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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 3309934" data-attributes="member: 2810">Sometimes a game gets so flexible it stops being a useful collection of rules.  More specifically, in Serenity most everything is a stat die plus a skill die.  For example, if your novice engineer wants to figure out what's wrong with the engine, you might tell him its to roll Intelligence + Mechanical Engineering and its 'Average' difficulty.  So he rolls a d6 (his Intelligence score) + a d4 (he's a noob) and has to get a '7' or better.The problem is, there are no fixed skill rolls.  You could just as easily have him roll Perception + Mech Eng.  And the base skills top out at a d6 -- if you want more, you have to take a sub-skill, which also aren't enumerated very well.   This becomes a pain for the GM (I think) for a couple reasons.  First, for harder tasks, if the GM doesn't allow the check to use a sub-skill, the chances for sucess will go down, and the player might feel compelled to argue his case that the subskill really does apply. This gets old and slows things down.  Secondly, it forces the GM to have to remember a lot more about the characters when designing the adventure, or especially when winging things.  Keeping track of who is good at what when there are dozens of subskills but characters will have only a fraction is a pain.  (Compare this to D20, where most DMs could make up a 'climb' check on the spot and have a pretty good idea of how hard it would be for any character in the party to succeed.)Third, it has the unintended side effect (I think) of emphasizing stats over skills.  An engineer with a d12 Int and a d4 Mech. Eng will have (over the course of the game) better chances of success than one with a d6 Int, d6 Mech Eng, and a few d10s in subskills, simply because the stat dice aren't capped the way the base skill dice are, and a stat die will always get used whereas a sub-skill die might not come up at all.  Consistency is also a bear, as you have to (or should, anyway) remember what combinations were used in what situations, otherwise the same task might be easy one session, and impossible the next.It's too bad.  On paper it looks good.  You could have different characters approaching the same dilemma with different tactics depending on their strengths.  The 'perceptive' engineer might listen to the ship to 'hear' what she's saying, whereas the 'smart' engineer would rely on diagnostics, etc.  In practice, it just doesn't work that well IME.  A shorter and better defined list of subskills would go a long way to alleviating some of that.</blockquote>

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