Running a Battlestar Galactica-esque game but with agency

[Deleted]

I'd like to run a Battlestar Galactica game (as I'm playtesting my "universal" OSR game), but I've never had much luck with sci-fi mostly because I like to let the players decide what to do and there is just too many possible places the players can go. On top of that add the phenomenal power that a crew of a Battlestar wield and it makes it that much more difficult to write location-based adventures.

There is a BSG RPG but from everything I can find about it, it seemed very much focused on railroading the players along a predetermined plot. Where I have had luck is games set in the Star Wars or Star Trek (briefly) universes where the players are part of a military unit so I can order them to perform whatever mission I have prepared. However, one of the aspects of BSG is that the players are alone and, thus, they are forced to make life-and-death decisions. For their decisions to have consequences, their has to be a chance of failure which railroady games can't provide (except on a limited personal level).

Anyone have any ideas?

[desertscrb]

Put the players in charge of the rag-tag fleet and have them decide how to find Earth!

Take some space opera plots from the original series (instead of the West Wing in space of the new show): Do they take the long way around a star and risk running into Cylons? Or do they take a shortcut through a nova that has a chance of cooking the ships. Where do they stop for supplies? If they're being chased, do they leave the slower ships behind, or set an ambush for their pursuers. Do the ancient ruins on that planet hold clues to the location of the 13th tribe, or is it just a Cylon trap? Is that planet of aliens willing to help, or will they sell out the humans to the machines?

The galaxy is your sandbox.

[Finarvyn]

Well, first of all, if the characters are not in command of the Battlestar they don't have as much control over where they go. This tends to limit things a lot. If you have a lot of "Captain Apollo" types, they can still lead missions and accomplish tactical things but don't always get to make the grand strategic moves.

So the general plotline can still be "railroady" in that Commander Adama is moving the battlestar along from point to point, yet the specific adventures can be freeform in that you give Captain Apollo a general task and he gets to decide how the team gets it done.

The part of BSG that I find the hardest to simulate as a RPG is the fact that so much action takes place in Viper dogfights. When I ran a BSG game back in the 1970's I ended up creating some simple dogfight rules and had a miniatures battle nearly every single adventure. That turned off a few of my players, excited others.

There is a BSG RPG but from everything I can find about it, it seemed very much focused on railroading the players along a predetermined plot.

I don't think that the BSG RPG is any more like this than any other RPG. BSG RPG is a set of rules and it's up to the GM and players how they play out. BSG RPG is based on the "Cortex" rules system, which seems okay but I don't like so much personally, but it's because I like other rules sets better.

Since you mentioned the SW RPG (I assume the WEG d6 version, but could be the WotC d20 version as well), I might suggest that you just use those rules (except for the force, of course) and run your BSG campaign that way.

[Finarvyn]

The part of BSG that I find the hardest to simulate as a RPG is the fact that so much action takes place in Viper dogfights. When I ran a BSG game back in the 1970's I ended up creating some simple dogfight rules and had a miniatures battle nearly every single adventure. That turned off a few of my players, excited others.

As an aside, my 1970's group liked BSG but at the time also liked the movie "Animal House" and the WWII tv series "Black Sheep Squadron" and ended up forming their own "Delta Squadron" where they acted like drunken frat boys in Vipers. That led to a few bizarre adventures, that's for sure.

[battlebrotherbob]

Aug 24, 2013 5:29:46 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

The part of BSG that I find the hardest to simulate as a RPG is the fact that so much action takes place in Viper dogfights. When I ran a BSG game back in the 1970's I ended up creating some simple dogfight rules and had a miniatures battle nearly every single adventure. That turned off a few of my players, excited others.

As an aside, my 1970's group liked BSG but at the time also liked the movie "Animal House" and the WWII tv series "Black Sheep Squadron" and ended up forming their own "Delta Squadron" where they acted like drunken frat boys in Vipers. That led to a few bizarre adventures, that's for sure.

Bizarre?! How could that be anything but fun. Until they get pulled over a Cylon Star Trooper and fail the line walk.

