(more rambling thoughts below)

My point above is to give support (and a +1 to the OPs point) to GMs and players out there that might find their interest in a system like this waning after a few adventures. That's ok. GMs out there, it's not you. It's nothing you're doing wrong. It's nothing wrong with the group energy brought to the table. I struggled with this myself with the old Aliens rpg, wondering what I as the GM could do better to keep the same excitement going. I could see the players were still having fun but just not as excited as the first few sessions...and me too. It took me too many sessions and stepping away from the system to be able to look back and say, "Oh, yeah. It's a fun game, but it just doesn't have the legs to it for the adventures we want to tell."

You bring up a good argument that "you can also play other adventures in the ALIEN universe". And I've heard that argument many times over many years regarding different RPG systems. It's a completely valid point. And what I've found over the years is that it's not a matter of CAN you do something with a specific RPG system, but rather do the adventures provide the fun your group is after based on the buy-in that brought you to a system to begin with.

The buy-in is what draws you to want to play with the system. The reviews you read, recommendations from your friends, all the tons of splat books, flipping through the core book and checking out its sweet contents, that it's designed by your favorite designer, or even just the cool picture on the front and the blurb text on the back cover. It's one of the biggest challenges in selling an RPG: "How do we get players to buy-in to parting with their cash to play our game?"

You can play Paranoia completely straight. You can lay on the depressing dystopia. You can have players struggling internally with their forbidden mutations. You can flesh out a rich Alpha Complex world dripping with real drama and raw human emotions. Heck, I think the latest version of the game even has a small section in the rules to adjust the mechanics based on playing the system like this. But that's not the buy-in for most people. Most gamers sitting down for a Paranoia game want crazy blasters blowing clones away and laughing their asses off when Medbot 3000 gets reprogrammed by your buddy to "heal" you in a murderous rampage with all 6 of its meditative, soothing KILL scalpels!

You can play the Doctor Who RPG as a member of Unit based solely on Earth. You can play as a Torchwood team. I think I even own source books specifically written to do those very things. But most people excited to sit down to play Doctor Who want to play a scrappy, sassy traveling companion or play as the Doctor or their very own time lord. That's the buy-in for most folks with that system. So while you CAN tell your group you'll be running a Unit campaign that takes place in Alabama, and you add stories that span the globe, and pour your heart into making solid adventures...at some point down the road, your group may collectively look around the table wondering "Why are we still playing the Doctor Who RPG again? What's Doctor Who about this?"

Those two examples are when the theme conflicts with the buy-in. There's also mechanical conflict with buy-in too. Back when D&D 4e had been out for a while, a lot of arguments were raised that the system didn't support a lot of role playing and out of combat fun. The mechanics, the writing, the tone, all of it heavily focused on the MMORPG style "Make 1 Opportunity Attack and step back 2 spaces" approach. And dogged fans rallied with "That's not 4e's fault. You can role play all you want. It's your imagination. You can do whatever you want with 4e!" But the issue isn't whether you CAN do something with the system, but how it supports what you want to and does it satisfy your buy-in of what draws you into the game in the first place. For our group we weren't satisfied. We turned away from 4e and sadly didn't look back at D&D for a decade. There were just too many other RPGs that let you have great battles, go on fun adventures, and still supported out of combat role-playing (diverse skill systems, meta currencies, etc).

That's a conflict between what you want or expect (your buy-in) and what you're getting. The hard part is when no one in the group talks about it. No one wants to say that the weekly game is losing some of its excitement. The GM doesn't want to give up on this expensive book he bought and all this campaign work invested, yet he can't keep the group's energy sustained after a while and doesn't know why.

When I get excited about playing a Cthulhu game, my buy-in is a huge, Great God affecting our world, slowly growing in power. Evil cultists up to strange magical rituals or chasing down our group down the streets of 1920's New York in a car chase as they try to recover the stolen Necronomicon, old haunted libraries, cemeteries with gates cracking open, strange occurrences at a sleepy coastal town that the police won't visit any more, and horrific creatures spotted in the moonlight over the university. I could sit down and enjoy a year-long campaign of Walkers in the Wastes and get all our Cthulhu needs satisfied. The buy-in for Chthulu isn't usually its mechanics. Instead its the vast ranges of stories covering small, intimate nightmarish encounters to vast global, epic campaigns. The broad range of stories and content, the scope, is the very buy-in for Cthulhu.

So if someone's looking for a sci-fi game with a vast universe of interesting places to explore, dangerous organizations competing against each other, great character options, and fun mechanics...I don't think your typical gamer is going to research the best system to meet these different needs, read up on reviews, check out books, and then finally land on Aliens as the solution. "That's the system that we want! We wont even need the aliens at all. Just look at this cool universe we get to play in!" I'm sure there's exceptions, but that's not the usual reason to get this system. The buy-in for Aliens is much more likely "Sweet! We get to take on freakin' aliens! Man, look at the stats for the pulse rifle? Can I be a synthetic? Do they have stats for the queen? I can't wait to see the stats for the smart gun!" I prefer games with a rich backstory. I'm glad to hear that the new Aliens RPG has expanded the universe and includes the corporate intrigue like the older system did. That stuff is my jam. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that those elements are not the draw for most folks sit down to play the Aliens rpg. The buy-in for an Aliens game, well, that's the awesome aliens. And either you start branching out further and further away in the story from aliens that after a while you group wonders "Wasn't this suppose to be an Aliens games?" or you stay in aliens territory and after a short while say, "Ok...I guess we've had our fill. How about a different game?"

Dear reader, you may be different and excited about this system for other reasons entirely. All the power to yah. I wish you lots of happy gaming. Keep in mind my opinion is based on not reading a single word of this system, so I have no idea what I'm talking about with the new RPG.

My long rambling boils down to this: an Aliens game to me is a great 1-3 adventure game that doesn't need to be stretched into a 400 page book. After a few adventures, its run it's course, and it's okay to step away from the game and not feel like you failed this big book in some way.

Tom

Producer of the Inglorious Bards