Hi,
Had my first HARP SF session yesterday, my players play a Dilletante (who is a blend of Soldier and Scientist), a Fusion:Spy, a Pilot (who wants to become Tech later on) and an Entertainer (a professional Gambler to be more precise).
The scenario was that they woke up in a hospital and found out that 7 years have passed since their last memory (and they have never seen each other before). They are on a backwater planet and their spaceship was accidentally shot down 2 days ago. For some reason several groups demand delivery of their cargo....
My comments so far (session was not rule intensive, more roleplaying):
- Depending on your profession, the DPs you have to spend are tight or not. Especially Engineers, Scientists and Pilots have it difficult, while a Soldier, Spy or Entertainer faces a more relaxed situation.
- The Fusion:Spy can practically not afford more than one PSI Field (the one he starts with). Extrapolation tells me that an Adept should not go beyond 2, at least when he has hopes of reaching higher tiers.
- I substituted on many occasions the skill to use something with the relevant Lore skill. E.g. the character with Medical Practice could identify the machines in their room, the character with Engineering: Magnetogravitic could try to find out whether their Space ship could crash the way it was described by the witnesses -> I think this is a good concept, perhaps mention it also in the manuscript (if not already there), as it menas you do not have to have tons of Lore ranks and can focus on your profession.
- During character creation we really missed further clarifications on the Piloting Skills and Machine Operation (i.e. which subcategories are there, as with Engineering).
- One of my players did a Excel based character sheet. Its quite nice, but you still have to check it - and the buttons are in German. I can send it to anyone who is interested (and I will send all characters to Nicholas, perhaps he can reuse them for his NPC table...).
- The basic rule mechanics from HARP again proved to be rock solid (RRs, ...).
Will keep you updated as the campaign progresses.
BR
Juergen