[Falconer]

A few years ago, I wrote this:

Aug 9, 2010 14:26:43 GMT -6 Falconer said:

BG strikes me as one of the easier space franchises to adapt from the screen to a RPG. I would do it as yet another “reimagining” so that the basic premise remains the same, but the way the story and mythology resolve would be different from how it ended up in both TOS and the RDM series (not to mention comics, novels, G80, and various other proposed TV and movie continuations), which would keep players familiar with either show on their toes. I would make it closer to TOS, though, because it allows for the possibility of way more inhabited planets, alien races, galactic empires, etc. The easiest setup would be to just have all PCs be “Colonial Warriors”, i.e. Viper pilots who handle all the away missions. Since it’s another reimagining, they could even take the names like Apollo and Sheba, and put their own spin on them.

I haven’t thought about it much since then, but, I still think it has a lot of potential. To be perfectly honest, my D&D campaigns are often not 100% sandboxy. I’ve got one dungeon/vicinity that I’m prepared to run at any given time, and the players go with it. At best, I’ve got 2-4 dungeons/vicinities for them to choose from. Similarly, at its most basic level a BSG campaign could be a string of planetary adventures.

As for rules, you would have to figure out something board-gamey for space combat, but otherwise, it could very well be a fantasy ruleset with guns. Science and tech are not really a big part of the feel of BG, are they?

[tec97]

I think if I were to run a BSG-esques campaign, I'd start the players in the fleet as ordinary folks, rather than as soldiers on the Battlestar... I think it would be more interesting to have them start there and earn their stripes; possibly to be asked onto the Battlestar, but maybe not to be.

[Deleted]

Aug 23, 2013 20:48:06 GMT -6 desertscrb said:

Put the players in charge of the rag-tag fleet and have them decide how to find Earth!

I definitely want them to be in charge but that's were I'm having my issues. For example, let's say that the Colonials detect a Cylon fuel depot. Now, in order for them to decide whether or not to try and raid the fuel depot they need to know the approximate strength of the cylons there but they also need to know how many Vipers they have, how much fuel they have and how much they can carry off.

Therefore, in order for the PCs to be able to really decide between alternate courses of actions, they need to know the exact composition of the rag-tag fleet as well as how many people are aboard and how much food, fuel, and ammo they have. It's keeping track of these values and presenting options that affect them that I'm having trouble with. You could, as the BSG boardgame does, just abstract it away into value. I was hoping the BSG RPG had techniques for this but it doesn't appear that it does.

Also, coming up with adventures that sort of randomly appears is another need. I could use the system from the BSG boardgame where a "crisis" happens every once in awhile that affect the fleet but I don't want it to appear so gamey.

[Falconer]

Agreed. If you want the players to be in charge of the Galactica rather than just their own vipers, you really need to map out the bigger picture of the campaign in a serious, wargamey way. I’m just not sure that sort of gaming is really “man-to-man” scale, i.e., what an adventure/role-playing game is really suited for. I think a wargame campaign and an adventuring campaign running in parallel would be pretty sweet. So you just zoom in and out as necessary.

[Deleted]

Aug 26, 2013 9:55:40 GMT -6 Falconer said:

I think a wargame campaign and an adventuring campaign running in parallel would be pretty sweet. So you just zoom in and out as necessary.

Even though my players are more wargamy than me, I didn't really want to go down that route (mostly due to the constraint of painting up miniatures and terrain). Still, I'm brushing up on my Battlefleet Gothic (did I mention that game would be taking place in the 40K Universe?). That game has about the right scale. I've played quite a few different spaceship games and I'm not sure which one would give the best feel. SFB is too much for a fleet and I don't like Full Thrust. Star Warriors does fighters but not capital ship-to-ship combat.

In the original show (and the new one to a lesser extent), the viper pilots where also the front-line soldiers. That's probably the way to go with an RPG since it was pretty cool. I think I'll add Raptor-like ships so that non-pilots can go on shore adventures. I don't remember any ships like that on the original show.

Finally got to look through the BSG RPG at a local (but far away) game store. As I suspected, the game doesn't focus on supplies which is odd seeing how that was the driving force behind the drama of the new series. Ships didn't have stores information nor was there a fuel cost per jump table anywhere that I saw. I'm so used to OSR game that I was shocked at how much of that rulebook was taken over by just ordinary mundane rules. About halfway through I found the rules for Jumping. I was expecting a discussion on a ship's jump drive but, instead, it was half a page dedicated to PC jumping over obstacles.

