BESM Firefly Thoughts

[subplotkudzu]

Started re-watching Serenity today and came to the realization that if these PCs were built in BESM it would explain a lot. For those not in the know, BESM pegs the cost of skills to how useful and prominent they are in the setting - if your game is about a group of race car drivers who stumble into adventures where they get out through seduction and fisticuffs, the skills of Seduction, Drive and Unarmed Attack would cost a lot per level, but other skills like Occult, Bureaucracy and History would be dirt cheap - the reverse of what they would be in a 1920's investigative horror game.

In any event, Simon is able to be a brilliant doctor because the Medical skill really is secondary to the premise - sure, Simon is helpful and useful, but the crew survived without him before and could do so again. Book is able to have a score of unused tactical skills because his high Religion skill was also dirt cheap. Wash, on the other hand, gets hosed: Piloting skills would be very important to the premise of a 'western in a space ship', and his high skill there eats up a lot of his available points, which is why he doesn't seem to do much outside of flying the ship.

To me this points out some of the perils of the BESM system, and dovetails with what I saw in the Silver Age Sentinels playtest that originated the Firestorm Effect setting. We used the rules as writ (with the standard supers point costs for skills) to make PCs, and when the players saw that some skills (Languages, Medicine and Piloting respectively for Asha, Tom and Stephen) were cheap the players quickly bought them up to the maximum level. In play, those skills suddenly became important to the campaign because they were areas where the PCs were experts.

But because they were now very important to the setting they should have cost more - in which case the PCs would be worse at them, but might have bought other skills that were cheaper and made those more important. It's a chicken and egg thing, and I'd rather the system either have all skills cost the same amount or have their cost based on difficulty to learn rather than trying to gene-engineer an initial chicken that turns out to be a turkey.

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

I agree. The idea's clever but the out-working of the consequences makes it tempting for players to change the focus of their characters to emphasize the skills that they paid cheap for, but now want to get more mileage out of.

I think it's better to have the costs up front and balanced and let the play determine what's important and what's not.

[mneme]

I think that the BESM idea -- that certain skills should be more important to the setting, and that they should therefore have higher definition between their levels and have more of an impact -- is a good one in principle, but think that BESM fails to execute it well for the reasons you list; players will avoid things involving skills they're bad at, and flavor confrontations toward skills they're good at (it does work ok if most combat skills are 5s, but non-combat skills are 3-4, though). But to really implement this, you need to enforce the usefulness of the big skills and the comparative uselessness of the smaller ones, which BESM totally fails to do. What might work for that is to have the "bigger" skills allow you to slant the narrative toward those skills far more often; calling for a scene that requires exactly the skill you want to use; whereas the smaller skills would let you do that much less often or not at all.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure even that would do it. In my other BESM experience - the Palomino Mecha Space Western setting I had worked out the usefulness of the skills to the campaign setting prior to character creation. The players still managed to find things that fit the setting but not the skill point breakdown: ladegard built a tinkerer/gunsmith, Bec built a gambler and Dave an Indian warrior. The PCs were still differentiated - even designed around - their cheaper skills, but those skills hardly ever came into play due to the focus of the game. Instead of the lesser skills just being color they were focal points, and the campaign ended up with a feel of rule/character mismatch.

It doesn't help that ladegard has a fundamental disagreement with the system concerning the relative utility of skills - BESM sees them as secondary and almost unimportant while Ladegard's system instinct (which I am prone to agree with) see them as much more central. This means every one of his PCs has the maximum number of ranks (or close to) in Highly Skilled to get the points he 'needs' to kit his PC out with ranks in all the skills his PC should have experience with. (He's doing the same thing in Emirikol, taking a starting level in Rogue to get the initial skill points). I don't see it as being quite as important, but I can understand his reasoning - it's easier to visualize the character if you have the key skills written down in some form on the sheet, if only as a reminder.

Before you ask, no he's never voiced a problem with larger skill groups - he seems to be quite comfortable with his Revolution character having just the broad career of Costumed Adventurer and the focused career of Alien Artificial Life Form because that's all the system required. It's when there's a listed skill that having a point or two in it is needed to make sure the character sheet can back up the concept. I find that hard to argue with.

[mneme]

The trick would be to allow skills to be "promoted" into greater centrality and usefulness -- but in a way that rewarded the players for buying the more central skills, without punishing them for having flavor skills that were appropriate but (as specced) didn't come up as often.

Skills in BESM are a bit double-natured -- the first point does have a lot of utility -- both because some skills can differ between "skilled" and "unskilled" and because the first point of any skill comes with a free specialty which can give it double-value in many cases. But later points of skill are just a more cost-effective (unless you have a -lot- of skills, or the skills are very expensive) way of buying up the relevant attribute.

In general, -most- rpg systems tend to rate attributes higher than skills, but skill-itis is quite common among players, who will sometimes come up with crippled character designs that neglect attributes that would allow them to do the things their creators want them to do for skills that are only useful with reasonable levels of the appropriate attribute. One does wonder if BESM would be more accessible for such players if the tree-nature of the skill system were a little more explicit.