So I have thoughts. More than I’m typing up here, but these are top of mind.
- Do we keep playing, and if so, do we continue with this system.
- I would like to see how the story-as-it-stands goes, but at the same time I’m not sure that’s a hill I want to die on for the sake of completion.
- If we pursue that, but don’t go with S&V, Impulse Drive trods almost exactly the same territory, and is a PBTA game that quite a few folks seem to like - people who TEND to like and play the same stuff we do (Rich Rogers, for example, loves it, and comes at it alongside year-long Masks games). Many of the playbooks and assumptions run parallel to S&V, as does the basic idea of ship-as-another-character.
- I don’t LOVE Impulse Drive at first glance, but it useful if we want to use a different game but retain the same basic tone. And also my first-glances are NOT a good indicator - I didn’t like Masks at first glance either - I’m not great at assimilating a game on a single read-through; I didn’t get Masks until I listened to the AP with the Young Justice podcast people.
- (By contrast to Impulse Drive, The Veil is supposed to be an amazing fresh PBTA experience, by all accounts, but is much more about exploration of transhumanism cyberpunk, so it’s not aimed at the same story stuff as the game we’ve got going, at all.)
- (Or we go super-light with something like Lasers and Feelings (Hell, reskin it to Scum and Villainy), but that wouldn’t likely get us a lot of mileage.)
I (privately, on the backend) ran into some of these same system-selection problems when we were doing the Star Wars game - I never really hit on a sci-fi system I loved. Even the pbta hack we played for awhile stayed largely planetside because there was no ship stuff, or what was there made me twitch.
- Do something else?
- I have thoughts on that, but that’s for another time.