Hello! I wrote these words with a translator, because I am Spanish and I don't know how to write in English fluently. I hope they are understood.
I have tried Meteor recently, because this game is what I have been looking for a long time. Overall it was a very good experience. It has some very powerful ideas, like the ability Training and its use with the Skills. Character creation is very fast and intuitive and overall we had a great time. The adventure I ran is one of my own that has a lot of survival, lack of oxygen, zero gravity, running out of flashlights and PVP. I'll tell you my feelings and the changes I made:
- Skills: I think that 4 skills + 2 undefined skills (6 in total) + one trait per character, is too much. The characters end up knowing how to do many things, leaving aside the inventiveness needed to solve problems with the lack of resources that a hard game like Meteor should have. Maybe 2 skills per class + 1 random skill + 1 trait, would be more than enough (eliminating the undefined skills). This will be something to test in the future.
- Stress: It has worked well for me, but everything gets complicated in a one-shot where the characters don't usually sleep, because the Resolve can disappear very quickly and not recover anymore.
The modifications I applied were the following: When the Resolve reaches 0, the character must roll 2d10 on a Panic Table with 20 options (inspired by Motheship and Alien). And when the character performs the action on the table, the Resolve fills to half the initial value, rounding up. In addition, as an optional rule, an ability called Stability Protection (SP) is added, which works like HP, but with respect to Resolve. You roll 1d6 (or 1d4 or 1d2, maybe depending on the class) at character creation to determine its initial value.
Anyway, these are very personal ideas of mine, and also easy to apply as modifications to a system that is working very well. For the time being, I will keep playing Meteor, because I love it, and I hope the game keeps growing, because it can become an OSR reference of dark Sci-Fi based on Into The Odd (or Cairn) since there are currently very few of them.
Thank you very much for creating Meteor and for sharing it. I hope in the future I will be able to buy the final version and I will do it with pleasure. Hopefully very soon, best regards.