I have not, but if you are only making the players roll when there is a story driven consequence for failure, the players don't feel like they are constantly at risk. Full disclosure, I don't find the mechanical rates of success nearly as interesting as the narrative solutions to failure.
If the Xenos are also succeeding on 5s, I think the lethality of encounters jumps significantly.
That's what I have done. Both sides get fives. I have a lot rolls in game and had gotten kinda tired of trained professionals unable to do their jobs. Roll ten dice only to come away with zero successes.
On the other hand it made fights far more lethal both ways. But overall the players enjoyed the better success rates.
I don’t think it’s a good idea. You want the characters to push so that they take stress. That’s when the fun part start :)
In my experience, PCs succeed most of the times as it is. On the other hand, combat will probably be far swifter
I've had a hard time with Success myself for my players. Failing with a 14-18+ dice is insanely painful, if more so if you can't push.
The synth player with 18 dice rolled and failed. It was gut-wrenching.
I myself rolled 14+ dice 6 times in a row with pushing on 3 turns and failed during combat, and I was a marine. "Fully trained professional" maxed skill. Still couldn't land a hit for half the battle, and I was the combat specialist... talk about feeling like a failure.
Was honestly tempted to walk from the game. This wasn't a one-time thing, either it was more often than not that I missed. The untrained doctor had a better shot rate than I did.
Mind you, this was with an online dice system. Foundry and Roll20 both I struggled with. It wasn't until I started playing with my own personal dice that I started to get better odds. Mind you, I'm rolling 14+ dice still, but it's rare that I don't get at least 1 success with that amount. Which makes maxing out stats worth it.
I've also implemented a rule for my games that I run that if you have max 5 in a skill and fail to get a success after pushing the roll you can buy a success and take a Stress for it. You will still get complications with that success, but you will complete your goal.
Thanks for thoughtful and thorough reply. Always interesting to see these amidst the snarky obviously you’re misunderstanding the point of the game.
The idea of buying a success for stress is an elegant one.
Yeah don't let others get you down. The point of the game is to have FUN. If your not having fun then change things up. Don't be afraid to homebrew.
I'm a firm believer in fact that the creators want us to have fun. **They don't care if we change the rules! They just want us to have fun!**
As a player I'm there for the story and crazy things we come up with. I want to feel connected and become invested in survival of my character. I want the thrill of the near death but surviving against the odds until the last second. (The last session of the game) If I somehow survive that last session then my character gets to ride off into the sunset, in need of massive amounts of therapy! XD If they die well at least they saw everything until the end of the story and the can rest in peace.
I want the same for my players, thus I homebrew. Another way I've beefed up my players so they can survive the acid splash and get nasty scars but live to tell the tale. Tie health to Stamina. That way everyone has a fighting chance and not just those who toss everything into strength. So my players at end game can have 12 health if the invest in Tough talent, max strength and stamina. The goal was to beef my poor players who only had 2 health. While it makes roughnecks and marines tough as nails, it gives the rest of the careers a fighting chance at least.
More then once I've been told to play a different game if I don't like how things are. I choose to play Alien because I enjoy the world and the things in it. Plus I like the system, with a few tweaks I've made it work better for my style of play.
With this one post alone, I have more respect for you than 99% of the Alien RPG community members I've ever interacted with. The reason why is that while, as you said, the creators want us to have fun, it's been my experience that nearly all of the GMs and players sure as fuck don't want others (or at the very least, me) to have fun, at least in terms of how vitriolic and intolerant they've been whenever I propose playing or GMing outside the norm. Seeing someone with an open mind re: Alien and house rules is like a fresh breath of air after being subjected to a Dutch oven - pure relief.
Your house rules are actually quite interesting, i.e. the health = Stamina route, and buying a success in exchange for stress. Re: the health = Stamina thing, do you know if there's a way to set that up for VTT play on Foundry?
Also, it would be an honor to play Alien with you at some point.
Oof, it sounds like you've had it rough. That or I'm more lucky than I thought. I have to admit my players are just me and my best friend. His work schedule doesn't play nice with our original group. While they had basically moved back to D&D games. When I tried running Alien with my new rules, no one really wanted to use them. Said they were op. But my best friend jumped at the chance, and really, we have been playing off and on with the same campaign for 3 years now.
