You, too, CAN run Metamorphosis Alpha

I am VERY much looking forward to your thoughts on this. Always wanted to run MA but haven't yet!

Part One: The Stuff

When looking at options for Metamorphosis Alpha, there seem to be almost no products out there. Yet there are many to choose from. I suspect that one thing that frustrates potential MA players is not knowing what you need to play.

The 1976 rulebook is not at all intimidating. It is 32 pages of MA fun, in two-column format and rather tiny font size. Ignoring the sample adventure and repeated tables in the back of the book the rules actually go from page 3 to page 24, which is in reality only 21 pages of rules. The rulebook is kind of pricey on e-bay (and Jim doesn’t get a cut of e-bay sales) but you can find the 1E rulebook as a PDF on RPGNow for pretty cheap. ($6 at RPGNow.)
www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=50526

And actually that one core rulebook is all you need in order to play. For those who like to run pre-determined modules, Craig Brain’s The House on the Hill is an excellent start and can be bought in print and PDF formats. (Print copy is $16 at CreateSpace and PDF is $9 at RPGNow. Be aware that buying from other places may not give WardCo their cut.)
www.createspace.com/3458160
www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=83322

What about the other rulebooks? Lots of options if you are interested, but 1E does pretty much everything I could ever want. 2E adds more background material but is written for an unusual game system (TSR’s Amazing Engine line) and needs conversion in order to be useful. 3E and 4E are compatible with each other and similar to 1E in style -- 3E is like a “4E quick start” rules set, actually. Any of these are fine, although I’m a fan of 1E. A 5E was announced two years ago, and is supposed to be based on D&D4E if/when it gets finished so I don’t know how much interest will be generated for 5E on these boards.

Also, if you want a hardback version of 1E, when Jim’s new company gets launched there is an “Ultimate 1E Hardback” planned which will include the 1E material plus stuff from those early Dragon magazines. Start with the PDF now, buy the hardback when it gets released.

That’s it. One thin rulebook and you’re ready to play!

Excellent, I will be following this thread with great interest too. Thanks Marv.

Part Three: Contents of 1E

Someday I want to see a three-booklet 1E boxed set come out. (Maybe I’ll talk to John at Brave Halfling about this…) I have ideas on how to arrange the material, although I’ll confess that I have not tried to balance page-count to be sure that each book is an appropriate size.

Here is a list of contents of my dream MA rules set, along with page numbers from my 1E rulebook. I mention this not to be critical of the organization of the 1976 1E rulebook, but instead to guide someone familiar with OD&D so that they can see that in many ways MA is similar.

METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA
Rules for Fantastic Science Fiction Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures
Jim Ward

MEN & MUTATIONS (Volume 1 of three booklets)
The Game (p.3) -- Tells the roles of the players and referee
Beginning the Game and Developing Characters (p.9-10)
Ability Explanations (p.10-12)
Physical and Mental Mutations (p.12-16)
Weapons & Combat (p.19-20)
Non-Player Characters (p.23)
Relatives (p.23)
Healing of Body Damage (p.23)
Languages (p.24)
Means of Exchange (p.24)

MUTANTS & ACQUISITIONS (Volume 2 of three booklets)
Earth Animals of the Ship (p.9)
The Mutants (p.17-19)
Distribution of Monsters (Mutations) and Treasure (p.20)
Treasure Item List for the Ship (p.21)
Encounter Table (p.22)
Wandering “Monsters” (p.22)
Human Tribal Areas (p.23)
Forested Areas (p.23)

THE WARDEN & STARSHIP ADVENTURES (Volume 3 of three booklets)
Introduction (p.3) -- tells the story behind the Warden
The Starship (p.4-5)
Ship Devices and Units (p.6-7)
Starship Equipment (p.7-9)
Movement (p.20)
The Main Ship’s Computer (p.23)
Time (p.23)
Surprise (p.24)

Stuff the might be left out of a rules set(Fine material, but not as important to an experienced gamer.)
Example of a Referee Moderating an Adventure (p.24)
Example Level 14 (p.25-26)

Oh, you won't disappoint. Me, at least. Anything you can tell me is more likely to get me inspired to track the game down. I don't know much about MetaAlpha but am willing to listen. ;D

Exalt, by the way, for doing this thread.

