[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by jmurrell

We may be the Social Science team but I suspect most of us should have some practical physical/outdoor abilities. With just 288 survey billets available and thousands and thousands of scientists itching for the chance to do real fieldwork, just being good at one specialty isn't enough.

My explorer is a Marine from the planet of Scouts. So yes, practical physical/outdoor abilities.

Originally Posted by Agemegos

That means that the explorers and they ways that they engage with the colonials they meet are where the rubber meets the road in terms of getting adventures started. I need to know about explorers and the grommets they present to my adventure hooks.

Strickland is going be young (how young is plausible for a Marine Lt. qualified for this mission?) compared to the other explorers, I think. A gift for getting inside other people's heads has got to be a double edge sword, so she's certainly going to have a tendency to sympathize with the colonial concerns. At this point I'm seeing as much of T.E. Lawrence as of Richard Burton. She's a girl scout from the planet of girl scouts and grew up on tales of adventure. She certainly idolizes the ethnographic explorers that came before her.

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Also, I'd like to hear about what rules you'd like to use. We all know GURPS, but it's more complicated than I think is ideal, especially for PBP.

Stripping down GURPS isn't hard. I think in this case Social Engineering is going to be more useful than Martial Arts or Tactical Shooting anyway. This might be a game where the Combat Lite rules are good enough.

My habit is to use ForeSight where-ever possible, but only I think two of you have copies, and only I am familiar with it.

ForeSight is fine with me, but it does put all of the heavy lifting on you.

I wonder whether something really simple such as BESM or FUDGE might be best, though I'm not very familiar with them.

Either system puts a lot of prep work onto the GM, especially FUDGE, otherwise either is fine with me.

I guess if I have to state a preference it would be ForeSight. FLAT BLACK is native to it, and therefore it's least amount of work for you and ForeSight seems to handle PbP fairly well.