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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Green Adam" data-source="post: 4609442" data-attributes="member: 50821">Hmmm...I disagree with several of these points. Such as...  Why? You have characters, they have skills and they use weapons and equipment to fight enemies and achieve a goal. Sounds like gaming 101 to me.  That's because Serenity/Firefly was based on Traveller. Joss Whedon has stated a number of times that he played Traveller, the SciFi/Space setting uses projectile firearms, the Reavers are inspired by the Reavers of Traveller (an entire sector of space is called Reaver's Deep) and in the first or second episode the ship's pilot actually says, "Hold on Travelers!" I've used that very same game to run stuff like Star Wars, Farscape, B5, Battlestar Galactica and more hard sf fare like Ringworld, Heinlein's stuff and much more. Most of my campaigns are a blend of all of these.  I'm not sure I understand. What problems are you referring to? Personally my players and I find it much easier to relate to people talking on cell phones, shooting rifles and driving cars then we do to milling grain and building castle walls. Need to know what a hotel room looks like and how much it is, easy. We've all been there. Now when was the last time you experienced the squalor of an 11th century peasant village?  This may be an effect of the game you're playing more then the genre but I personally haven't experienced this. Its as easy to play a skill based character in a modern setting as it is in any setting. You figure out what you want to do, what skill fits the bill and you roll. You can't be sure Craft (Pharmaceutical) is going to be useful in a modern or sf game any more then you can Craft (Blacksmithing) in a fantasy game. Sometimes its useful, sometimes its not. If an alien virus breaks out and you have it, well you just saved the day potentially.  Again I don't understand this logic (to quote a favorite Scifi character). My character is a person. He has personal skills like shoot stuff, Knowledge (Interstellar Politics) and Craft (Rayguns). He gets in to a starfighter. Now he uses a skill called Starship Piloting and Starship Weaponry (Ship Rayguns) or something similar. If you don't find it hard to play a character on horseback in D&D, a guy in a Shuttlecraft is no big deal.  In my last Traveller game, at least two people other then the pilot/vehicle driver could drive the vehicle. The pilot had a 5 in his skill and the other two PCs had 3 and 2 I think. No rules more unique or special then Psionics, Horseback, Mass Combat, Feats and a dozen other things in D&D.  And in the end I have to wonder if its the system. D20 Modern/Future is not the best at portraying SciFi. Traveller, Star Wars (D6), Star Trek (FASA/Last Unicorn), the awesome new StarBlazer Adventures by Cubicle 7, the modified and updated online rules for Star Frontiers and many, many more are much better. For your above example, Mekton II or Z would've been a much better choice. I've been gaming over 30 years and I play SciFi about 85% of the time. The rest is taken up by Superheroes (which is actually what got me into RPGs even though my first game was D&D Red Box) with the occaisonal smattering of Fantasy. And by Fantasy I mean Faery's Tale Deluxe, Ars Magica or a number of other games. I rarely play and hardly run D&D. AD</blockquote>

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