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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Breaking Star Games" data-source="post: 9306813" data-attributes="member: 7042067">100% agree on Harm in BitD. Only one player out of something like a dozen I ran BitD and S&V really engaged with the "drive the character like a stolen car." Most are newer with mostly just D&D 5e under their belts but I did walk them through what the game expects. But Harm (more in BitD than S&V) is hugely punishing. Your PC likely has to spend all their share of the Coin and Downtime Activities just recovering from a single instance Level 2 Harm if they roll well. Harm is something I had to really avoid dishing out, thus I become a Complication generator. The temporary Harm (ends after Job is done) and cheaper recovery of it are good ideas included in S&V. And space opera genre lets you be more of a Big Damn Hero.All my players hated the doom track that is trauma. They wanted to avoid it like the plague (I was able to convince them to get one for the XP trigger though).Its a good tip for S&V. My play started breaking after about a dozen sessions. I ran a 2-session 6-hour Job. Of the 20ish rolls, I think 1 was a Miss, the few that were Mixed Success were all Resisted for super cheap. The math kind of breaks when PCs get too powerful and roll 5-6d on Action Rolls and 3-4d on Resistance rolls and just ignore Devil's Bargains that aren't softballs. Nobody was close to maxing out their Stress. Doesn't help that S&V suggested that resistance should negate Risky Consequences (2-step reduction) rather than reduce as the default - that is a BIG design issue.I think too many Special Abilities just being +1d for X situation isn't interesting design. And its even worse that is breaks the math pretty hard.My homebrew included gutting the XP system and just replacing with milestones (every 3 sessions you get a Special Ability and ship gets a level up). Action Ratings are ONLY increased if you do a Desperate Action Roll and you can have 1 XP training (reduced from 2) assuming your ship has the module. Resistance was also brought back to base 1-step reduction. The game is much nicer for my table when players are more incentivized to be Desperate, they get to stay in the Actor stance and the typical Action Roll is only 2-3d.Yeah, I can see the homebrew setting being small in scale for Space Opera. Compare to Mass Effect or Star Wars that leaves the entire Galaxy open to your disposal and it seems disappointing. I think its bigger sin is that its not all that good - kinda overly tropey and not doing something new like Doskvol has crazy ghosts, vampires and ghostbuster police. Its fine but I can see why a lot of people have asked and created Star Wars conversions for it. A big appeal of fantasy and space opera is wowing the players with a truly fantastical setting, which requires surprise. TBF, that is very hard to do because you are in some heavily saturated genres that have made planet destroying lasers cliche - in fact the current sci fi audience would probably ask why they didn't just accelerate a rock at light speed instead of an overly expensive, giant death weapon that like 20 starfighters can blow up.</blockquote>

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