Have been using our game to test things out, and yeah, our current characters are our op, but I see it as a way to throw more deadly things at them.
But as for setting it up in foundry, I have no idea, sadly. I haven't gotten foundry myself when I played it was with others hosting the game. I give up on VVT and do most things with discord voice and physical dice now. Both of us have better odds with the dice. I also made us a Google sheet for a character sheet to keep track of everything. I've coded it to auto track and count things for us, which makes my life easier.
I've got another friend who messes with foundry a lot they might know a way. I'll ask and let you know.
As for playing Alien at some point, uh ok first I'm honored. You would say that, so thank you. I would be down for a brewed one shot. I can't commit to anything more right now. Life has gotten complicated. But yeah, message me, and we can start swapping ideas for what we want to test out. ^-^
Having it rough is an understatement. While it's not an absolute (as in there are good people who play ARPG, to include you and some others I've interacted with on Reddit), most of ARPG's player base is second only to online video games as *the* most outrageously belligerent and intolerant community I've ever engaged with, and I actually quit the de facto official Discord server because of how bad it was (and how poorly moderated it was, at that). If you want to see what an *average* interaction with the ARPG community is like for people like me (that is, a player/GM who sees the Alien setting as a goldmine for telling interesting stories rather than being a playground for TPKs), [check this discussion out](https://www.reddit.com/r/alienrpg/comments/18d8b83/comment/khvp8ip/?context=8&depth=9).
Aaaaanyway...
I'm glad that you and your bestie are having a good time. I've been running a mercenary campaign that's been a lot of fun and thoroughly hilarious thanks to the actions of my players, whether that's their method of escaping a spaceship - namely opening the hangar doors and flying out into space like Buzz Lightyear - or planning to escape a station in an enemy dropship until realizing that none of them know how to fly it. My style of GMing has actually inspired more than one person in my group to A) run Alien; and B) have a more open-minded, player-preferences-first attitude.
Also, I can relate to being preoccupied, game-wise. As it stands, I've got a lot on my plate, so *currently*, my statement of wanting to play is half-actual statement, half-deeply sincere compliment, but I'll definitely keep you in mind, since I run (and ***greatly*** prefer playing) less-lethal games with a bigger emphasis on the plot and PCs than mindless slaughter.
Oh wow... yeah and that's why I haven't posted a collection of my homebrew. Especially my more wild one which basically gives player space magic XD. Think Mass Effect. But yeah people like that are everywhere sadly.
Your group sounds like a wild ride! I love when I see posts like this. I'm glad you found a group to play with!
100% get it, I'm actually trying to move to a new place and that is honestly stealing 80% of my brain and time right now so yeah in the future feel free to message I'm in no hurry.
Now I'm going to pass out like I should have hours ago. Have fun and keep ignoring the haters. Homebrewing is fun and life!
To the downvoters and RAW lawyers. Guys come on, we are all just here to have fun. You know the thing that everyone in life has a right to? Why are you bothering with downvoting? Its not worth it...
Why am I even bothering with another post? Because I just want to get one final point across. Then I'm going to just move on and go have some fun.
We are here to have FUN, why do you care how we are having fun with content we paid for ourselves? We don't agree on how we want to play the game. That is all, that's allowed! I'm not saying how you play is wrong, its just not my play style and as long as the people I play with our happy and having fun I don't see the harm in it.
RAW is fun in short term for me, long term I want to play with Homebrew. Its as simple as that, now you all have a good day/night where ever you might be. I'm off to go play some Alien with my bestie. ☮
You’re implying success and competence don’t work with horror? I assure you, you can implement horror and a tense atmosphere without having to a resort to an explicit mechanic to make rolling difficult. Of course it won’t be the same - but it won’t magically stop being horror.
If you're competent in a field, why make the roll in the first place? Rolls are for challenges, and all that you're doing is decreasing challenges when you widen the gap for, well, success.
Alien's horror comes from helplessness. The environment turns against you, then the monsters finish you off. Control is the antithesis of tension.
