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.