How would you run a Cowboy Bebop game? What system would you

For a first choice I'd use Bounty Head Bebop, because it was written to do it. If an in-depth read showed it to suck, however, I'd fall back to a lightly modified Traveller, because that's damn close to Cowboy Bebop already. (Close enough that while watching the show I sometimes wondered if it was based on somebody's custom-setting Traveller campaign)

>>51444263
Seconded

>>51444263

Hm, I'm skimming through BHB's rulebook.

It definitely gets the setting flavor right, but the rules seems a bit too simulationist for the kind of crazy shit they pull off in the series.

Thanks for the rec anyways, I'll give the book a proper read later on.

I guess first thing to do is to look at how the series was structures and how well you can translated.

The Bebop crew always starts out on the brink to starvation, they find an opportunity for money and follow it (every member in their own way) to earn their next meal.
They potentially meet new people and help them solve their problems but almost always they end up just as poor as they started, even if they did the right thing in the end.

What translates well is the episodic nature and the premise, just throw them a few possible leads and they are bound to take one of them. It will always be clear what their goals will be.

There could be some problems with how the Bebop crew sometimes liked to split the party.
Sometimes they all just went and split up to do their own thing until they randomly meet again in the middle.
You would have to not only make up a deep enough story that allows for such opportunities to split up for every mission but also have the usual problem of players having to wait a long time before it's their turn again to do what they want to do.
But if your party is the type that doesn't mind splitting up and you don't mind figuring out all the multiple paths then I guess this could be in the same way be a pretty cool plot device.
You could potentially even just do solo sessions with every one of them and the point where they all just randomly stumble upon each other will be when the real session with everyone starts.

>>51444964
Another thing is the constant return to the status quo, it could be frustrating for the players to never really get anywhere and the standard solution would be to just let them earn money through the missions for better gear and ships instead of making them not earn anything, but if they are completely invested into trying to get the original Cowboy Bebop feeling and truly believe that the journey is the reward then there is no harm in keeping them starving, always desperate for new work.

When I think of themes then I guess the biggest one would be about being haunted by the past, almost all Bebop members had a difficult past that they were trying to forget/run away from/remember.
Especially in Spikes case it came back repeatedly and forced him to drop what he is doing and deal with it.
This could be an interesting to include into the game, every player has a backstory they'd only share with their closest people, stories about regrets and what ifs and other stuff they'd rather forget forever.
Occasionally ghosts from the past come back to haunt them, possibly interrupting missions and requiring the players to share their past with the team to get their help with it.

>>51444446
Holy hell that almost get

I opened a thread about it days ago, and I'm working on a game myself.

As for my opinion; there are two facts that are indispensable to do this right:

1. All players need a tragic and unresolved backstory. This backstory must be ideally randomly assigned from a table; to prevent Marysueitis, but vague enough so they can customize them with their own details.
On every odd bountyhunter mission, there is always a lead to advance one of the PCs plot.

2. The bandits themselves must have good backstories themselves. I want to write a list of them, or instead a d12 table of bandit generation. It must have 12 each of: Names; Crimes (or assumed crimes); Main skill; Motives for crime (in the series, most of the criminals have their motives, which makes them human. PCs must be tempted sometimes to let them go), and an Ace up their sleeve (a twist to fuck PCs in the last moment). Also a randomly assigned bounty (fluff the details depending on the bounty: if is too high, maybe he's got a well-provided gang or pissed off an important man. Too low? maybe the law is underestimating him)

It would be cool that PCs can sometimes choose which prey is best to hunt. Maybe they know a lot about one guy, but the prize is too low, and there is another who they only know the name and the prize is high, but they do not know which kind of dangers they pose.

TL; DR: you need good backstories to tie up the plot and memorable bandits to fight. The rest is up to the PCs

>>51446328
continued

also you can play it straight in the future, but I want to keep it all in one planet on a more eclectical setting (maybe more steampunk/JRPG tech level) but all on earth. I opened a thread to find substitutes for the spaceship.
A common ship seems too easy. A plane is not confy at all (because confy is everything). I don't know if a RV is too modern for an RPG; I would need roads and everything to be a thing.
Maybe a giant cart pulled by a bison?
A vapor boat, but the setting itself is a not!mississipi river?
A magic tent that is small on the outside, byt like a small church on the inside (stained glass and all)?
A static base, and all the action takes place on a small radius?

>>51446461
If I were going to do near-future Earth, I would do it post-nuke-war. No ridiculous, Fallout-type setting. War happened. Ruined everything in the short-term, but fifty years later and people have picked up the pieces and moved on. Society regained a semblance of normalcy. Fallout did cause huge parts of the world to be nearly uninhabitable--particularly the once-cities. Resulting famine and disease also cut the population down to something 10% of where it started. Modern communications still exist. There are rockets and planes and jets and cell phones. Just no cell phone towers and no fuel for public transit. So 80% of the USA is uninhabited, half of that radioactive or maybe-radio-active. The players' home-base is basically what Newt's family had in Aliens. It's a giant, mining/agriculture/industrial combination lifted fifteen feet off the ground, running on bio-diesel and with huge tires or treads, built to help settlers reclaim abandoned territory. The frontier has a communication delay of a few minutes as you hit each others' transceivers, but you get back to the city and it's still computers and cell-phones