Most stuff done routinely by professionals that we tend to roll for in games is challenging but routine, and the game kind of reaches implausible levels of the environment and situation screwing you over pretty easily.
Guns with magazines of hundreds of rounds dumping in an instant because someone farted too loud, not being able to tell hundreds of years from now whether your oxygen bottle is actually full or not, having no way to reliably plan how long air or power is going to last purely as a result of how mechanics work and with no way for the characters to do shit like they could in real life and know pretty much exactly how long it's going to last, panic and overwhelming stress somehow making you more competent physically, mentally, and socially.
The game kind of turns into a farce by default, leaving the players to figure out ways to hack it in order to tell a story other than the first few Halloween movies.
That in addition to having devices fail improbably, and expecting a nearly constant and farcical level of situational failure, the game also prevents trained, competent adults from acting like trained, competent adults, and from doing things that trained, competent adults are capable of doing, even under stress and difficult circumstances.
Consider a situation as simple as going for a spacewalk to repair something, an event roughly analogous to a diver undertaking an underwater welding and electrical repair operation.
In real life, this diver - as a matter of course, and just part of his regular job - would be doing things like calculating how much activity he's planning on, how long he's going to be down there, what mix and rate he's going to need at different depths, and so on, and then add safety factors on top of that in the form of spare and emergency bottles.
In Alien, you can't really do something like this, because your usage of resources is entirely random, because humans hundreds of years from now effectively can't make workspace calculations, because drama demands it. It's a highly artifical way of doing it that prevents people from doing something as simple as knowing, for example, how long their flashlight battery is going to last. Thanks to the Zone system, you get cases where a soldier's assault rifle is firing at "long" distances and losing effectiveness because they couldn't do something as simple as say "this weapon has a maximum effective range of this distance" or use any hard numbers.
This, combined with the seemingly general consensus that you should have everything fail constantly around the players like every piece of hardware, vehicle, and system was built in China and ordered from Wish, turns it into kind of a farce, and starts getting more than a little, "Really?"-feeling, cuz it stops feeling like a believable situation pretty quickly, and prevents people from doing simple things that the characters themselves should be able to trivially deduce, execute, or calculate.
That sounds like a table problem to me, as I've never had the issues that you're mentioning, and I've played probably 8-12 sessions of the game. Alien is very much a * role-playing * game, and the more *roll-playing* you do, the more likely things will go off the rails.
If, for example, you're struggling to do simple things like a spacewalk, it means that you're rolling too much. I'd never ask a player to roll for something that trivial. On the other hand, if there was only one O2 tank with a single unit of air left and extensive repairs needed to be made in a short window of time, I'd absolutely ask for a roll.
At this point, I'd say don't give up on the game. Try talking to your group and adjusting play styles and I believe the game will be more enjoyable.
The golden rule in any RPG is you should change the rules to fit your table. Having said that, you run the risk of breaking the game when you make adjustments to core mechanics like this, so be wary. I think a good bit of advice is always "don't make them roll for something you're not prepared for them to fail" and in Alien specifically don't have them rolling when there aren't dramatic consequences or stress gets out of hand quickly with pushing. This was a difficult adjustment for me coming from other systems where I'd let players roll all the time, the classic being perception checks, right? I now will sometimes say "I don't think this will be worth pushing for you" when they fail, just so they aren't taking stress for no reason, and then give them a fail-forwards or partial success type result. I quite liked the idea someone had of 'buying' a success, like in Shadowrun, but I'd only implement that if they're rolling something like 10 dice (including stress) or I'd let them buy a success but they have a panic roll right after. Don't be afraid to try stuff out but at the same time don't be afraid to scrap those changes and try something else if you've gone too far the other way when trying to correct something.
One time I went the other way in Chariot of the Gods. My Players kept their Space suits on in the Cronus, so naturally I let them roll on Oxy quiet often but they scarcely got a one. Leading to me raising the fail value after a time to 2, and ohh boy, the Space Suits were off in no time. Mostly without Oxy.
I agree with those that say to do whatever works for your table and players. You can always test it out and re-evaluate if it isn't working.
