Here’s a question that I’m sure has been answered numerous times. Is there any way to adapt ideas in BWG to a Science Fiction setting? One with automatic weapons, though. I imagine this is the major hurdle since Fight breaks down with any type of automatic weapon. Does Range and Cover?
If it comes down to it, I’m fine with Bloody Versus.
Would buying BE be helpful to this end? The scenes seem to be integral to the system—but just how integral? Are there any good things to hack out? Can Firefight be imported or are the mechnics behind the two systems (BE and BWG) too foreign?
Is there anything major I have to look out for? I’m hoping to do a mix of Eclipse Phase + Blue Planet ideas, with less focus on the transhumanism aspect.
Furthermore, has anyone attempted/accomplished anything similar? Do you have any work/guideance/lessons/hacked game mechanics I could have?
I’d be tempted to use BE as the starting point. Mechanically, it’s very similar to BW, and it has the sci-fi lifepaths and skills already made, which save you a ton of work.
Firefight rocks, plus rules for vehicles and large-scale weapons; the tech burner (a sort of questionnaire-driven way for players to cost stuff they want to buy), and probably a bunch of other useful rules.
More experienced BE players will weigh in, but I think, to play it like sci-fi BW, you’d drop the Infection mechanics (which is the campaign-level dispo, session maneuvers and scene economy), but otherwise run it as is.
Instincts are rewarded slightly different in BE - you get Fate for not using them when it would be advantageous to do so. (The scene economy makes game time run pretty quickly, since you skip right to the highlights, so insurance-style instincts are more common.) So, you might house rule that back to the way BW does it if you play a more zoomed-in time scale.
You might want to take a look at Burning Sands: Jihad which is a supplement that adapts BW to a certain “desert planet” type of Sci-Fi. It’s much less of a radical surgery than BE, and frankly one that I like better. It’s available from the BW Wiki downloads: http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=Downloads#Burning_Sands:_Jihad