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This is going to be a slightly unusual review in that I'm going to be reviewing 2 products at once, basically because they are closely related and should be purchased and used together as a single product. The products are the universal RPG ruleset called EABA, and its companion book, the universal gear creation system called "Stuff!"
Both are made by BTRC, in other words by Greg Porter. I have several other products by Mr. Porter, namely his "3G" weapon construction system and expansion for it along with "emperor's arsenal" and "Central supply catalog" for T4, the best products made for the disastrous T4 line.
EABA, pronounced "Ee-buh" and standing for "End all, Be all" is a complete RPG system packed into a 159 page PDF that offers up a lot of gaming value in an economical, plain brown wrapper package.
EABA uses a points based chargen system that has 6 stats, Strength, Agility, Will, Health, Awareness and an odd stat called "Fate" that is used both as luck and for other things, depending on the genre. In a fantasy setting, fate often becomes your magical powerbase, in a SF game it could represent psionic potential.
In a gritty, hardcore reality system, fate might be used to represent "Adrenaline rushes" in combat. Each time you try to use fate to add 1d to your actions or subtract 1d from injuries (The most common uses), it gets harder to do. This makes it a good candidate to simulate adrenaline rushes for hardcore games.
The skill system uses a roll over on 3d6 mechanic, with the number of dice rolled varying depending on skill and circumstances. You take your best 3 dice and any modifiers. Some characters can take an advantage called "larger than life" that lets them take the best 4 dice in all or some situations.
There are modifiers, but if they exceed a +2 they convert to another dice. If, for instance, you had an agility of 2d+2 and a gun skill of 2d+2 you would roll 5d+1 as the combined modifier of +4 becomes an extra die with a +1 left over.
As an additional note, if you roll more than 4 dice, you can opt to convert one of them to a +2 modifier if you don't already have one on your roll.(This is recommended but not mandatory.)
As a side note here, the way the EABA dice rolls work seem to defy statistical analysis and it seems to be very difficult to calculate your odds of success. Well, never fear. Greg Porter ran a program to roll hundreds of results at various difficulty levels and dice pool sizes, and printed the results in a spiffy, multi-color graphic chart so you can look up your approximate chances of succeeding at beating, say, a level 14 task when rolling 7 dice and keeping the best 3, or most other tasks at most other dice pool sizes.
There are built in limits to skills in general, with most skills being limited to no higher than the base attribute. Thus since using melee weapons in a function of Agility, your maximum skill with a melee weapon is equal to your agility. You can overcome this in some circumstances by specializing in a subset of a skill and gain an additional +1d in that specialization.
(BTW, all dice in EABA are d6. Dammit, another system in which most of my dice collection is useless! Oh well...)
The skill list in EABA is fairly skimpy and a little coarse, but you are encouraged to make new skills as required. Skills come in 3 types: Regular, advanced and hobby.
Regular skills are, as one would surmise, regular. Advanced skills add to an attribute during an action, like Martial Arts adding to strength while making a melee attack. Hobby skills are things a character might pick up in various ways, but not be able to use to generate income.
Each skill type has a fixed point cost, which means it's easy to add skills. It also means that acquiring a skill level in "Quantum mechanics" is no harder than acquiring a skill in "driving". Also skills don't require prerequisites, so you can get a skill level in Quantum mechanics without any mathematical skills being taken first.
A possible fix for the skill system would be to give some skills a prerequisite or two, this would automatically make them more costly as you needed the prereqs to get them. Thus gaining a level in quantum mechanics might require a very high math skill as a prereq, making it more realistic.
The combat rules are next. EABA combat comes in two types, basic and advanced. This allows you to tailor the time, effort and detail level of combat to suit your group. It's a fairly simple and clean combat system, with damage divided into two types: Lethal and non lethal.
Some weapons and attacks do lethal damage, like bullets, knives, etc. Some do non lethal, like fists, stunners, etc. Some do a combination called "Half lethal". Now it's important to understand that "non lethal" damage can in fact become lethal if too much of it is taken in one blow. If you take more "non lethal" damage in an attack than you have Health, half the excess becomes lethal. Thus healthier people are less likely to take as much lethal damage from many attacks, and stronger attacks are more likely to do lethal damage. I like this mechanic a lot.