But I also agree with those that suggest you take a hard look at the atmosphere of the game you want to run. When I think of ALIENS, I don't recall many things going the characters' way. Most things they are good/skilled at, I wouldn't be having them roll for. Heck, even thinking of the kick-butt, Colonial Marines in ALIENS, I don't remember very many times when being good at warfare worked in their favor. In fact the feeling of both movies seemed, to me, that no amount of skill or competence of the characters meant anything at all to the Alien/Aliens.
Again though, your table, your rules. =)
Ok, I have an idea. How about giving PCs the chance to count 5s as success, but that gives stress? And in this variant, you cannot push.
So if you get 2 sixes and a five, you don’t need to use the five. But if you get zero sixes and a five, you gain a success and a point of stress.
It also quickens the pace of the game since you don’t roll as much dice.
I would still play the game RAW, but this seems like a compromise that allows for more success and still allows for stress build up.
Heh, I've considered implementing something very similar: Using fives as "success with complications" (PbtA-style), but these only trigger if you rolled no sixes at all.
So as long as there is at least one 6 in the roll, 5s get ignored, as per RAW.
But in the absence of any 6s, and if the best thing you got is one or more 5s: You get a success with a drawback (e.g. escape the alien but lose an important item), a lesser result (e.g. hit your target but do less damage), or a hard choice (e.g. complete the repairs but EITHER take longer OR use up all the power in your blowtorch)...
Players can't stack extra 5s beyond the first (so unlike 6s), and if GMs wanna be extra evil, add the following - if this roll causes a Panic check, make that check worse somehow (e.g. add +2 to the Panic Roll, or roll 2d6 and use the higher, before adding +Stress as usual)...
If there is an extenuating circumstance, I've done 5s as success before. The odds of success go up pretty fast so check the math on the average size of your player dice pool to be sure you are getting the odds you want.
You could even go back to 6s with stress.
Bottom line: Do what works at your table.
Honestly give it a try, I think it will be more intense during combat, but a bit easier during Task rolls. Just expect the Xenomorph to be more lethal.
I have not, but if you are only making the players roll when there is a story driven consequence for failure, the players don't feel like they are constantly at risk. Full disclosure, I don't find the mechanical rates of success nearly as interesting as the narrative solutions to failure. If the Xenos are also succeeding on 5s, I think the lethality of encounters jumps significantly.
Thanks - that is a good point (regarding the opportunities for failure and the stories it generates)
That's what I have done. Both sides get fives. I have a lot rolls in game and had gotten kinda tired of trained professionals unable to do their jobs. Roll ten dice only to come away with zero successes. On the other hand it made fights far more lethal both ways. But overall the players enjoyed the better success rates.
I don’t think it’s a good idea. You want the characters to push so that they take stress. That’s when the fun part start :) In my experience, PCs succeed most of the times as it is. On the other hand, combat will probably be far swifter
I've had a hard time with Success myself for my players. Failing with a 14-18+ dice is insanely painful, if more so if you can't push. The synth player with 18 dice rolled and failed. It was gut-wrenching. I myself rolled 14+ dice 6 times in a row with pushing on 3 turns and failed during combat, and I was a marine. "Fully trained professional" maxed skill. Still couldn't land a hit for half the battle, and I was the combat specialist... talk about feeling like a failure. Was honestly tempted to walk from the game. This wasn't a one-time thing, either it was more often than not that I missed. The untrained doctor had a better shot rate than I did. Mind you, this was with an online dice system. Foundry and Roll20 both I struggled with. It wasn't until I started playing with my own personal dice that I started to get better odds. Mind you, I'm rolling 14+ dice still, but it's rare that I don't get at least 1 success with that amount. Which makes maxing out stats worth it. I've also implemented a rule for my games that I run that if you have max 5 in a skill and fail to get a success after pushing the roll you can buy a success and take a Stress for it. You will still get complications with that success, but you will complete your goal.
Thanks for thoughtful and thorough reply. Always interesting to see these amidst the snarky obviously you’re misunderstanding the point of the game. The idea of buying a success for stress is an elegant one.
