

Again, I'm not saying the rules are inherently wrong but they are FAR lower risk than the current rules. Not slightly less, a lot less. Factor in the ability to forgo ammo rolls entirely with an extra hit and PCs are going to be firing all night long!

IMO ammo rolls are fine, they're quite fun and a lot more realistic, while being better for tension building, as you see that ammo dice pool get smaller and smaller. I do agree that the numbers are too big. I believe that for full auto capable rifles, it should be 2 dice, anything less (pistols, shotguns and sniper rifles) should be dice 1 ammo, and bigger heavier weapons should be 3 ammo. Because you are right, with this setup, PCs will almost never run out of ammo.

The major problem was that even if you had a newly fully loaded Smartgun, you absolutely knew that you were gonna lose all that ammo in the first round if you have high stress, and still possibly with only one stress. And rounds last 5 to 10 seconds max. So loosing 500 rounds on such guns right away makes no sense, not only is it not possible, but it makes no sense that a panic feature means you magically keep on pressing the trigger button for so many seconds. Maybe making a rule where the first shot of the newly loaded gun is always free and you can't run out of ammo on the first shot, might be a half solution for 1E. Ammo was a very frustrating thing in 1E, that was the first thing I was homebrewing away.

Ammo.

I stopped replying as much since the second beta as I didn't have much to add beyond my feedback already stated for the first. And I don't want to argue against anyone else's feedback. But a question someone asked on Reddit about something I said made me realise something isn't quite as obvious as I'd thought it was. So I'd like to offer some concerns about the Ammo Supply system.

Previously my observation was simply that this adds a lot more rolling. That still stands. Especially with Full Auto in which a character's firing action can easily be six dice rolls! There's a mitigation in that sometimes extra hits will allow the player to forego the ammo roll but that's only occasional and actually less of a mitigation than people might think because of reasons related to the other issue I'm about to raise.

Statement: The design intent of the ammo rules is to create the tension for the players of running out.

I don't think that's controversial and it's a staple of the genre. The current edition rules achieve this by having the possibility of running out present at any moment. Technically any moment when the PC is stressed but when aren't they stressed in a combat? It can throw people who aren't used to a more abstract rules system and used to counting numbers but - barring the infinite ammo exploit with Synthetics - I would say the rules achieved their design intent.

The issue with the new rules is that they don't achieve that design intent. Perhaps for the less mathematically focused players it will at first but they'll quickly learn through experience that running out of ammo is a rare thing.

Worked example: A pulse rifle has an Ammo rating of 3. Rolling 3 dice it's going to be an average of 2.4 rolls before you drop down a rating. So lets say 2-3 rolls. With 2 dice it's going to take long. 3.3 rolls. Lets just note that one down as 3. With the final one die rolls it's going to take an average of 6 rolls before you run out. In total therefore starting from a fully loaded pulse rifle you're going to get off 11 to 12 shots. And due to the large number of dice rolls involved, you're not going to see much variance from that number. Even firing on Full Auto every time, you'll be good for four rounds of combat. Which I think is longer than a typical encounter lasts at most tables. And frankly if you're rolling six times for every shooting action you're not going to want to do more than four rounds of it!

There is still an element of tension, but it revolves very much about how many reloads you have rather than uncertainty of running out in combat. The new Ammo rules are not necessarily wrong (other than increasing the number rolls when shooting from one to anywhere up to six separate rolls), but re-reading them I wonder if people realise just how much less tense they are than the current edition. And logically, a PC should rarely reload except when they actually run out because presuming finite ammo packs (which rules imply when saying you need to track them), using one to reload before hitting actual 0 is likely giving up a lot of shots you would have had from the old one. Similarly, to bring this back to my opening comment, it's rarely statistically in your interest to actually spend spare hits on skipping the ammo roll and paradoxically, the lower on ammo you are, the less worth it is (depending on how likely you are to die immediately if you lose a firing action).

There's also the weird diminishing returns of the Ammo rating. A gun with an Ammo rating of 3 doesn't fire three times as much as a gun with an Ammo rating of 1. It fires less than twice as much. A gun with an Ammo rating of 4 isn't the endless bullet stream you imagine it to be - it has around twice as many shots in it as that gun with Ammo of 1. Though this is something common to all the Consumable rules and I'm not against it exactly, but Ammo throws it into starker relief than with Oxygen or Water where it's a little more nebulous.

Again, I'm not saying the rules are inherently wrong but they are FAR lower risk than the current rules. Not slightly less, a lot less. Factor in the ability to forgo ammo rolls entirely with an extra hit and PCs are going to be firing all night long!

IMO ammo rolls are fine, they're quite fun and a lot more realistic, while being better for tension building, as you see that ammo dice pool get smaller and smaller. I do agree that the numbers are too big. I believe that for full auto capable rifles, it should be 2 dice, anything less (pistols, shotguns and sniper rifles) should be dice 1 ammo, and bigger heavier weapons should be 3 ammo. Because you are right, with this setup, PCs will almost never run out of ammo.

