Things I’ll miss about running a Firefly/Serenity role playing game

Josh
Tuesday
1:46 pm

A few weeks ago, my players and I ran what will likely be our last Firefly/Serenity session. It ended mid-episode, at a fairly climactic point, which is poetic justice, considering how the series left off.

We’re currently in the process of learning Shadowrun. While I’m excited to try a darker, grittier game that has an established pile of material a mile high (which makes my life easier), I’ve questioned my decision to drop Firefly more than once.

A few of the things I’ll miss most:

The latitude to completely make shit up

"I don't know — just roll 'em all."

The ruleset to MWP’s Serenity RPG is less complicated than checkers. The system was designed for fast gameplay, but I didn’t really appreciate that until I started getting into the Shadowrun system, which has a rule for everything (not only do the players have to purchase their “cell phone” equivalent, they have to buy a freaking Operating System!).

Of course, the other side of the coin is that my Serenity game had more house rules than a strip club. How does combat work according to the ruleset? Good luck figuring that out. Oh, and if I interpret the rules correctly, it doesn’t appear that a character can ever really die, as long as they’re wearing armor. Once you drop the fear of losing a character, the game dynamic totally changes.

That said, the lack of rules gave us the ability to make up rules and not feel bad about it. It was much more the telling of a tale, and much less like doing taxes.

Knowing every niche of the universe

I’ve followed every twist and turn of the crew of Serenity since before they made the casting announcements, and the show’s page was a “coming soon” blip. I rooted for the show since I saw Mal get thrown through a holographic window on opening night, and I was there for the midnight screening of the movie.

I also started FireflyRPG.com a few years ago, and created the gold standard for a map of the ‘verse, until QMx asked for my help to be on a team to design the “canon” map (which is much better than mine, I might add).

So, yeah, I’m kind of a nut about the Firefly setting. I could recite most likely any line from scratch and remember every setting. I’ll miss having an answer ready when a player has a question.

The language

That unique Whedon patois of Western and sci-fi was one of the most captivating things about the series. And it was tough to pull off, too. It wasn’t just bad grammar — it was, at times, an artificial stilting of the language, mixed in with clipped verbs and understatement.

Lines like, “Wash, we’ve got some local color happening. Your grand entrance would not go amiss right now” or “See, morbid and creepifying, I got no problem with, long as she does it quiet-like,” just don’t have the same ring in Cyberpunk.

Being part of a small, dedicated community

The player base for the Serenity RPG isn’t gigantic, but as with any niche, it’s very active and very vocal. I still get the occasional bit of fan mail at FireflyRPG.com, and the rare-but-still-present paypal donation keep the lights on and bandwidth bills paid. Every couple weeks, I get someone who wants to add new material, too.

The source files for the site were lost to the sands of time, though; it needs a proper redesign in straight HTML in order to get new content up — so, as it stands now, it’s a standing resource for players who still want to use it.

The music

My laptop’s hard drive is littered with more than a hundred tracks, split into emotional groupings based on where the characters would be at any point. I had twangy slide guitar for rim worlds, celtic themes for love interests, minor strings for Alliance troubles, good vamps for caper music and eerie thumps, just in case of reaver trouble. I’ve already started compiling synth and grittier techno for Shadowrun, but I’m going to miss the warmth of a good guitar strum.

The sense of family

What the Serenity RPG was missing in rules, the setting made up for with heart. As you watch the series or movie, the ties of this “dysfunctional family in space” are what keep the characters compelling.

And thankfully, my players got that. In fact, they adored it. There were short one-shot sessions I had planned that turned into three-episode arcs because the characters would spend half an hour just sitting around their table in the galley talking, or consoling one another, or cooking. Their ability to step into their characters is the envy of any GM.

I don’t know what it’s like to GM a session where the players don’t have a home to return to (even if that home sniffs the air, and doesn’t kiss the ground). I don’t know what it’ll be like to have a group of characters that are “in it for the money,” and not other reasons.

Time will tell if Shadowrun will stick among my players. The Firefly ‘verse is a compelling place, and maybe I didn’t realize how much it suited my storytelling style or my players’ desire to forge relationships with each other and tell a tale instead of flip through rule books.