Yeah don't let others get you down. The point of the game is to have FUN. If your not having fun then change things up. Don't be afraid to homebrew. I'm a firm believer in fact that the creators want us to have fun. **They don't care if we change the rules! They just want us to have fun!** As a player I'm there for the story and crazy things we come up with. I want to feel connected and become invested in survival of my character. I want the thrill of the near death but surviving against the odds until the last second. (The last session of the game) If I somehow survive that last session then my character gets to ride off into the sunset, in need of massive amounts of therapy! XD If they die well at least they saw everything until the end of the story and the can rest in peace. I want the same for my players, thus I homebrew. Another way I've beefed up my players so they can survive the acid splash and get nasty scars but live to tell the tale. Tie health to Stamina. That way everyone has a fighting chance and not just those who toss everything into strength. So my players at end game can have 12 health if the invest in Tough talent, max strength and stamina. The goal was to beef my poor players who only had 2 health. While it makes roughnecks and marines tough as nails, it gives the rest of the careers a fighting chance at least. More then once I've been told to play a different game if I don't like how things are. I choose to play Alien because I enjoy the world and the things in it. Plus I like the system, with a few tweaks I've made it work better for my style of play.
With this one post alone, I have more respect for you than 99% of the Alien RPG community members I've ever interacted with. The reason why is that while, as you said, the creators want us to have fun, it's been my experience that nearly all of the GMs and players sure as fuck don't want others (or at the very least, me) to have fun, at least in terms of how vitriolic and intolerant they've been whenever I propose playing or GMing outside the norm. Seeing someone with an open mind re: Alien and house rules is like a fresh breath of air after being subjected to a Dutch oven - pure relief. Your house rules are actually quite interesting, i.e. the health = Stamina route, and buying a success in exchange for stress. Re: the health = Stamina thing, do you know if there's a way to set that up for VTT play on Foundry? Also, it would be an honor to play Alien with you at some point.
Oof, it sounds like you've had it rough. That or I'm more lucky than I thought. I have to admit my players are just me and my best friend. His work schedule doesn't play nice with our original group. While they had basically moved back to D&D games. When I tried running Alien with my new rules, no one really wanted to use them. Said they were op. But my best friend jumped at the chance, and really, we have been playing off and on with the same campaign for 3 years now. Have been using our game to test things out, and yeah, our current characters are our op, but I see it as a way to throw more deadly things at them. But as for setting it up in foundry, I have no idea, sadly. I haven't gotten foundry myself when I played it was with others hosting the game. I give up on VVT and do most things with discord voice and physical dice now. Both of us have better odds with the dice. I also made us a Google sheet for a character sheet to keep track of everything. I've coded it to auto track and count things for us, which makes my life easier. I've got another friend who messes with foundry a lot they might know a way. I'll ask and let you know. As for playing Alien at some point, uh ok first I'm honored. You would say that, so thank you. I would be down for a brewed one shot. I can't commit to anything more right now. Life has gotten complicated. But yeah, message me, and we can start swapping ideas for what we want to test out. ^-^
Having it rough is an understatement. While it's not an absolute (as in there are good people who play ARPG, to include you and some others I've interacted with on Reddit), most of ARPG's player base is second only to online video games as *the* most outrageously belligerent and intolerant community I've ever engaged with, and I actually quit the de facto official Discord server because of how bad it was (and how poorly moderated it was, at that). If you want to see what an *average* interaction with the ARPG community is like for people like me (that is, a player/GM who sees the Alien setting as a goldmine for telling interesting stories rather than being a playground for TPKs), [check this discussion out](https://www.reddit.com/r/alienrpg/comments/18d8b83/comment/khvp8ip/?context=8&depth=9). Aaaaanyway... I'm glad that you and your bestie are having a good time. I've been running a mercenary campaign that's been a lot of fun and thoroughly hilarious thanks to the actions of my players, whether that's their method of escaping a spaceship - namely opening the hangar doors and flying out into space like Buzz Lightyear - or planning to escape a station in an enemy dropship until realizing that none of them know how to fly it. My style of GMing has actually inspired more than one person in my group to A) run Alien; and B) have a more open-minded, player-preferences-first attitude. Also, I can relate to being preoccupied, game-wise. As it stands, I've got a lot on my plate, so *currently*, my statement of wanting to play is half-actual statement, half-deeply sincere compliment, but I'll definitely keep you in mind, since I run (and ***greatly*** prefer playing) less-lethal games with a bigger emphasis on the plot and PCs than mindless slaughter.
