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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kaffis" data-source="post: 4777507" data-attributes="member: 10305">My experience running a Serenity game was immediately after it came out, I haven't paid attention to the system recently.I found two things: it's easy for players to make a character that you have a hard time finding "stuff to do" for, without getting really repetitive, or that really just stands out as out-of-place in a group. One of my new-to-RPGs players rolled up a sort of animal-lover/horse trainer type when the rest of the crew was going for "mostly legitimate cargo runs." Short of making all their cargo cattle or horses, it was tough to play to her strengths.Likewise, the creation system allows for some very specialized niche-y things that players might be drawn to because it's cool to them, but which won't see a lot of playtime because they're super-nichey. The doctor who bought up whichever skill it was for creating medicines and poisons is an example, when there are no real rules for crafting OR poisons outside that skill's existence (i.e., no combat effects of poisoned weapons, no prices or examples of poisons or components...). I ended up handwaving a few things as "you buy X creds worth of medicinal components, and on the way to the next planet, you make a couple rolls to see if you make anything useful." The vaguaries that I ended up giving probably weren't very satisfying, and the economics of it were a headache for me, which leads me to my final complaint/warning:The game is pretty hollow, economically. For a game whose inspiration is constantly about the characters scraping an existence out of the universe, this was pretty disappointing. There weren't really any good bargaining guidelines, and there's not much to spend money on aside from ship maintenance, which is exorbitantly high compared to what else there is. As such, it's really hard to keep the characters feeling "poor" while still being able to maintain, or mostly maintain, a ship. If they've got money to keep the thing in the air, they've got the cash to buy food and whatever equipment they want, pretty much, or can save it in short order. It really relies on debt as a plot vehicle to keep the characters from being able to say "Okay, that's enough, I retire rather than keep the ship afloat" after a couple of successful jobs, and trying to calculate just how much a merchant crew can be allowed to make and haggle down/up to with their goods can feel like a full-time job itself. I guess my problem was that there was very little reference for economic stuff, and there's nothing analogous to the D&D wealth motivation of having cooler equipment to aspire to (for non-ship owners, at least. The owner has plenty of goals if they want to improve their ship, but a paid crew... not so much.)...</blockquote>

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