I suspect that this element of the game is going to be the most loathed by traditional roleplaying gamers. Since you can customize your own card deck, you can stack it with mutations that you want to have (within limits) but you can’t control when you have access to them with any certainty. The rational for this constant change is that your character isn’t mutated per se, but is really drawing upon alternate realities in which you naturally possessed these ability. Characters can try to supercharge their mutations by making a die roll and, depending on your origins, you may get a bonus to that roll. You have that power available until after the next encounter. At the end of an encounter (and sometimes during), you discard that mutation and draw another. At the start of every game, you draw a number of mutations based on your level from either your own or the game master’s deck.
This is where the customizable card element comes in.
* Everyone has mutations, but, unlike previous editions of Gamma World, these mutations are constantly changing. You start with 1d4+1 things and a basic clothing/equipment package. Your weapon could be a parking meter, a claymore, or a sledgehammer: it doesn’t matter. Again, it’s left up to you to decide if that means you’re wearing a Kevlar-lined duster or a chainmail shirt made out of pop tops tabs. You might start the game with Light Armor and a Heavy Two-Handed Melee weapon. Every character can attempt any skill, but starts with a +4 bonus to three of them (again, usually). * There are ten skills in the game, each covering a broad area such as Science or Mechanics. I’ll repeat that so you know it’s not a typo: 3d6 in order. The rest of your abilities are determined by rolling 3d6 in order. * Abilities are the standard six and every character begins with (usually) one ability of 18 and another at 16, based upon their origins. I recommend that WotC hire Jeff Rients to immediately write a supplement that lists every possible rationalization for all the off-the-wall combinations available at character creation.
#20XX MELEE 4.08 ANDROID#
Your Android Yeti could just a well be a cybernetic Bigfoot (all the better to fight Steve Austin) as it could a gorilla with a space helmet. For example, if your origins were Hawkoid (flight-based powers) and Rat Swarm (swarm-based powers), you could decide that your character is a sentient flock of seagulls or a hyper-intelligent colony of bats. Template names are more indicative of the powers they possess rather than accurate descriptions of the origin. Some suggestions are given, but ultimately it’s left in your hands to figure things out. To the game’s credit, it expects you to come up with an explanation justifying some of the really outré combinations. You might start as a Radioactive Felinoid or an Android Empath. This leaves you with two templates that you need to reconcile. At character generation, you roll d20 twice to determine your origin. Players are warned that their characters are likely to perish in Gamma Terra and the best way to deal with that is to “raise a glass of Mountain Dew in his or her memory, and then get to work rolling up your next character.” The character creation section features the following quote: “Now that you have your ideal character fixed firmly in your mind, pick up some dice and start rolling to see what sort of bizarre freak you’re ACTUALLY going to play. * Character generation is completely random. It could be that I simply remember the unwieldy mess 3.5 was and that has colored my impressions. I can’t be sure as this is my first real experience with it, but I suspect it might be a “lite” version of those rules. * The rules engine is 4th edition D&D, which is no surprise. The players could be exploring a radioactive desert one week, fighting off dinosaur Nazis the next, and finish things up by pillaging the pyramid of Pharaoh Abraham Lincoln IV. Because of this, the game master had carte blanche to throw anything he or she wants into the campaign, no questions asked. Something when wrong and hundreds of possible realities coalesced into a single one-Gamma Terra. Instead, it is the result of Swiss scientists mucking about at the Large Hadron Collider. * Gamma Terra is not the result of a nuclear holocaust, which will no doubt enrage some people. * The official name of the game according to the rules is D&D Gamma World. The following is based on the first half of the rules. rule book and have not yet opened the cards and other peripherals. What follows are bullet points of the game that I expect the grognard coalition would like to know, regardless of whether or not we’re planning on picking this up for ourselves. As I stated yesterday, I’m not going to do an official review of the new Gamma World until I’ve had a chance to put the rubber to the road and see how she handles under actual play conditions.
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