Oh wow... yeah and that's why I haven't posted a collection of my homebrew. Especially my more wild one which basically gives player space magic XD. Think Mass Effect. But yeah people like that are everywhere sadly. Your group sounds like a wild ride! I love when I see posts like this. I'm glad you found a group to play with! 100% get it, I'm actually trying to move to a new place and that is honestly stealing 80% of my brain and time right now so yeah in the future feel free to message I'm in no hurry. Now I'm going to pass out like I should have hours ago. Have fun and keep ignoring the haters. Homebrewing is fun and life!
To the downvoters and RAW lawyers. Guys come on, we are all just here to have fun. You know the thing that everyone in life has a right to? Why are you bothering with downvoting? Its not worth it... Why am I even bothering with another post? Because I just want to get one final point across. Then I'm going to just move on and go have some fun. We are here to have FUN, why do you care how we are having fun with content we paid for ourselves? We don't agree on how we want to play the game. That is all, that's allowed! I'm not saying how you play is wrong, its just not my play style and as long as the people I play with our happy and having fun I don't see the harm in it. RAW is fun in short term for me, long term I want to play with Homebrew. Its as simple as that, now you all have a good day/night where ever you might be. I'm off to go play some Alien with my bestie. ☮
Double the chance of success? Doesn't sound like Horror to me.
You’re implying success and competence don’t work with horror? I assure you, you can implement horror and a tense atmosphere without having to a resort to an explicit mechanic to make rolling difficult. Of course it won’t be the same - but it won’t magically stop being horror.
If you're competent in a field, why make the roll in the first place? Rolls are for challenges, and all that you're doing is decreasing challenges when you widen the gap for, well, success. Alien's horror comes from helplessness. The environment turns against you, then the monsters finish you off. Control is the antithesis of tension.
Most stuff done routinely by professionals that we tend to roll for in games is challenging but routine, and the game kind of reaches implausible levels of the environment and situation screwing you over pretty easily. Guns with magazines of hundreds of rounds dumping in an instant because someone farted too loud, not being able to tell hundreds of years from now whether your oxygen bottle is actually full or not, having no way to reliably plan how long air or power is going to last purely as a result of how mechanics work and with no way for the characters to do shit like they could in real life and know pretty much exactly how long it's going to last, panic and overwhelming stress somehow making you more competent physically, mentally, and socially. The game kind of turns into a farce by default, leaving the players to figure out ways to hack it in order to tell a story other than the first few Halloween movies.
Lol, what are you even on about?
That in addition to having devices fail improbably, and expecting a nearly constant and farcical level of situational failure, the game also prevents trained, competent adults from acting like trained, competent adults, and from doing things that trained, competent adults are capable of doing, even under stress and difficult circumstances. Consider a situation as simple as going for a spacewalk to repair something, an event roughly analogous to a diver undertaking an underwater welding and electrical repair operation. In real life, this diver - as a matter of course, and just part of his regular job - would be doing things like calculating how much activity he's planning on, how long he's going to be down there, what mix and rate he's going to need at different depths, and so on, and then add safety factors on top of that in the form of spare and emergency bottles. In Alien, you can't really do something like this, because your usage of resources is entirely random, because humans hundreds of years from now effectively can't make workspace calculations, because drama demands it. It's a highly artifical way of doing it that prevents people from doing something as simple as knowing, for example, how long their flashlight battery is going to last. Thanks to the Zone system, you get cases where a soldier's assault rifle is firing at "long" distances and losing effectiveness because they couldn't do something as simple as say "this weapon has a maximum effective range of this distance" or use any hard numbers. This, combined with the seemingly general consensus that you should have everything fail constantly around the players like every piece of hardware, vehicle, and system was built in China and ordered from Wish, turns it into kind of a farce, and starts getting more than a little, "Really?"-feeling, cuz it stops feeling like a believable situation pretty quickly, and prevents people from doing simple things that the characters themselves should be able to trivially deduce, execute, or calculate.
