When I walked into my local geek-shop to finally pick up a copy of SR4, I was astounded to discover a new book: Serenity RPG.
Now, recently i've become thoughtfull as to how a good system could work to do spaceships and guns and such, Battletech does the spaceship combat wonderfully; but sucked royally at the RP part of it. Shadowrun does H2H okay, as well as incorperating guns; but the vehcile combat gets fuzzy if you do anything other than drive a car down the road. the other systems i've tryed all had their short falls; Star wars had a lot of difficulty putting any sort of space combat into the D20 ruleset; and as far as I could tell everyone would be better off using swords rather than guns for combat as far as the rules are set up (and I have problems with a knife winning in a gun-fight)
after watching the Movie Serenity, I was re-kindeled with this desire to find a good RP system for spaceships. and, they kindly made one for me. It's not D20, it's not D10. It's an independant system, really simple (but not so much as D20) it's got adjustable power levels, so you can run a simple, complex, or heroic level campaign, it's got a good space-ship creation enginge in it, It's got a well rounded PC creation system (skill and attribute based, much like SR) and to top it all off; it's got a couple of pages in the back that'll teach you how to swear in Chinese. (I spent more time on thoes pages than any other LOL)
Basics: each attribute gets one Die.
D2 if you suck at it.
D6 if you are decent.
D8 if you are better than average, etc.
topping out with the D12; for the truely godlike.
same thing for skills;
when you try to do something you roll bouth the dice; and add up the total.
(hit someone with a sword; you use your Strenth D6; and sword skill D4, and add them together.
then they roll their Quickness and Dodge skills; add them together, and if they are quicker; then they get to dodge. if you are quicker; you hit, and roll for dammage. if they have armor; you subtract the amount of armor from the dammage (typically one or two points)
you can adjust the target numbers by who's doing what; full attack, defencive attack, or full defence.
(sound familiar)?
basicly; it's like shadowrun, but instead of counting hits and rolling 40 dice; you just add two dice together.
it's a well ballanced system (from what I can tell) I plan on rolling up a couple of test PC's and ships, and putting it through a test run next week or so. I'll let ya'll know how it goes from there.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
