I’ve been enjoying The Mandalorian recently and have been thinking about running a bounty hunter-based game, but with less prep than in the Fantasy Flight Star Wars Genesys system. An obvious one would be Fate Accelerated, or maybe Lasers & Feelings, but I’m curious to hear what the Gauntlet community might recommend.
What has been the best RPG for playing bounty hunters in space and why?
This is one of the three core “modes” of “Scum & Villainy” which, I mean… check the name. 
Maybe Impulse Drive?
You could try Hunt the Wicked. It’s a game designed to play bounty hunters … in space !
This is shockingly relevant to my interests in running my next campaign. We’ve been hankering to do Cowboy Bebop / Firefly. Any systems out there support modular ship design?
Rich Rogers ran a very lightly hacked version of Monster of the Week to do Bounty of the Week, where we played a team of Bounty Hunters. It worked really well, though lots of potential activities would just fall under the standard MOTW moves rather than have specific mechanics (i.e. flying would probably be Act Under Pressure or possibly the Use Technology move that replaced Use Magic)
Thank you all.
I don’t recall hearing about Hunt the Wicked before and will check that out. In my experience Scum & Villainy and Impulse Drive could work, but there’s a lot of moving pieces for a one-shot, which I apologize for not stating earlier. I also have a copy of Bountyhead Bebop that uses an inverted D20 system (too much stuff) and Firefly could work. Bounty of the Week sounds like it could work. I’ll check out the great suggestions.
Another thought I just had was taking Dread and using it for a BH game where whenever the tower falls the bounty gets away or you let it get away by toppling it on purpose. There would be fallout in either case. You could then play it as the hunted with a fall being capture. The character sheet could be about you that you fill out as the game progresses. There could be one for the bounty where you fill it out as you progress. Just some thoughts. Maybe this could also be a version of a two-player or two-group game like StarCrossed but with a hunter and a hunted like in The Fugitive, etc.
Good hunting!
S&V lets you redesign ships pretty easily, but it’s not truly modular. On the other hand, Mothership definitely is. The rest of the game is horror focused rather than Firefly-esque shenanigans, but I feel like you could pull out the ship stuff into another game or just hack Mothership to focus less on Sanity/Stress/Panic.
I would second the idea of Scum and Villainy - I was introduced to it as a one-shot last summer; the game was a blast, we had lots of fun and I ended up buying the game!
It was a 3 hour one shot and the GM gave us the tail end of the previous mission (which was a chance to establish our characters a bit), then a downtime session to further that establishment and show how things worked - and where we picked up our actual mission for the majority of the adventure. We then played through that smuggling adventure. It was a great introduction and would work extremely well as a bounty hunter scenario too.
After all, S&V is Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. It’s a great fit.