The major problem was that even if you had a newly fully loaded Smartgun, you absolutely knew that you were gonna lose all that ammo in the first round if you have high stress, and still possibly with only one stress. And rounds last 5 to 10 seconds max. So loosing 500 rounds on such guns right away makes no sense, not only is it not possible, but it makes no sense that a panic feature means you magically keep on pressing the trigger button for so many seconds. Maybe making a rule where the first shot of the newly loaded gun is always free and you can't run out of ammo on the first shot, might be a half solution for 1E. Ammo was a very frustrating thing in 1E, that was the first thing I was homebrewing away.

Maybe I have missed it in the rules but can you no longer panic empty the mag when firing a weapon now? If that is the case one solution maybe to re-add it. In the event of a panic you roll full ammo dice regardless of current supply. Would also give the synthetics an advantage again on firing.

Ammo.

 
The rules are the foundation of the game, but they aren't completely set on stone. You can make the adjustments you deem fit for your own game sessions. Thus, You are free to rule that ammo runs out at the speed you consider more appropiate for your style, either by adjusting ammo availability, or by intensifying the depleting rules.

For example:
- After losing both their APC and Dropship due to an unexpected crash, all their weapons have ammo 1 with no reloads available...
- You may rule that for each 'Facehug' result on an attack roll, you add an equal number of additional supply dice to the ammo roll...
- Or that when using full-auto, the chances of depleting ammo are doubled...
- In combat, you may change the #4 result in the panic effects table to cause the character to run out of ammo, instead of losing one item...
- You can ask a player to declare, before rolling his attack, if he is trying to conserve ammo. If so, the first 'success' result on the roll must go to conserve ammo, even if it means inflicting no damage...
... And so on, and on, you get the idea.

Also, you may use another set of dice in a different color (for example, blue) as supply dice, that way, you can roll the [normal + stress + supply] dice in one go, reducing rolls and time needed. Just treat the '1' results on the extra dice as facehugs.

Quote: @User

Maybe I have missed it in the rules but can you no longer panic empty the mag when firing a weapon now? If that is the case one solution maybe to re-add it. In the event of a panic you roll full ammo dice regardless of current supply. Would also give the synthetics an advantage again on firing.

I don't think there's anything that says you can't, it's just not a thing at all in the Beta. I believe the only effect of panic is now explicitly what's on the Panic Response table. You could add a "Deplete Ammo" result but there are too many circumstances where it wouldn't make sense.

I think if you add it back in, it would need to be integrated with the Ammo supply rules. Which does give me an idea further down.

Quote: @ApocalypseDan

I've always felt that an easy solve for the synthetic infinite ammo exploit in 1E was to add in a simple Supply roll at the end of any combat sequence in addition to the existing facehugger result prompt. It makes sense to me that a super computer could keep better track of its ammo than a human operator (especially a stressed out human), but a firefight is still going to have a chance to run through ammo.

There certainly should be something to fix the Infinite Ammo exploit. I'm just not yet sure what. Most of the approaches that make sense move you back towards traditional tracking of your ammo. You either track it or you have something panic based. If the former, you lose a source of tension. If the latter, it doesn't work for synthetics. So how do you thread that needle?

Quote: @Still Collating

IMO ammo rolls are fine, they're quite fun and a lot more realistic, while being better for tension building, as you see that ammo dice pool get smaller and smaller. I do agree that the numbers are too big. I believe that for full auto capable rifles, it should be 2 dice, anything less (pistols, shotguns and sniper rifles) should be dice 1 ammo, and bigger heavier weapons should be 3 ammo. Because you are right, with this setup, PCs will almost never run out of ammo.

Well I respect the difference in tastes because that part is a matter of taste - whether happy with the beta version or not. But part of what I was trying to get to is highlighting how they work to make sure people actually are happy. At first glance it looks quite similar to the current edition except with a little buffer built in. It's only on second glance that it becomes apparent how huge that buffer is and the extra tracking you have to now do. I think you're right about sidearms (pistols, revolvers) having an Ammo rating of 1. Maybe higher for some weird or customised ones. It would be quite easy to lose track of how many bullets you had left in a magazine of 8 or 9. You're as equally likely or more to lose track with a larger magazine size but in those cases, the actual running out is going to happen later. So 2 works as well.

I like your preferred values. I just don't know that, imo, they're enough to fix the problem.

Quote: @Still Collating

The major problem was that even if you had a newly fully loaded Smartgun, you absolutely knew that you were gonna lose all that ammo in the first round if you have high stress, and still possibly with only one stress. And rounds last 5 to 10 seconds max. So loosing 500 rounds on such guns right away makes no sense, not only is it not possible, but it makes no sense that a panic feature means you magically keep on pressing the trigger button for so many seconds. Maybe making a rule where the first shot of the newly loaded gun is always free and you can't run out of ammo on the first shot, might be a half solution for 1E. Ammo was a very frustrating thing in 1E, that was the first thing I was homebrewing away.

Yes. This is possibly the crux of the problem. Similarly to incorporating synthetics, you've got an inherent tension here: Any system which is stateless (by which I mean works the same from round to round) doesn't remove the risk of fully loading a smartgun and then running out of ammo 3 seconds later. The chance is the same at any time. Any system which does prevent that moves you back towards actually tracking the ammo. Or worse - some kind of hybrid system whereby you only start tracking the ammo after X rounds of firing, sort of thing.

