I see a lot of people talking about S&V, but very few people talking about having played it. Anyone?
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Here’s to series that I played in:
Stardancer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNuXiEYyM4isWCFlCmywChngKTaP5Gcx5
Persephone: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNuXiEYyM4is610_fOqxUxzMmv86-RUMV
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The second half of Friends at the Table’s Twilight Mirage season used S&V.
I’ve been intermittently playing S&V in the Star Wars universe and having fun with it. https://twitter.com/OldDogGames/status/1207101418936487937
Was there anything in particular you were curious about?
It hews pretty closely to Blades in the Dark core rules, which isn’t a bad thing imo. The softer healing rules and the addition of gambits gives it a slightly lighter tone - it’s easier to get those succeses. I found it hard to keep up with all the ship modules and systems and upgrade paths so I sort of gloss over that part a bit - if the PCs find a mechanic and have spare credits, I’m pretty liberal about letting them upgrade their ship within reason.
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I’ve been playing fortnightly for a few months. Have about 6 sessions of 5 hours each.
This is the first of the FitD games that my group was tempted by, though I bought Blades first (and was very sold on the system and narrative - I’d never seen any of the PbtA games prior to it, but my group were not sold on my description of BitD).
My group loved the XP rules and the narrative structure, and overall we will be moving toward games like this in future.
In terms of Scum and Villainy there’s a bit of a struggle for me in terms of exactly where the job ends, downtime starts, and free play starts - but my players aren’t bothered. The game moving in weird directions (It’s gone more dune/cyberpunk than Star Wars) and it doesn’t seem to be following the concept of 20 sessions or so mentioned in the book.
My second issue is the ship rules and upgrades are interesting but seem a little abstracted from the main action itself, though again my players don’t care. They are playing bounty hunters and wanted personal fighters cowboy bebop style, so thats where they do most of their action - not in the big ship itself, forcing me to come up with some rule of thumb stuff relating their fighters to the crew tier and making it up from there. Luckily the system is flex like that!
Overall a very nice addition to our group and has sold us on different styles of game from D+D (finally…)
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As a more of a lose frame work than a totally detailed out world lore. I’d say an important aspect of playing S&V will be for the players to have some sense of the sci-fi direction they want to roll with. It can go anywhere from SW mystic force running the show to cyberpunk hacking, to space force alien ass kickers, to firefly scramble for daily bread.
And the bread and butter can be the PCs kicking in doors and taking care of business with their character powers, or the ship/s where most work is ship based work with the ship as the main work tool. So either be sure to lay down the lore for everyone up front, or make sure everyone’s on the same page for what sort’a sci-fi direction yall are going with.
People looking for Space Opera won’t be as into the same stuff as people looking for the Bounty hunter BeeBop vibe, who won’t be as into the same stuff as sci-fi high weirdness follow The Way people.
With the ship and pilot kinda part of every crew, because they are a ship based crew. It can be hard trying to keep a mission interesting for the pilot if their main role will be get away driver just keeping the engine rev’d.
Generally dig it and would recommend.
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