Combat turns are 1 second long, and you roll initiative each turn, based on what your major action for the turn will be. Clunky? Maybe, but I like it.
One thing I don't like in the combat and skills rules is the complete and utter lack of a critical success/failure system. There is none as written, and I kind of like the chance of a critical hit popping up now and then to keep things interesting.
On the other hand, the EABA combat system doesn't use the horribly bad clockwork critical system in which everyone, regardless of skill or circumstance, has the same chance of a crit success or failure on the same action. That's about as bad as no criticals at all...
As you take damage, you become less effective, with "damage levels" that can vary based on the health and general toughness of the character lowering your dice pool as you reach them. However, the more damage you take, the less new damage affects you. If you are at -2d from injury, a 2d hit does less damage than it would if you weren't already injured to that level. The rational given goes like "If your arm's already broken, breaking it again will affect you less than the first time it was broken." The loss of dice from your dice pool also works well for simulating the effects of illness, fatigue, heat exhaustion, etc.
Lethal and non lethal damage reduce your effectiveness the same way, but lethal damage takes much longer to heal after the battle. Also, the more badly wounded you are the longer it takes for you to heal and the harder it gets. In some cases badly wounded people can't heal at all without aid.
There are rules to cover bleeding, which I consider essential to a rpg system. Ask any combat medic anywhere and he'll tell you far more people die from blood loss than from the actual injuries that caused the blood loss.
Note that a range limit on ranged weapons seems to be missing in the EABA rules, but is covered in the "Stuff!" rules.
All in all the combat rules work quite well and offer flexible levels of detail for any game.
On a personal note, after the incident where 3 Somali pirates were killed by American military snipers at the order of America's new president, I took the EABA combat system and tried to use it to model the situation and found that under the EABA rules it was quite possible to model the event accurately and still get the real world results in most "roll through's".
The "powers" rules is a huge part of the book, and allows all sorts of powers to be created and used. This is a large, complex and major part of the game, which is quite effective but could have been detailed and explained a bit better. Suffice it to say an experienced gamer will be able to create most any power, ability or handicap he wants, though with some effort.
All in all, I'd say that EABA is an excellent buy for the experienced gamer. It's not quite user friendly enough for novices. For the experienced gamer willing to invest some real effort, it will yield up excellent results. It's a basic system with few frills, but offers most everything needed for most situations. It even has a mass combat resolution system, for example, something that some more expensive games still lack.
Moving right along to the second part of our double feature, we come to "Stuff!", a system that allows you to build weapons, armor, gadgets, vehicles, creatures (yes, creatures) and even whole civilizations for EABA in a rational, consistent fashion. It may not be a perfect simulation of every "real world" device, but it works and is consistent.
At 234 pages, Stuff! is an add on that dwarfs the main rules it's written to work with.
Stuff is based on units called "Hexagons" for volume and mass, and most large things will be measured in hexagons. A hexagon is a hexagon 1 meter from face to face, and 1 meter high. It comprises a total volume of 26.5 cubic feet. A typical car might have a volume of 8-10 or so hexes, for example. (BTW, Stuff! and EABA use metric measurements, but Stuff! gave the value of 26.5 cubic feet as an example of a hexagon's volume for those of us who have not yet bowed in supplication to the almighty metric system.)
Personal gear will often be measured in millihexes, a volume roughly equal to a typical human fist. .1 millihex is the smallest standard measurement in stuff, and is roughly equal to a small watch and its strap.
Most items are created by either picking a size/mass limit, then determining what you can make something that big do with various mods, or by picking an effect you want and seeing how big you need to make the device to do it. Stuff! is based on modifiers, and there are a lot of them. Thus you might start with a rifle that masses, say, about 8 pounds as a base, but after applying mods you could end up with two radically different results. One 8 pound rifle could be an assault weapon with limited range and damage that had full autofire, while the other could be a bolt action sniper rifle that had vastly greater range and damage with a low rate of fire.
