Battlestar Galactica RPG

[DethStryke]

Any shows -- that is not a televnovela or a mini-series -- that didn't make season (or in the case of Britain, series) 5 is considered canceled in my book. Yes, that includes TOS and ENT for my fellow Trekkies. Don't flame me, I wanted them to last at least season 5, or perhaps season 8 as in the case of SG-1 (ironically, we still do not have such a continuing RPG line since AEG stopped their production).

I simply want the game to be in for the long haul.

I'd choose a complete, solid story from start to finish that only lasts just two seasons than a story that was injected with filler and stretched just to fill extra seasons. This covers any story-telling medium for me. I wouldn't want someone to make three films where one would suffice (coughcoughepisode1-3starwarscough). I wouldn't want someone to take a great novel and stretch it across three or four books just so that there is "more" of it.

Now, if there is compelling and great story to be told which can be grown to fill more seasons, or a great team of writers can fill that void with the same great quality, then I'm all for it.

Quality over Quantity. If you give me three silk bags of gold and three silk bags of crap just so that there are six total bags, that's just as useless. I would certainly want to stop at the first three bags of gold.

 

[JPL]

Here's mine.

When the session begins I say, "So, once again the crew finds itself down on its luck and short of cash. But, looks like Badger has a job, though it may involve some Alliance entanglements..."

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Bingo. Don't turn a game into bookkeeping. We never see Mal sit down and balance the checkbook, so don't make the players do the same. If they pull off a job, the ship keeps flying and presumably Jayne sends some money to Mom and Kaylee buys some batteries and Wash and Zoe sock some money away for a house. But it's no fun if everyone ends up rich enough that they would logically just quit flying around and live the good life.

Same thing for fantasy RPGs --- Conan wins a fortune and pisses it away between sessions and is broke again in time for the next adventure.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Here's mine.

When the session begins I say, "So, once again the crew finds itself down on its luck and short of cash. But, looks like Badger has a job, though it may involve some Alliance entanglements..."

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

There's a substantial portion of the player base, though, that doesn't want to replay the TV show, they want to play in the 'verse. It's much like the discussion you're seeing in the SWSE threads about tech specialists and such.

 

[buzz]

There's a substantial portion of the player base, though, that doesn't want to replay the TV show, they want to play in the 'verse.

Accurate bookkeeping, as JPL points out, is simply not a part of the 'Verse. I'm not sure what it really adds to play to have a whole sub-system devoted to cargo economics, bills of lading, export tariffs, etc. It just has nothing to do with the source material. I don't understand why anyone thinks it's a necessary addition to a Firefly RPG. The cynic in me thinks it's from years of being brainwashed by GURPS and HERO that this stuff actually matters.

And, yes, I'd say the same thing about SW.

 

[fusangite]

There's a substantial portion of the player base, though, that doesn't want to replay the TV show, they want to play in the 'verse.

Exactly. So, waiting until BSG's underlying cosmology and physical principles seems kind of important.

 

[Ranger REG]

By that logic, Fawlty Towers was cancelled. I see a flaw.

Yeah, it canceled, even though we prefer to see more of them.

Who knows. Maybe John Cleese will produce the new Fawlty Towers: The Next Reservation series.

 

[fusangite]

Yeah, it canceled, even though we prefer to see more of them.

Okay. Now that "cancelled" can mean "the network and public wanted more but the producers refused to make them" I think we're lifting off from the normal meanings of words in discourse about TV.

 

[wingsandsword]

Accurate bookkeeping, as JPL points out, is simply not a part of the 'Verse. I'm not sure what it really adds to play to have a whole sub-system devoted to cargo economics, bills of lading, export tariffs, etc. It just has nothing to do with the source material. I don't understand why anyone thinks it's a necessary addition to a Firefly RPG. The cynic in me thinks it's from years of being brainwashed by GURPS and HERO that this stuff actually matters.

And, yes, I'd say the same thing about SW.

I'd say accurate bookkeeping would be a little more a part of BSG than Firefly or SW. While they might make the occasional error, the producers of the show do try to be consistent with the population of the fleet, the number of Vipers available, and other resources available to the fleet. Episodes such as "Water" (and the rest of early plot arc around finding more water), "The Passage" (and the rest of the "algae world" plot arc about finding more food), "Flight of the Phoenix" (about building a replacement starfighter), "Hand of God" (about fuel reserves running critically low), and "Acts of Contrition" and "Scar" in Season 2 were about training new replacement pilots to deal with casualties.

Bookkeeping isn't much fun as blasting Cylons out of the sky, but it's clear many times over that the crew of Galactica do have finite resources and have do work within those limits.

 

[buzz]

Bookkeeping isn't much fun as blasting Cylons out of the sky, but it's clear many times over that the crew of Galactica do have finite resources and have do work within those limits.

I'll grant that resource management has been a very important theme in BSG, so, yeah, it would make sense that those kinds of macro-level concerns should be a part of any BSG RPG. How detailed they need to be is another matter, though.

As I mentioned above, the now Origins-award-winning Burning Empires is an awesome template for a BSG RPG, as it handles stuff like this like buttah.

 

[Pbartender]

I'll grant that resource management has been a very important theme in BSG, so, yeah, it would make sense that those kinds of macro-level concerns should be a part of any BSG RPG. How detailed they need to be is another matter, though.

To which the answer is... Only detailed enough so that they can be used as an occasional plot device.

For example, no one in the BSG fleet was especially worried about water levels, until the explosion destroyed most of it. Until then, by and large, there was always enough for what needed to be done. Afterward, it was the same. Only during the crisis was the resource management of water a real concern, as far the plot and the main characters were concerned.

In others words, you can add such rules as needed into adventure scenarios for which they are important, without necessarily having them detailed to any great degree within the general rulebook.