Serenity for d20?

[HeapThaumaturgist]

If I were to do d20 Serenity, I'd go with d20Modern/Future and just crank the MDT down to either 10 or 10+Con Mod.

Seemed like every second episode or something one of the main characters would get shot and be "OMG Dying!!!" and then they'd patch them up real real good and they'd be ready to rock. Kaylee, Shepherd, Mal ... think it was only 10 episodes or something, right? And there weren't many gunfights. So you make it bang-bang = dangerous, but not LETHAL (I.E. not huge damage, just people dropping).

--fje

 

[Felon]

*It's not meant to be hard sci-fi any more than Gunsmoke was intended to be a realistic depiction of the Old West. So enough with the 'Wow. Lame' commentary, ok? Relax and enjoy the 'verse.

Once it stops being a series and starts being an RPG, then you no longer have the luxury of just taking it easy and avoiding answering the obvious questions (even in a "Gunsmoke" RPG). If you have a character playing an engineer, he's probably going to want to have some idea of how a spaceship works. If you have characters trying to pull off get-rich-quick schemes, they're probably going to want to know something a ting or two about the economics system.

Ans like I said, it's lame for non-scientific reasons as well.

IInterplanetary travel is still possible, but time consuming meaning that most people are essentially bound to their planet or moon of origin, except for those that can afford to travel. Adding in hyperspace or FTL cheapens the feeling of the series which is about beating around the 'verse in an aging transport ship and dodging the law. The setting is a gritty wild west kind of solar system. With podunk towns and isolated people making due on the rough fringes. Add FTL or other super-high tech stuff and you lose that. People can get around willy-nilly, why would anyone move out to the edge, and how would that be difficult if you could just hop on the next transport ship to the Core with little or no wait time.

What are you talking about? Space is a BIG place. Are you familiar with the term "light-year"? FTL capability hardly equates to instantaneous travels. It's pretty much a baseline that needs to be met for a space opera to be at all practical (unless you come up with some silly contrivance where dozens of terraformable worlds are jammed into a single solar system). You can still have week and month-long trips. In fact, Voyager had FTL and they were still stuck decades away from known space.

If the Firefly 'verse doesn't have start-of-art, flashy FTL tech, then so be it. It's canon. You don't screw with canon.

Well, the point I was initially making was that we had no way of knowing how fast ships travelled in Firefly--other than the simple fact they had to be flying at a pretty "flashy" speeds to manage interplanetary travel at all.

 

[Felon]

If I were to do d20 Serenity, I'd go with d20Modern/Future and just crank the MDT down to either 10 or 10+Con Mod. Seemed like every second episode or something one of the main characters would get shot and be "OMG Dying!!!" and then they'd patch them up real real good and they'd be ready to rock. Kaylee, Shepherd, Mal ...

I'm not understanding why you think D20M's Con-based MDT needs to be cranked down at all, even by your own words. There were a few nasty wounds that looked like failed MDT saves, but not that many.

think it was only 10 episodes or something, right? And there weren't many gunfights. So you make it bang-bang = dangerous, but not LETHAL (I.E. not huge damage, just people dropping).

I don't know what you mean by "many", but there was one or two each episode. Characters suffered a lot of flesh wounds and Simon would patch them up later. Indeed, having watched the entire series specifically to see how they correllate to D20M, I'd say most of Firefly's fight scenes played out as perfect examples of a hit-point-based system.

 

[Ranger REG]

Well, the point I was initially making was that we had no way of knowing how fast ships travelled in Firefly--other than the simple fact they had to be flying at a pretty "flashy" speeds to manage interplanetary travel at all.

True. We don't have that many information due to the small number of episodes plus one feature film, just a small portion. The kind you give to newbie gamers at the start of a small campaign.

Hope Whedon can provide more in the future.

 

[ecliptic]

I think people are missing key points of the Firefly verse. The solar system is getting smaller and smaller for the rebels as the government is expanding farther and farther. So the rebels are caught between th ever expanding government and the black. There is no where else to run. FTL drives completely eliminate this aspect.

 

[Felon]

I think people are missing key points of the Firefly verse. The solar system is getting smaller and smaller for the rebels as the government is expanding farther and farther. So the rebels are caught between th ever expanding government and the black. There is no where else to run.

