Firefly: Freedom Flyer

This month's "Lost Episode" saw the Crew helping an old war buddy, Maggie Miller, get her life back together after the Alliance decide to renew old scores.

This was probably the most satisfying of the series so far, partly because there was absolutely no "evil mayor" character getting in the way (and, indeed, the obligatory Alliance commander barely featured), partly because it made more use of the sci-fi part of Firefly's foundations, and partly because I did a slightly better job in editing the adventure for the time.

The Crew this time was four members: Ali (Zoe), Josh (Wash) and Emma (Mal), and the newcomer Finlay (Jayne). This slightly new group composition did give me a moment's pause: I opened the adventure with the inciting incident, then stopped talking in the expectation that they'd take over and... silence. Fortunately, they quickly got going from there, and once things were in motion they stayed suitably active. So, that was a relief.

The other thing that this group did was that they took the acts of the adventure in a rather different order: I'd already edited Act One down to almost nothing to save time, so they tackled Act Two, then Four, and than an entirely new act, and then Act Three. That was, of course, absolutely fine - a good adventure, and especially story-based adventure, should only ever provide a suggested order of events, with the PCs having flexibility on how they actually tackle things. Plus, their final approach was rather novel, I thought, and in keeping with the character of the show.

One thing I'm increasingly unhappy about is the difficulty of the game, or lack thereof. All too often, it really seems that the PCs are being set laughably low Stakes to beat. This has three effects, two of which are distinctly negative: firstly, it means they pass almost every task handily (which is fine). Secondly, though, it means they're racking up huge numbers of Big Damn Hero dice, which makes later tasks in the game easier again, which can sometimes hamper the drama of the episode climax (though it actually worked fine last night, as the dice 'turned' at a key moment).

And thirdly it removes an Interesting Choice from the game - one of the good things about Firefly is that the Stakes are set first, the acting character then rolls, they take their best two dice automatically, and then they can spend Plot Points to add more dice to the total if they wish. Which means, in theory, they get to choose: is it worth spending those points to get the win, or is it better to accept the loss now but keep the points for later? But if the Stakes are too low, those "best two" dice probably beat them already, and so there's no choice to be made.

I think I'm going to have to give that some more thought. In the first instance, I think I'll need to make sure I'm rolling more dice in pools in general - make sure to keep the Complications widely applicable, be sure to add environmental dice generously, and try to ensure the PCs are mostly rolling against NPCs, rather than generic Difficulty Dice. But in the second instance, I think I may need to claim more Plot Points for my own pool at the start of the session, and then use those more generously. (This latter is much more controversial, though, so I'll need to consider that carefully.)

But that's an aside from what was otherwise another very satisfying session of what is quickly becoming a favourite game system.

Despite being the longest episode in the book, this was actually the shortest of the five sessions to date - everything was neatly wrapped up by 10:15. Which was nice. Due to excessive busy-ness, I've decided to take June and July off, so the next session is now scheduled for August, where the story picks up with "Strawberries" - my first homebrewed "Lost Episode".