Part Five: Styles of Play

Metamorphosis Alpha has a reputation for being really wacky and slapstick. I’m not sure where this originated, but I never got that vibe from the game. When I read the rulebook it’s just as serious as any other RPG.

I think that the problem starts off with the fact that MA and Gamma World are interchangeable in the minds of many gamers, and GW has a slapstick feel to it. Remember those classic drawings of rabbits holding assault rifles in GW? That kind of picture isn’t found in MA, at least not to that degree of absurdness. Not that you couldn’t play that way, but the rules don’t specifically encourage it.

Then there is the fact that Jim Ward is known for killing characters. Lots of them. So many that WardCo sells a stein with dozens of ways to die in MA printed on the side. I get the feeling that over the years Jim has been referee for a humongous number of character deaths, and that many of them look pretty funny in retrospect. That doesn’t mean it was funny at the time, however. For example, suppose that players learned that eating blue mushrooms could protect them from radiation. But they aren’t counting on the fact that in Jim’s world not all things act the same each time, so the next time they encounter radiation and smugly chomp down on blue mushrooms it’s possible that their characters didn’t survive. Maybe they tried the same trick again and again, convinced that it should work. That’s the stuff of gaming legend but not a function of “wacky” rules.

Also there is the issue of “item complexity.” Remember in GW where a player could spend an afternoon rolling dice to figure out if he could use that flashlight? In GW they have those wonderful flowcharts, but in MA it’s a relatively tame couple of tables and quick dice rolls. If a character finds a flashlight, for example, the player knows what it is right away but the character does not and wacky things may happen to the character while he tries to figure out what the item is and how to use the technology. While this rules don’t try to force a “wacky” campaign on the players, often the results are humorous. At the same time they can be frustrating to a player. What I do is assume that characters can figure out basic stuff (flashlights) in a hurry, but struggle more as the tech gets more complex (gasoline motor). So driving a car isn’t so hard but fixing one is really tough. This avoids a few “watch the fun” moments with the flashlight, but also diffuses much of the “MA is just wacky” feel from the campaign.

So, I think that the style of play is a complex balance of fun and seriousness. To me, the best way to balance the wacky part is to emphasize some of the elements of survival. Keep supplies limited. Make attrition important. If a character uses up ammo to kill some strange mutated creature, make the lack of ammo important later on.

Upon first reading, I was sorta wondering if there was some sort of weird hullabaloo in the OSR I had missed: "Judges are bad! Down with referees and games masters!"

This is a big issue for me, and honestly one of the major plusses I see in buying MA compared to many of the other old TSR games. New MA purchases actually go to the author of the game!

Sorry for the delay in this post. Been a tad busy recently. So, to continue....

Part Six: It’s a lot like OD&D!

You’re rolling 3d6 for six stats, a lot like OD&D. Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution are a lot like found in OD&D. Leadership Potential acts a lot like Charisma. Mental Resistance is a lot like a combination of Intelligence and Wisdom. Radiation Resistance is a new stat that ties in the environment of the damaged starship environment to the campaign.

There are no classes. The big difference between one character and another tends to be the number and type of mutations. Some characters have none. Some have many. Some mutations are good, others are defects. Some mutations are physical, others mental. So, in effect the mutations do the same thing as classes would do in D&D.

In addition to not having classes, there are also no levels. Characters roll hit dice based on their Constitution score and this number essentially remains unchanged throughout the campaign.

Armor Class is similar in MA and D&D, except that MA goes from 8 to 1 while OD&D goes from 9 to 2. For both, low is typically better but in MA each AC gets matched up against a Weapon Class on a chart in order to determine the “to hit” number. Weapons are better against some AC types and worse against others, and it’s not so simple to find a pattern like in OD&D. Reminds me a lot of the charts on p.13 of Greyhawk Supplement I which are designed to match up weapon type against armor type. The chart in MA is pretty simple and easy to use, however, as you simply equal or beat the number on the chart with a d20 die roll.

Weapon damage is similar to OD&D as well. Basic axes and swords do a d6 while more unusual weapons do more unusual damage ranges. Some futuristic weapons do nasty damage, as one might expect, but ancient weapons are pretty much D&D-like in use. Healing occurs at a point per day, just like OD&D.

