I have been asked to run a 1:1 oneshot, or short story arc Space Opera… think The Expanse, Gskactica, I was told it didn’t need to be Star Wars.
Can I get recommendations for PbtA games? Please remember one GM, one player -so lots of inter party strings/debit/connections won’t work…
Help
Scum & Villainy (with a few minor tweaks to make the system work better for one-on-one)!
Uncharted Worlds works fine 1-on-1. It doesn’t have strings, bonds, or history — it tracks debts to powerful Factions who intrude on your life. It has options for crews and assistants to support your character in action. The only place you might want to house rule, or figure something out is around the starship rules, which assume someone will be controlling the ship and someone else will be handling the guns and someone else will be doing the shields — but you could just connect them all to the same console or whatever.
UW also already supports human-centric, more down to earth sci-fi directly out of the box. If you do want aliens and psychics and cyborgs and clones and magic and space gods or whatever, that’s in the Far Beyond Humanity supplement — which is just a great investment anyway.
Seconding Uncharted Worlds.
Kk I was thinking uncharted worlds, but I wanted to get feedback. I don’t know S&V I’ll have to look up. I found UW has rules and a source book? Does the source book have more playbooks/rules or pregen adventures/universe? Useful for 1:1?
Lasers and feelings is free and sandbox in one page, very simple system great for 1:1.
The Far Beyond Humanity book for UW has more playbook options, and specific specialized rules for extended campaigns, “hero” ships, transforming mechs, horror, and some alternate/bonus moves for emphasizing different sci-fi tropes in play (tracking fuel, for example). No pregenerated universe, but there is another supplement called Jump Points with a bunch of adventure starters.
Kk thank you all, I’ll check out lasers and feelings also.
I know I’m bad for even saying this, but…have you considered classic Apocalypse World? If you’re going for a used future, spaceships and scarcity kind of motif I feel it’s got potential.