Stuff! has some gray areas where you can choose to go more than one way. An example might by a large missile. You could design it as a weapon, or design the missile as a vehicle and the warhead as a weapon it carries as payload. Personally for a regular missile I'd go with it as a weapon.If you want a 'smart" cruise missile that can actively try to evade enemy countermeasures, choose a random route to a target, etc. you might be better off making it as a vehicle with a warhead designed with the weapon rules.
Stuff! also adds the rules for gun ranges to EABA and allows you to increase or decrease ranges to simulate various weapons or to try to match "real world weapons" more closely. The rules admit an M-16 made with the Stuff! rules will have too much range to be an accurate model of a real M-16, then shows how using a level of reduced range mostly solves the problem.
The rules for damage reduction cause most normal weapons to lose 1d of damage at various ranges, with some exceptions. Technical note here: A loss of 1d damage equates to a 50% drop is total power. Thus a 2d bullet has 1/2 the power of a 3d bullet.) A warhead type weapon, say a grenade launcher, obviously should not and does not lose damage with range and has a range limit of the last range value it does full damage at.I like the damage reduction over range rules as it means you may be able to hit an armored cyborg at 3,000 meters with a high powered, pimped out sniper rifle but be unable to damage him unless you get to, say, 1,000 meters.
Stuff! gives a level of detail that may not equal some very few game products, but is quite adequate to all practical RPG needs.
On the other hand, Stuff! offers details few if any other creation rules do. An example was given by showing how hard it would be to build a sensor array for a starship. It would be very hard to build it all as one unit, but if you divide the job into several smaller subassemblies it gets easier. (This is how many large, complex items get built in the real world, and why we have "subcontractors".) The rules give you guidelines on how big a facility needs to be to complete a certain job and how many people are needed to work on it. This will usually be extraneous detail, but in some games it could be useful. Imagine a scenario where the players are assigned to sabotage a production facility that makes sensor arrays for enemy starships. If the players can knock out a few of the labs doing sub-contracting work it can shut down the production of starship sensor arrays for a time, slowing down the rate the enemy can produce interstellar warships.
I made a couple nice weapons for Stuff! fairly easily. One was a version of the Lawgiver pistol from Judge Dredd that left out some of the sillier rounds, the other was a man portable fusion gun from Traveller that had a special effect requiring (Or at least making it desirable for) the firer to wear full armor like in Traveller.
Stuff! allows you to make most things you'd need in any game setting from primitive, low tech settings to superscience SF settings. Rules for magic items are added as well, even though I can't comment on their quality as I don't generally use magic in my games.
Asides from being another vehicle/weapon maker, Stuff! allows you to create living creatures and civilizations as well, in plausible, consistent ways. If you create a large carnivore, it'll tell you about how many a given area of land will support in a given eco system. Likewise, if you create a medieval society, you'll know how many people each acre of arable land will feed, how many farmhands it takes to work each acre at a given tech level, etc. If you want a L5 type habitat to be self sufficient, Stuff will help you determine what amount of it's volume should be devoted to agriculture.
EABA and Stuff! aren't perfect, and I have a list of things I'd like to see changed if there's ever a second edition. (Add a critical system! Put more detail in the skills section!) Both require the gamer using them to be fairly experienced and willing to put some effort into things. Both also offer considerable rewards for the investment. Also both have some errors here and there that can cause confusion, often in the "examples" parts. In one case of an example, you were shown how many shots you could recharge into a laser rifle from a battery, but the example and the rules gave different values. Likewise in an example of how range works, the difficulty level given in the example was different than that you'd get following the rules. In such cases a good rule is to follow the written rule and not the example since they seem to have the errors more than the rules do.
EABA and Stuff! both, by themselves, offer a lot for their price. Combined, as they should be, they serve up a potent 1-2 punch that should leave the competition reeling. They then administer a coup de grace by costing so much less than their main competitors in the Universal RPG system field.
Consider: You can buy EABA for 13$ and Stuff! for 12$. At 25$ total they cost less than nearly any of the new, hardcover rulebooks other universal systems require.
