{"id":717,"date":"2004-06-29T11:53:30","date_gmt":"2004-06-29T11:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/random-average.com\/?p=717"},"modified":"2004-06-29T11:53:30","modified_gmt":"2004-06-29T11:53:30","slug":"unknown-armies-meets-firefly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/2004\/06\/unknown-armies-meets-firefly\/","title":{"rendered":"Unknown Armies meets Firefly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend, I had a chance to play-test a Firefly game session using a stripped-down version of Unknown Armies 2nd edition. (Details on chargen are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fireflywiki.org\/Firefly\/FireflyGaming\">over here<\/a>, but basically I just stripped magic out entirely and used the street-level campaign.)<br \/>\nAnyway, the game went reasonably well (though, damnably, we didn&#8217;t get a chance to finish up what should have been a one-shot session, due to interruptions) and the system seemed to work pretty well.  There are, however a few tweaks I would make (or have already made) to the chargen.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>More skill points.<\/b>  Using the &#8216;street level&#8217; points for stats seemed to give scores that felt realistic and accurate for the characters (both those from the show that I was using to &#8216;calibrate&#8217; the system and those that the players made up &#8212; however, using the street-levels for available skill points meant there just weren&#8217;t enough to go around and really flesh out the characters.  We were using 15 bonus skill points &#8212; I think that in the future, I&#8217;m going to go with the same number of Stat Points, but change the &#8216;extra&#8217; skill points to somewhere around 70 to 100.  (Basically, I think the characters we see in <i>Firefly<\/i> have Stats that fit Street-level, but I don&#8217;t generally feel like I&#8217;m doing justice to their skills.\n<li><b>Passions can be invoked multiple times in a session instead of once-per-passion.<\/b> This is the thing that will let a player get those cinematic moments when they need them &#8212; it also reemphasizes the Firefly conceit that a person is more effective when they really <i>care<\/i>.  Mal&#8217;s a decent shot with a pistol, but when you&#8217;ve betrayed him and you&#8217;re threatening one of his crew, at <i>that<\/i> moment he can put a bullet in your brain from twenty feet away while at a brisk walk, without aiming.  Cool.\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m also pondering using Conflict- instead of task-resolution.  Rather than rolling for each little task in the middle of combat or major conflict, I&#8217;d move to a Sorcerer\/Fate type of resolution where a roll represents a short-ish series of related actions.  Rewrites to optional skills like Fast Draw might be necessary, but it would still probably be quite viable.<br \/>\nWe&#8217;ll see.  I&#8217;ve been wanting to mess around with this system for Firefly for awhile now and I was glad to give it a whirl&#8230; I think it offers a lot of features that emphasize the parts of the show and characters that deserve emphasis &#8212; it&#8217;s not perfect by any means, but there&#8217;s some really good stuff there.<br \/>\nThat said, I&#8217;m looking forward to a chance to try out Dust Devils in the &#8216;verse as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend, I had a chance to play-test a Firefly game session using a stripped-down version of Unknown Armies 2nd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}