I'm typing this when very tired; so the usual apologies for all poor spelling, grammar, style, and content apply.
I ran a playtest of 2.0alpha on Saturday. Two of my players have played SA 1.0 one-shots before, and the other two hadn't played SA at all and needed an explanation as to the setting.
The system works. Quite well, actually. Everyone had a grand time, and we ended up sucking a decent chunk of Games Club into a conversation about SA and sessions and campaigns past. You have some more fans, I'm afraid.
The “yes”/“no” mechanic to default tests felt a little strange. It certainly works, and the “yes”/“no” questions are usually pretty easy to ask (and players quickly learn what their characters can and can't do, and so soon only ask to try things if the answers will be “yes”). If only the capability or skill matches, I'll say “no, unless you're quite clever”, which works well. Either they'll be clever, or they'll come up with another solution and do that instead.
I occasionally missed the ability to say “you can try, but it's risky/unlikely”. This isn't necessarily bad; it plays more like my old Aria campaign than anything else, and has the advantage of having a better framework.
The GM really needs to have a good way to judge whether a character's capabilities cover a particular action. The only big question that came up during the campaign was when a player with high hard nanotech tried to dismantle ship components (at the molecular level) to make oxygen. Hard nanotech gives nanites, but soft gives fabrication. I ruled that this was under soft, but I'm not sure this was the correct ruling. Similarly, I was never sure if something should require high levels of a tech or not.
Professions were a harder one, for uncontested actions. Omnicompetent gives every profession at 2, so the default “do you have the skill?” answer appears to always be “yes”. Presumably, there are things where a higher level of expertise is needed, but without any framework for what “2” means, it was hard to judge.
So, in short, it is an excellent system that flows great, but the GM really needs solid guidance as to what various levels of capabilities and skills mean.
The new contested action system works lighting-fast (with only interesting things happening, like the players picking complications to apply). That said, I rarely want to design a character to handle the other side of a contest. As a result, I kind of fast-built characters, picking a tech and a skill, and ran with it. So, the Independent police had a tech+profession of 5 (as long as it was something that dealt with being police), and the automated guns had a 4. That said, the “take complications” system worked excellently. Generally, the players won by 1 or 2 points (usually after factoring in a Core Value), so they were taking small complications while generally getting what they wanted in return. The result was a system where things would tend to go wrong (but not disastrously), but the players got what they wanted, at least in the short term. Since I could pick the complication to apply, I could choose ones that made the plot more interesting, so I retained some control of the plot, even when it was spiraling out of control.
The new themes system is quite powerful. Since I didn't have named NPCs as opponents, the players usually needed 1 in scope to do what they needed. As a result, they could be spectacularly effective for (usually) 2 or 3 twists. Rarely they would spend 4. Twists were spent much more often than in 1.0, but to more mixed effect. About two thirds of the way through, the players could have accepted an easy Pyrrhic victory, having spend maybe a third of their twists. Instead, they decided to burn through them and curb-stomp the villains. It was quite fun, but I suspect that they had a few too many twists, or else the cost for various plot effects was a little too low.
In short, the session's (hidden) plot was as follows (written in about 20 minutes just before the game):
So, there's a Stored world being leased from the Independents. It's name is Ice, and the Independent world is Remington. The Logicians do some psychohistorical analysis on the situation, and come to the conclusion that in 30-50 years it'll evolve to the point where Stored have some pseudo-citizenship on Remington, which will result in the two civilizations getting closer together and maybe eventually allying. The Logicians don't want this to happen, so they get a hold of a rogue group of Mechanicans and tell them what they found. Said Mechanicans rather hate both the Stored and Independents, and reason that if they can get them to go to war with each other, the other Mechanicans will be able to sell weapons to both sides. But they don't want to get implicated in said war, so they get a rogue group of Skotadi to do their dirty work (while doing the Skotadi's dirty work in return). The Skotadi redirect asteroids, making it look like Ice is sending them to destroy Remington.
The first scene in the session is as the Inspector's spaceship breaks up around them, having just been hit by an asteroid (as they wormholed in). They had about ten minutes before they'd hit the ground. The old worlder burned twists to retcon them having worn spacesuits. The omnicompetent metatech roamer used nanites and fast foam to build a heat shield out of the pieces of the ship floating around (uncontested test). The stardweller gravity martial arts satori used his gravitic abilities to slow the crashing heat shield before it hit the ground (uncontested test).
The the police arrived and tried to arrest them. (Contested test with metatech roamer; police apply “kidnapped” to PCs (to represent bringing them to the police station); roamer applies “befriended by enemy” to police, getting their help in figuring out what happened to their ship).
Twists were spent to discover the Skotadi, skill tests to talk to them, track them, and fight them (contested; several PCs with teamwork; PC shuttle's engines damaged (delayed), skotadi injured and driven off (delayed even more)). Uncontested skill tests to discover the mechanicans (using the Stored sensor array to discover them), and more twists (through roamer contacts) to figure out how they are involved with the Skotadi (the players had figured out the bulk of it, but wanted confirmation), Further twists to discover the Logician involvement, and yet more to convince the Skotadi to betray the Mechanicans (the biotech religious cargo cultist had Terror-conspiracies, and convinced them that the Mechanicans were intending to betray them later; which was very plausible). With that, they contacted the Mechanican Civilization, and pulled off a (relatively easy) contested test against the hostile Mechanicans to get them exiled. At this point, they could have ended the game, but still had a lot of twists to spend, so…
The now exiled Mechanicans attacked, wormholing their entire asteroid base into orbit over Ice. The PCs get the Patent Office to wormhole them into the base, and burn through twists (and contested tests), taking control, destroying their power systems, driving the Mechanians out of the base, and eventually getting them to surrender.