The key point of Firefly is that outer space provides a savage frontier that's the futuristic equivalent of the wild west. As Mal says himself, no matter how far out the Alliance reach extends, free spirits like him can keep on moving. But there is a catch....

FTL drives completely eliminate this aspect.

Nope. First off, you're making the same mistake others before you have made; interpreting "FTL travel" to mean the same thing as "instantaneous travel". Perhaps you lot should remember this little ditty from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life":

"The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide.
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's bugger all down here on Earth."

Got it?

Second, even with instantaneous travel, you'd still need somewhere to go, wouldn't you? With the Independence crushed, all new planets are terraformed and colonized by the Alliance. The Alliance probably could clamp down any newly colonized planets if they were willing to slow their pace down and incorporate new worlds into a zone of control. But, as stated in the pilot, the Alliance colonizes at a faster rate than they can establish outposts. They terraform some hellhole enough to make it marginally inhabitable, chuck some colonists on it, and then leave them to fend for themselves. After all, how much trouble can a bunch of tuber farmers make? They'll be hard-pressed to survive, much less start another rebellion.

Not so great for the colonists, but it creates a vast playground for outlaws.

 

[Johnny Angel]

To many science fiction fans FTL is lame. It's absurd, and it requires a lot of technobabble to explain away how we're just going to conveniently break the laws of physics. This is not an unreasonable position, though I prefer to have FTL as part of a setting.

Furthermore, it is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that you could find a solar system just loaded with terraformable moons. It would be a hell of a coincidence, but the idea is not physically and logically absurd in the way that FTL travel is. It could happen, although I too find it harder to buy than FTL. That's because we've been trained by sci-fi to take FTL for granted.

 

[Agemegos]

Furthermore, it is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that you could find a solar system just loaded with terraformable moons. It would be a hell of a coincidence, but the idea is not physically and logically absurd in the way that FTL travel is.

That depends on how much you think about the effects of tides and orbital resonances on rotational periods. Between tidal kneading of moons in close orbits around their primaries, and extremely long days for moons in more distant orbits (and both for those in orbits in between) it is very hard to specify a realistic habitable moon. Dozens in the one solar system is beyond coincidence.

If you want people travelling among scores of inhabited in less than lifetimes you just have to bite the bullet and admit that you are not writing admantine SF. Like you I would prefer that writers posit FTL travel than claim a spurious plausibility for unrealistic celestial mechanics and planetology.

What was it that Aristotle said about probable impossibilities and improbable possibilities?

 

[Johnny Angel]

"Hundreds of moons" -- if we're to assume they mean hundreds of terraformable moons, does boggle the imagination. I mean, our own planets have moons that are barely more than asteroids. How much gravity does it take to be able to hold an atmosphere? Also, those rim worlds appear to be getting an awful lot of sunlight.

The science is definitely not hard core -- after all, in the movie we see ships engaged in demolition derby combat. At those speeds, anyone inside those ships should be reduced to a gory smear along the walls. Nor are they really all that low tech -- gravity generation, which is clearly widely available, seems pretty whiz bang to me. There are also somewhat effective energy weapons and nano techniques in medicine. But they bit the bullet and accepted what they had to do to make a spread-out setting without FTL. It's a hell of a coincidence, but not impossible.

 

[MavrickWeirdo]

I actually read the science explanation in the Serenity RPG book and while it may not be "perfect" it has fewer holes than most SF I've seen or heard.

The "Major Scientific Breakthrough" which makes things possible is the discovery of

"The Unified Field Theory"

(short explanation: planets follow Newton/Einstein laws of motion,
sub-atomic particals follow laws of quantum physics,
the 2 sets of laws don't line up;
if you can get the 2 sets of laws to fit together you have "The Unified Field Theory")

The principals of the UFT (in their universe) allow them to make artificial gravity

Artificial gravity is used for:

Life support on ship (Artificial gravity, "Impact Stablizers")
Pulse Thrusters (non-rocket propulsion, not FTL but more efficient than traditional thrusters)
Fusion Generators (take a few hydogen atoms put them in an artificial gravity field as strong as a sun and fusion happens)
Teraforming (increasing a moons gravity to hold in atmosphere)