SERENITY NOW! or Don't Say I Never Gave You Nuthin'.

Another short post, dear reader, for which I apologize. Indeed, I must make further expiatory remarks to the effect that this brief missive will mostly consist of criticism. If you don't want to read that, then I suggest you choose a link from the list to the right – Ding or xkcd might be more your speed today. Otherwise...

...on with the blather!

As you may have guessed, I am a young man with warm feelings for SCIENCE (It works, bitches!) and am therefore partial to things science-tific. The flipside to this is that entertainments meant to be sciencelike, such as pretty much all science fiction, had better hew pretty fucking close to the grain if they want me to keep reading/watching/caring. Bad science = me walking away, though some efforts get a pass. The Fifth Element, for example, has terrible science. But it's a parody, so I can accept transluminal airline service and a series of closely-spaced beepy-beacons marking the edge of human interstellar territory as just part of the story. But take a serious SF flick (or one that tries to be serious) such as... oh, The Day After Tomorrow. Now I don't know much – I'm just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, not a climatologist. But if you're going to posit an ice age that happens so fast it freezes fuel lines in helicopters in midflight you had better just skip the pseudoscience bullshit and call it magic.

This attitude is more or less suspended when it comes to roleplaying games, mostly because a) I am inured to the terrible science or b) if you try and fight it the story falls apart. Like in the old Palladium Robotech game, where Veritechs ran on what was essentially alien life-force, in space and atmosphere alike, without consideration of reaction mass or fuel. Take protoculture away, and you start having to justify tankage, and range, and operational loadout, and then you may as well be playing Mekton Zeta +.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I liked Firefly, a lot, and I even enjoyed Serenity. (Though Mal Reynolds is a lot more engaging when he's a wiseass, and not a very sympathetic character when he's being a dick. There were a couple occasions when I sincerely hoped Mal would end up as a Reaver hood ornament.) Both of these entertainments had terrible science, and Joss Whedon himself admits that the "science" portion of "science fiction" didn't interest him. In the show, and in the flick, the bad science is more-or-less forgivable – mainly because they don't try to explain it. People can walk around normal-like in a spaceship under weigh, with nary a mention of spin, gravity emulators, or giant magnet sandals. Unfortunately, in the context of a roleplaying game, you sort of have to talk about these things, because if you don't some bespectacled twit is going to work out the math and prove that the Ringworld is unstable – there goes your science cred. So better just to toss some technobabble in there, and hope most readers get glassy-eyed, and move on the swedgin' part.

I knew that the Serenity roleplaying game was not going to be Blue Planet, say, or even CP2020, when I bought it. Really, my biggest complaint is not the total lack of coherence even in the crap pseudoscience – it's the fact that the entire book is written in Firefly dialect. Which, if you've never experienced it (and if you haven't, how the hell did you get in here?) is folksy para-cowboy patter with the odd Mandarin expletive thrown in. This, to me, is akin to writing the entire D&D player's guide like this: "If thou then savest 'gainst the rod, O Fortunate one, thou takest but half damage." "When thou smitest the goblin with thine shortsword, thou inflictest 1d6 damage: but shouldst thou find thyself fighting a giant, lo! take thee care, for thou doth but 1d4, as yon giant is of Large stature." Dialect is great for the flavortext! But keep the rules crisp and clear and concise.

Here. I'll give you an example for free – my 3-page addendum to the ship creation rules. Never one to leave well enough alone, I offer up this PDF so you too can put it on your blog and excoriate my writing style, design ethic, and leitmotif. Needless to say, Serenity and its attendant intellectual properties are copyright of Universal Pictures (may their multiclass ninja/lawyer/accountants never sully my lab), and the Quirks ruleset is in no way intended to infringe upon that.

Ugh, legalese – it leaves such a bitter taste in my mouth. I believe I shall wash it out with a beer. Salut!

– Dr. Madu

PS Not that short after all. If I could only apply this ethic to Deathmagus....
PPS ARGH! A God-damned typo. I'll have to fix it some other day. Unless I rule that "condictive" ceramic fittings are some kind of nanotechnological thing. Or maybe they're made of smart matter. Smart ass matter.
PPS Aaaand somewhere along the line FileAve went kaput. I'll host the PDF somewhere else. After I correct some typos!