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Jacob_Gallagher
2007-11-06, 12:36 PM
Hi, I just got this book, and so far everything is great- I especially love the simple way stats are handled. The issues I've run across are when I just can't seem to find things:

-Fuel consumption seems vague. Is it 100 hours of fuel to engage pulse drives, then more fuel is used for the total journey? According to that, the humble Firefly would use most of its fuel just to travel to another planet- that doesn't seem right.

-I can't seem to find ranges for shipboard cannons.

-How do I determine what is short, medium, and long range on a personal-scale firearm? I have the range increment, but can't figure out what multiple determines the others.

Thanks for the help!

shadowdemon_lord
2007-11-06, 01:31 PM
When playing Serenity my group just house ruled in parts of the d20 system, mainly for combat. (we adopted the grid used in d20, and copied over range increments). I just assumed short range=weapons range x1, medium=weapons range x2, and long range=weapons range x3. So if I had a gun that fired 20 feet, up to 20 feet would be short range, 40 feet would put me at the end of medium range, and 60 would put me at the end of long range. For things like fuel, why are you bothering? Their's a nice part of the rule book (not sure where) that tells you what monthly expenses for running a ship are. Just assume that if you keep making those payments whenever you land, you're refueled, have food for people, etc. If For some reason you have to fly none stop for extended periods of time, that could get dicey. You could pay extra when refueling and just say the extras in your cargo bay and assume you can refuel in space with the proper equipment. Anyway, firefly is about nitty gritty dealings with the high and low parts of society, not rules minuiatie.

Dairun Cates
2007-11-06, 01:34 PM
-I can't seem to find ranges for shipboard cannons.

I think the answer for most scenarios is "Yes". If you're in the atmosphere, then nothing's going to be too far away, and if you're in space, neither friction or gravity is going to stop you.

Jacob_Gallagher
2007-11-06, 02:13 PM
Well, the same could apply to missile weapons...

As for fuel, the reason is that I want to know how much fuel is being used to go from place to place- space is going to feature heavily in my campaign, so I'd like to know how much fuel is being used to move around- especially when the 100 tons of fuel just to fire the pulse engines is using 500 credits' worth of fuel alone.

Jacob_Gallagher
2007-11-06, 05:18 PM
Anyone else here familiar with the game?

Dairun Cates
2007-11-06, 08:03 PM
Anyone else here familiar with the game?

Oh, I'm completely familiar with it, I just don't have the weapon stats on hand. Still, I assume with ship weapons, they assumed that if you can see it, you can probably shoot at with reasonable accuracy with a ship that can bother with said cannons. It really becomes an issue of pilots and mechanics over strategic ranges, but if you want rules for it, I'd say make a range increment and stick with it.

Edit: You could always pick something like a pistol, and since the dimensions of space are bigger, just scale 1m squares to 1km square.

Yodaman23
2007-11-06, 08:09 PM
I love the game, the only problem I have with it is that there is little to do in space minus fly and the occasional very dangourous fight. Most of my action happens planet side with gun duels. They are fun.

Iku Rex
2007-11-06, 08:16 PM
You'll probably get better answers on the CortexSystemRPG.org forums (http://cortexsystemrpg.org/index.php?action=forum). Waves in the Black (http://wavesintheblack.aimoo.com/)is shutting down, but there are a lot of old posts you can search through.

Dairun Cates
2007-11-06, 08:18 PM
I love the game, the only problem I have with it is that there is little to do in space minus fly and the occasional very dangourous fight. Most of my action happens planet side with gun duels. They are fun.

Don't forget fighting stowaways ON the ship.

Jerthanis
2007-11-06, 11:36 PM
Don't forget fighting stowaways ON the ship.

If you're fighting stowaways, they're called Pirates.

I looked for concrete info on all the rule points you brought up, but to be honest, I couldn't find anything about them. I'm sure you would've found them eventually if they were in the book. The book isn't amazingly well edited, and there's going to be plenty of arbitration that's up to the GM. I'd say just houserule it to what sounds reasonable. There wasn't a hard rule that said players couldn't have grenades at character creation, just that they cost a lot, but I learned my lesson there after one session. Eventually you'll find a balance when it comes to fuel usage... just let your players know that you're still sort of experimenting with the hard and fast rules of fuel consumption, and have them just think that their old, rundown ship is being finicky with its fuel usage.

BananaPants
2007-11-13, 10:49 AM
I'm working on figuring out Serenity for a campaign, and it's quite fun.

I too find ships pretty hard to comprehend. We have a junker Firefly (using Hotaru's stats) and we want to add a weapon. The one page on ship weapons seems to be written vaguely at best.

What is needed to add a cannon or two to our ship? Is there a weight concern? Is there a clearer explanation of cost calculations someone can provide? How's a 0 damage gun supposed to work? Gaaah!

Thanks in advance for any help with this. I'm the party's engineer, trying to baby our ship.

nerulean
2007-11-13, 11:19 AM
There wasn't a hard rule that said players couldn't have grenades at character creation, just that they cost a lot, but I learned my lesson there after one session.

Hahaha. The old Star Wars d20 was even better. Every low level stormtrooper came equipped with free grenades as standard. Yum.

/derailment.

Totally Guy
2007-11-13, 12:22 PM
I was an evil pilot named Jasper. Initially I had trouble...

"There's a fight in the cargo bay!"
"I bring my gun!"
"I bring my medical supplies"
"I back up the captain"

"Jasper?"

"I'm flying the ship."

But after that it got better, I took "Things don't go smooth" as a complication, did mischievious things, and just let Karma catch up with me. It was great.

Now we're using serenity rules in a fantasy setting with similar complications/assets as those are the best parts of the character concepts.