[desertscrb]

Aug 26, 2013 8:25:56 GMT -6 @hedgehobbit said:

I definitely want them to be in charge but that's were I'm having my issues. For example, let's say that the Colonials detect a Cylon fuel depot. Now, in order for them to decide whether or not to try and raid the fuel depot they need to know the approximate strength of the cylons there but they also need to know how many Vipers they have, how much fuel they have and how much they can carry off.

Therefore, in order for the PCs to be able to really decide between alternate courses of actions, they need to know the exact composition of the rag-tag fleet as well as how many people are aboard and how much food, fuel, and ammo they have. It's keeping track of these values and presenting options that affect them that I'm having trouble with. You could, as the BSG boardgame does, just abstract it away into value. I was hoping the BSG RPG had techniques for this but it doesn't appear that it does.

You don't need to count every can of beans; just make it semi-abstract: Say the fleet has 200 ships. Each ship uses 1 unit of fuel per week and carries 5 units in its tanks; enough fuel for about one month. There are also five refueling tankers with the fleet; each one holds 100 units of fuel (plus what's in its tanks). There's 50,000 individuals in the fleet. Each person uses 1 unit of food per week. Each ship has enough food to feed its crew and passengers for one month. There are also ten cargo ships carrying food; each ship holds 10,000 units of food. There's also an agri-ship that grows crops at the rate of 10,000 units per week.

Now what happens when the Cylons attack the fleet? Do you protect your food or your fuel? There's also that episode from the first season of the new series where the fleet loses its water supply and has to search for more.

Regarding Vipers, give them about 80 to start out. Allow machine shops scattered throughout the fleet to build new fighters at the rate of one per week--but new pilots will take at least a month to train.

You could probably use a spreadsheet to keep track of all this.

[aldarron]

Aug 26, 2013 8:25:56 GMT -6 @hedgehobbit said:

Aug 23, 2013 20:48:06 GMT -6 desertscrb said:

Put the players in charge of the rag-tag fleet and have them decide how to find Earth!

I definitely want them to be in charge but that's were I'm having my issues. For example, let's say that the Colonials detect a Cylon fuel depot. Now, in order for them to decide whether or not to try and raid the fuel depot they need to know the approximate strength of the cylons there but they also need to know how many Vipers they have, how much fuel they have and how much they can carry off.

Therefore, in order for the PCs to be able to really decide between alternate courses of actions, they need to know the exact composition of the rag-tag fleet as well as how many people are aboard and how much food, fuel, and ammo they have. It's keeping track of these values and presenting options that affect them that I'm having trouble with. You could, as the BSG boardgame does, just abstract it away into value. I was hoping the BSG RPG had techniques for this but it doesn't appear that it does.

Also, coming up with adventures that sort of randomly appears is another need. I could use the system from the BSG boardgame where a "crisis" happens every once in awhile that affect the fleet but I don't want it to appear so gamey.

According to the Encyclopedia Galactica (Bruce Kause, Windmill books, 1979):
there are 4 to 8 Viper squadrons per Battlestart. I'd assume 8 for the Galactica initially, including survivors from other Battlestars. A Battlestar typically has a 500 person crew and can travel 500 ly before refueling.

The Rag-tag fleet is of 220 ships.

According to FASA's Battlestar Galactica: A Game of Starfighter Combat, each fighter has 30 "fuel points" - perhaps one ly per point. Look to this game if you want to have space battles on a hex map.

In the syfy BSG a squadron consists of 12 fighters. In TOS it seemed to be about the same.

[Deleted]

Sept 1, 2013 7:59:26 GMT -6 aldarron said:

A Battlestar typically has a 500 person ... (snip)

Are you sure? I've no knowledge of the source you cite so please forgive, but that doesn't seem like enough crew. I know this is a made up setting but just for comparison a modern aircraft carrier needs around 5,000 crew to keep the thing afloat.

[jeff]

I had an idea for the Cortex BSG game in which the PCs were members of an "NCIS" type team on the battlestar doing security clearance updates when the Cylons attacked.