Reading the post from @User further up who I quoted, where they ask if it's not possible to just add the existing current edition system back in, it occurs to me what you could do is have the old system but rather than just be out of ammo, it drops your Ammo rating down a point.

You end up still having to track something extra (current Ammo rating) but that's only in comparison to the current edition. The Beta has you tracking that anyway. So I think that's an acceptable cost for a system if it works. And the advantages are:

• It solves the problem you highlight in the current edition rules about instantly running out of ammo.
• It solves the issue that I raise about the non-linearity of Ammo ratings. I.e. that a smartgun has less than double the number of bullets than a pistol (i.e. as Ammo rating goes up, the number of shots you get on average doesn't rise in proportion).
• It preserves the tension in Current Edition of when you might run out of ammo whilst keeping some of the buffer principle. I.e. in contrast to the Beta where you can fairly reliably say "I have twelve rounds of shooting from a reload.
• It reincorporates Stress as a factor in how quickly you spend your ammo and how likely you are to lose track of it. Which admittedly is a matter of taste but it's genre appropriate and I think a lot of people enjoyed that aspect of the current edition, they just want to avoid the silly situations

Yes, I think this could work quite well. One would possibly want to tweak Ammo ratings a little on some weapons to work with this. But that's easy enough to do.

Now, just have to figure out how to square this with Synthetics. Thoughts?

Quote: @Jehan Menasis

 
The rules are the foundation of the game, but they aren't completely set on stone. You can make the adjustments you deem fit for your own game sessions. Thus, You are free to rule that ammo runs out at the speed you consider more appropiate for your style, either by adjusting ammo availability, or by intensifying the depleting rules.

Sure. I don't think that's in doubt. But the purpose of this thread is to discuss the pros and cons of the published rules and potentially offer feedback on other ways to do it. I don't think anybody expects Tomas to kick their door in if they house rule something.

Like your suggestion about using a third colour die for supply rolls to reduce total rolls is a good one. I see a lot of people doing that if the final rules are as in the latest Beta. But I can't see Free League doing it because they're quite wedded to the idea of novelty / game specific dice that they make.

The synthetic issue would also apply to sentry guns, notably. In Aliens, those guns are really, really doing a number on the xenos but it added a ton of tension (Stress) to the Marines watching those ammo counters drop. However, RAW those sentry guns are no different than synths in that they never have facehugger results and thus infinite ammo. My plan is to use both Panic and encounter thresholds for ammo depletion (and Power depletion). I think this puts an extra burden on humans but then they have the dice pool benefits of Stress dice to offset that. In my mind, here's how I think depletion could work:
Make a Supply/Power/Ammo roll at the end of each encounter (figuring they last 3-5 rounds max) - add a die for each time Full Auto is used, subtract a die if Conserve Ammo stunt was chosen (max of once per encounter to prevent synths/sentry guns from firing forever).
Make a Supply/Power/Ammo roll any time a Panic roll result comes up Holding it Together - this adds back in the 1e ammo depletion without doubling the penalty for a facehugger, and simply prompting a Supply roll without any other negative effect does demonstrate that the PC is starting to panic fire even if they aren't suffering the other, more grave Panic chart results yet.

The synthetic issue would also apply to sentry guns, notably. In Aliens, those guns are really, really doing a number on the xenos but it added a ton of tension (Stress) to the Marines watching those ammo counters drop. However, RAW those sentry guns are no different than synths in that they never have facehugger results and thus infinite ammo. My plan is to use both Panic and encounter thresholds for ammo depletion (and Power depletion). I think this puts an extra burden on humans but then they have the dice pool benefits of Stress dice to offset that. In my mind, here's how I think depletion could work:
Make a Supply/Power/Ammo roll at the end of each encounter (figuring they last 3-5 rounds max) - add a die for each time Full Auto is used, subtract a die if Conserve Ammo stunt was chosen (max of once per encounter to prevent synths/sentry guns from firing forever).
Make a Supply/Power/Ammo roll any time a Panic roll result comes up Holding it Together - this adds back in the 1e ammo depletion without doubling the penalty for a facehugger, and simply prompting a Supply roll without any other negative effect does demonstrate that the PC is starting to panic fire even if they aren't suffering the other, more grave Panic chart results yet.

That's interesting. You didn't say this explicitly but this threads the needle with synthetics because with your approach they will never run out in combat but can still run out at the end of an encounter. Which can be narratively justified as them using ammo but managing it carefully in combat.

Will have to have a think about the rest. It's interesting.

That's interesting. You didn't say this explicitly but this threads the needle with synthetics because with your approach they will never run out in combat but can still run out at the end of an encounter. Which can be narratively justified as them using ammo but managing it carefully in combat.

Will have to have a think about the rest. It's interesting.

That's why we're here, as I figure it, bounce ideas off of one another and do our best to improve the core rules and each other's tabletop house rules Goodness knows I have learned a ton here and been inspired innumerable times.