My Serenity campaign is over

[Cam Banks]

Thanks for the feedback, Merric!

You're not alone in having issues with the system in the way you describe, and in fact that was one of the chief design issues I wanted to resolve when I overhauled Cortex for SMALLVILLE and LEVERAGE this year. I wanted competent characters to have a better chance of doing well, I wanted more potency with Plot Points, and I wanted to do away with fixed target numbers that seemed pitched too high or too out of reach for most characters.

Once LEVERAGE is out, I'm considering developing an unofficial SERENITY conversion, or at the very least providing some obvious nods to it in a CORTEX PLUS generic book later this year or early next year. I think the caper/heist approach of LEvERAGE would work well with Firefly-type games and fits more closely to my own vision of how those sorts of campaigns should run.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[MerricB]

Thanks for the feedback, Merric!

Good luck with your projects, Cam!

As I've mentioned before, I was looking at the Serenity RPG shortly after I picked up the new Doctor Who RPG, and they tracked very closely in how characters looked, except that Dr Who was 2d6+Attribute+Skill for resolution (with Att and Skill being 1-6).

Meanwhile, Doctor Who's Story Points would change the level of success - you could have Major, Normal or Minor Failures or successes, and each SP you spent would change it one band - to a maximum of "Minor Success" if you had failed the check. You also had a limited number of SPs per session, with the number was based on how good your character was (fewer the better you were). So, that added some resource management to it, whilst characters had a much better idea of how effective SPs were.

Alas, I still haven't gotten to try the game yet. I have a bunch of heretics who don't like Doctor Who for friends!

I liked the Serenity system when I first read it, but play convinced me that it had issues, unfortunately. The character generation system inspired my players to come up with some great personalities, but we never quite worked out what the proper numbers were for skill checks. So, a lot of the time I ran it diceless, or rolled dice only to look good.

Cheers!