Sure you have to print them, but if you have a decent, refillable inkjet printer you can do it fairly quickly and cheaply as the two PDFs are made to be printed easily. I used a HP deskpet 3915, (a very cheap printer) used the fast normal setting to save time and ink, refilled my cartridges and got the job done in a couple hours at about 5$ or so in total cost for the ink and paper. (As a note, they should be printed in color.)
So even at 30$ EABA/Stuff! is still a bargain, and you can take the money you save and buy some great, original worldbooks for the system, like "Code:Black" or "NeoTerra", both of which I have.
Also, being PDF's they are replaceable if the pages are lost or damaged. Furthermore, you can print out just what you need. Thus you can print out the combat rules, put them in a slim ring binder and take them to a convention to run EABA there, and you're not lugging a big, heavy, expensive to replace full hardcover rulebook that some git might steal.
Stuff! has a neat built in feature that lets you use a PDF reader to make a weapon, vehicle, etc. on a spreadsheet in the PDF and print it out. You can't save it as a file, though, but it is still of use for a basic weapon or vehicle.
Even with it's flaws, EABA is an overlooked and under appreciated Titan in the arena of universal RPG systems and if you're an experienced gamer looking for a low cost, high value system you should check it out. To see for yourself, go to www.btrc.net and download some free sample of EABA, Stuff!, Code:Black and Neoterra.
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Richard
Greece
Marousi
Athens
RPGGrEEK Guild, γινετε μελος εδω:http://rpggeek.com/guild/1256
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Very thorough review.
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Oops! One thing I forgot to mention: EABA comes with a variety of covers, allowing you to print out the one of your choice, slip it into the front cover of your ring binder and customize the appearance.
One cover even features a nice bit of abstract color art with a lot of text offering good game advice from some expert. The text is quite hard to read unless you print it out at max resolution, or possibly have it printed as a hi res photograph, which you can do easily and not too costly at walgreens.
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Michael Tan
United States
Santa Monica
California
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Judge Death wrote: Oops! One thing I forgot to mention: EABA comes with a variety of covers, allowing you to print out the one of your choice, slip it into the front cover of your ring binder and customize the appearance.
One cover even features a nice bit of abstract color art with a lot of text offering good game advice from some expert. The text is quite hard to read unless you print it out at max resolution, or possibly have it printed as a hi res photograph, which you can do easily and not too costly at walgreens.
How does EABA and Stuff! differ from CORPS and Guns Guns Guns and VDS? In some respects it seems like a replacement but it is also more cinematic no?
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m3tan wrote:
How does EABA and Stuff! differ from CORPS and Guns Guns Guns and VDS? In some respects it seems like a replacement but it is also more cinematic no?
Not owning CORPS but having read up on it, and not owning VDS but owning the guns guns guns products (naturally) I would have to say that EABA/stuff allows you to design a lot wider variety of stuff to a lesser degree of detail.
In G3, you are limited to designing projectile, some missiles, lasers and particle beams but you design them to an incredible level of detail, such at the length of the receiver and barrel, mass of propellant on each bullet, etc.
In stuff you simply end up with the number of millihexes a gun takes up as a measure of size and volume, and in general 200 rounds of ammo takes up as much mass and volume as the gun.
That asides you can design a lot wider variety of weapons and equipment in stuff than in 3G.
From what I heard, CORPS is somewhat coarser in resolution than EABA. EABA is meant to be easier and more intuitive to use and to be more of a generic universal system whereas CORPS was more suited towards "normal human" type characters.EABA can do normal humans quite well, but also is better suited towards non human, superhuman or other such characters.
All in all, it's too bad that CORPS got the cooler name and EABA got stuck with EABA,
In general I find that even though Stuff may offer less exacting detail than 3g or VDS, it gives more than enough for most gaming purposes and can even please all but the most extreme gearheads, while allowing far more things to be made in a consistent, rational, logical fashion.
EABA reminds me of Klaatu's honest commentary on his society at the end of the day nthe earth stood still. (Don't even ASK if I'm referring to that thrice cursed and damned keanu reeves movie.) "We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we have a system, and it works."
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Posted Mon Aug 10, 2009 12:33 am