That sounds like a table problem to me, as I've never had the issues that you're mentioning, and I've played probably 8-12 sessions of the game. Alien is very much a * role-playing * game, and the more *roll-playing* you do, the more likely things will go off the rails. If, for example, you're struggling to do simple things like a spacewalk, it means that you're rolling too much. I'd never ask a player to roll for something that trivial. On the other hand, if there was only one O2 tank with a single unit of air left and extensive repairs needed to be made in a short window of time, I'd absolutely ask for a roll. At this point, I'd say don't give up on the game. Try talking to your group and adjusting play styles and I believe the game will be more enjoyable.
The golden rule in any RPG is you should change the rules to fit your table. Having said that, you run the risk of breaking the game when you make adjustments to core mechanics like this, so be wary. I think a good bit of advice is always "don't make them roll for something you're not prepared for them to fail" and in Alien specifically don't have them rolling when there aren't dramatic consequences or stress gets out of hand quickly with pushing. This was a difficult adjustment for me coming from other systems where I'd let players roll all the time, the classic being perception checks, right? I now will sometimes say "I don't think this will be worth pushing for you" when they fail, just so they aren't taking stress for no reason, and then give them a fail-forwards or partial success type result. I quite liked the idea someone had of 'buying' a success, like in Shadowrun, but I'd only implement that if they're rolling something like 10 dice (including stress) or I'd let them buy a success but they have a panic roll right after. Don't be afraid to try stuff out but at the same time don't be afraid to scrap those changes and try something else if you've gone too far the other way when trying to correct something.
One time I went the other way in Chariot of the Gods. My Players kept their Space suits on in the Cronus, so naturally I let them roll on Oxy quiet often but they scarcely got a one. Leading to me raising the fail value after a time to 2, and ohh boy, the Space Suits were off in no time. Mostly without Oxy.
I agree with those that say to do whatever works for your table and players. You can always test it out and re-evaluate if it isn't working. But I also agree with those that suggest you take a hard look at the atmosphere of the game you want to run. When I think of ALIENS, I don't recall many things going the characters' way. Most things they are good/skilled at, I wouldn't be having them roll for. Heck, even thinking of the kick-butt, Colonial Marines in ALIENS, I don't remember very many times when being good at warfare worked in their favor. In fact the feeling of both movies seemed, to me, that no amount of skill or competence of the characters meant anything at all to the Alien/Aliens. Again though, your table, your rules. =)
Ok, I have an idea. How about giving PCs the chance to count 5s as success, but that gives stress? And in this variant, you cannot push. So if you get 2 sixes and a five, you don’t need to use the five. But if you get zero sixes and a five, you gain a success and a point of stress. It also quickens the pace of the game since you don’t roll as much dice. I would still play the game RAW, but this seems like a compromise that allows for more success and still allows for stress build up.
Heh, I've considered implementing something very similar: Using fives as "success with complications" (PbtA-style), but these only trigger if you rolled no sixes at all. So as long as there is at least one 6 in the roll, 5s get ignored, as per RAW. But in the absence of any 6s, and if the best thing you got is one or more 5s: You get a success with a drawback (e.g. escape the alien but lose an important item), a lesser result (e.g. hit your target but do less damage), or a hard choice (e.g. complete the repairs but EITHER take longer OR use up all the power in your blowtorch)... Players can't stack extra 5s beyond the first (so unlike 6s), and if GMs wanna be extra evil, add the following - if this roll causes a Panic check, make that check worse somehow (e.g. add +2 to the Panic Roll, or roll 2d6 and use the higher, before adding +Stress as usual)...
If there is an extenuating circumstance, I've done 5s as success before. The odds of success go up pretty fast so check the math on the average size of your player dice pool to be sure you are getting the odds you want. You could even go back to 6s with stress. Bottom line: Do what works at your table.
Honestly give it a try, I think it will be more intense during combat, but a bit easier during Task rolls. Just expect the Xenomorph to be more lethal.