I’ve played 7 sessions of Scum & Villainy, and am probably not going to play any more, so I’ve written up my main impressions at mhuthulan.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/comments-on-scum-villainy-v1-6/
S&V worked well, helping us run science-fantasy heist missions very much in a Firefly vein. Action kept moving, the players worked together and were usually highly involved (except for perhaps one session were I unwisely let five play at once). Just about everybody seemed to get the setting straight away, with Firefly being the principle touchstone. Six of seven missions were chaotic and confused, usually starting with bad engagement rolls, but the players seemed to enjoy this.
The weakest part was the supplied setting, which I found extremely bland.
http://mhuthulan.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/comments-on-scum-villainy-v1-6/
A solid review, but… if you and your group don’t love sci-fi, and you yourself talk about how Blades itself is more compelling, why on earth didn’t you just play Blades?
Good question! Because, unfortunately, I had another long-running open table game in parallel, which was too close to Blades in many ways. In any case, I was more interested in learning the rules so as to hack from them, rather than either game as-is.
(I’ve added this to the blog post)
Hey! Thanks for your feedback.
Happy to read when folks do stuff and I’m glad you took the time to write it up.
I had only one question – is there a reason your group didn’t mark ship quality in pen (that’s generally what most of the folks we’ve seen playing do)? Running in a specific place that didn’t have that sort of stuff handy is totally legit feedback.
Ship quality in pen… that’s a good idea. Simply didn’t occur to us.
Might be worth prompting in the text, especially as it doesn’t make sense until you realise that system qualities never decrease.