In Men & Magic a large percentage of the book is devoted to spells because spells are a critical part of the flavor of the fantasy campaign. In MA there is a lot of space devoted to the mutations that might afflict a character because that’s the element that makes MA special. Mutations are the heart of the campaign and, unlike OD&D, almost every character gets one.

Mutants are rated according to Number Usually Appearing, AC, Movement, and Hit Dice, much like OD&D rates the monsters.

In short, 1E Metamorphosis Alpha plays a lot like OD&D. The attributes are similar, the game mechanics are similar, and the overall game is designed to be flexible the way OD&D was designed.

Part Seven: Where are the Elves?

One thing that really bothers some players is the strange names for things. What is a clicker? What is a hisser? Where are the elves?

Well, the elves are one thing that I can’t help you with, although if you wanted to have some sort of “mutated” folks who were essentially elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, go ahead. The mutant creatures provided are supposed to be Earth-like critters who were exposed to radiation over generations and have slowly become something else. There is no reason why those mutations couldn’t create creatures which we might call “elves” just the way that Shadowrun did. That’s up to you, and frankly if you want to include creatures from more conventional monster lists in your game it might be a lot of fun.

But most of the creatures are basic, boring animals. Animals who have mutated into ferocious critters who can kill you in very painful, interesting and unexpected ways. I hate to list off too many of them here because the more you know as a player, the less fun it is to explore the world of the Warden. The best MA adventures I’ve ever run were with players who had no idea what game we were playing, had no idea they were in a starship, had no idea what to expect. Then everything is a surprise.

At one point I had created a spreadsheet of every mutated creature in MA, along with their Earth equivalents. I’d have to search my hard drive to find it, but what I found is that if the referee has a list like this it’s a lot easier to run a monster encounter. To use a made-up example, is it easier to run an encounter with a “Xouer” or a “mutated deer with poisoned hooves”? While the deer might turn out to have sharp vampire fangs and drink blood or something like that, to the referee the fact that it’s a mutated deer gives some idea of what it might look like or act like. At least a little, right? If there is enough demand I can print off my list, but as I mentioned earlier it’s more fun for the player if he doesn’t know what kinds of things to expect.

On the other hand, an interesting debate is whether there ought to be “races” of mutants or if each should be unique. Traditional fantasy literature typically has races of elves and dwarves, so there is no reason why a MA campaign couldn’t have races of pig-people or whatever. The advantage of races is that you create a stereotype template and characters can continue to run into the same types of guys again and again, which promotes familiarity. “Hey, guys, it’s more of those pig-guys!” If every mutant is unique then we lose a certain simplicity for the WardenMaster and instead introduce the burden of having to create something new each time. There was an old article in Dragon called “How Green is My Mutant” by Gary Gygax which addressed this very issue, and I often use Gary’s tables except that I do it to create new races rather than individual mutants. Whether you go the simple racial route or the complex individual mutant route, either way the challenge will be to come up with ways to describe to the players what they see and experience since the starship may not look anything like what they have experienced in their real-world lives. Not that they’ve actually seen elves and dwarves, of course, but at least most gamers are familiar enough with the stereotypes so that if a GM says “it’s an elf” it generates a basic mental image not too different for both parties.

Back to elves and dwarves. With 17 or so worlds (levels) to play with, why not have some of these if you like. Perhaps dwarves (to steal the stereotype) were humans who once were engineers or fixed things. The radiation made them even shorter, which was an advantage so they could fit into small spaces. But don’t name them “dwarves” but instead maybe call them “fixers” so that the players don’t know what they are. They see short mutants who fix things and may never draw the connection that in your mind these are dwarves.

After all, it’s your starship.

I wonder also if the lack of character development rules is a function of the anticipated life span of characters. If you die quickly there isn't as much need to develop "level up" rules.

Similar to Boot Hill. We played BH for years and never worried about characters advancing or not, but also we often went through 1-2 characters per session anyway.

Great thread, Marv!

In our current game we are playing with Jim Ward, it's more about survival than advancement. We did 2-3 sessions as robots, then 2-3 sessions as andriods, and now we are doing humans (non-mutated). Any characters that survive from previous sessions can come along with the new character if desired (but it's risky because once they're gone, they're gone for good).

So far, the robot phase has been the only phase where we felt like we actually got any objectives accomplished. Since then it's been a lot of running and dying. In one 3-hour session, my little cousin went through four characters! (But he's power-hungry and likes to try to learn how to use everything. Don't do that!)

Wow, great write-up on MA, I love it! Makes me want to go looking for my MA PDF and run a game.

Ed Green

Part Nine: Plotlines

At first, MA 1E seems to be mostly about survival on a damaged starship. You basically start out as some random guy on some level of the ship and may or may not know that you are actually in space instead of on a regular planet. In fact, my favorite MA campaign began with players not realizing it was a scifi setting at all, and they had no idea about the starship element for several game sessions. Eventually they will encounter either a ramp or an elevator, or perhaps bump into the wall at the edge of the “world” and start to think that something isn’t right. Up until that point they tend to think of the game as some odd twist of D&D, but after that point their entire feel for the campaign changes.

I like to compare this to many TV series. Often the first season, or at least the first few episodes, seem to have a generic “go on an adventure” quality and then SOMETHING happens and everything takes a turn for the crazy. Babylon 5 was like that, where the first season was guys hanging out on a diplomatic space station and then BAM! suddenly there is this war going on and psionic dudes and time travel and things that make your head spin. Fringe was the same way, starting off with X-Files kinds of weird stuff and then suddenly moving characters into opening rifts to another dimension. Surprise! Not at all an unusual thing in TV-land, and sometimes I really love or really hate a TV show after the twist happens.

The “alternate sequence” from Dragon magazine gives a different spin on the campaign as characters awaken in some sort of cryogenic tank. At this point they are at least somewhat aware of the high-tech aspect of the campaign, so certain things won’t be a surprise to them. I like the “wake up with amnesia” approach, at least for a first campaign, so that I don’t have to give a briefing in advance. Players get the enjoyment of discovering the cool stuff the first time. In later campaigns with the same players I’ll adjust my style and zip through some of the early phase of the game, but for newbies that early “discovery” time is just so darned neat.

However, there is nothing that says you have to stick to the generic plotlines. Another thing to keep in mind is that the “default” technology of swords and shields need not be the tech of your Warden. As an added wrinkle it’s possible to allow characters to start off with 20th century knowledge and gear, more like commandos than ancient wanderers. (Good inspiration for this kind of campaign could be Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries.)

You could also start off players in a “trapped in a section of the ship” scenario, kind of like Battlestar Galactica (only without space ships) where a ragtag group just wants to find home. For example, a troop of soldiers with scifi weapons could be exploring part of the ship and somehow get trapped from the main crew. Perhaps an elevator malfunction keeps them from going back the way they got in, so they have to battle their way through levels of mutants in order to reach safe ground. (This could be the “Resident Evil” scenario.)

The campaign can evolve slowly or quickly, as the players and WardenMasters like. There are a number of ways the game can go, and the most common is probably the “take over the ship” scenario. After all, survival without a “big picture” purpose isn’t much fun for some players. Taking over the ship probably involves a progression of steps, however, and may not be as simple as players first think. In Jim’s version of the Warden, different sections of the ship are security coded so that access is limited. It’s possible that the ship still has some sort of crew, perhaps shielded from radiation and human or maybe mutie stock. That crew may not be interested in just turning over the keys to the engine room or command center, so players may have to battle to gain control. The crew could be some sort of automated robots or androids controlled by a central computer. Again, the characters might have quite a battle on their hands.

Even once the characters begin to control parts of the ship, the WM can take the campaign to a new level by introducing an external element. Fast Forward Games intended to produce a supplement for MA called “Asteroid” whereby the Warden collides with an asteroid full of creatures. At this point we could gain something similar to Aliens or Starship Troopers, whereby a simple battle for control of the ship becomes an all-out survival game of desperation as the creatures try to exterminate humanity. This war may take place on the Warden, but eventually could find its way onto the Asteroid as players try to kill the “Queen Bee” or whatever is controlling the bad guys. As in many “conspiracy theory” style games, it’s possible that this campaign can have all kinds of twists and turns along the way, and not be a simple exercise in warfare. Remember the Cylons from the new Battlestar Galactica? Perhaps some of the creatures look and act like humans. The MA campaign could evolve into a Paranoia style game with players not being able to trust anyone they encounter. Or maybe each other, if the WM allows for one or more players to be of questionable origin.