The Black Campbell

We’ve had to sharply change gears on how we play the Battlestar Galactica campaign since the Fall of the Colonies. Up until the Cylon attack, it’s been mostly a Cold War spy/police procedural where one set of characters have been ferreting out the Cylon conspiracy, and another set have been dealing with the politics of the Colonies and how they are hampering the search. Now it’s a post-apocalyptic survival game.

First thing we’ve done is create groups of characters that have a certain sphere of influence. We can mix and match as works, but there are 1) political characters involved in the civilian fleet and the politics of running a small town on the run, 2) military to handle fighting Cylons and finding Earth, and 3) civilian characters whose fight crime, boredom, and dispair in the Fleet.

We’ve had two short episodes since the Fall. Our version of 33 only took about a day’s time, as the characters figured quickly that the Cylons were tracking the fleet and managed to locate the devices that were aiding the enemy. I had the white disk thingees we see in the miniseries (the one on the DRADIS console) play the role of trackers, tied into the DRADIS and navigation feeds, and powered by the ship’s power grid. Unplug them and they’re useless. There was an Olympic Carrier moment, but a shoot down is averted early on.

However, unlike the show, where the tiny government gets its act together fairly quickly, we’re addressing the chaos that 60,000+ people on about 92 ships (our Fleet is a bit bigger and has two battlestars and a few support ships surviving) that have had almost no time to mourn, come to grips with the enormity of what has just happened to them, and who are packed like sardines in some ships with terrible sanitary conditions, would face.

After the events of 33, the next adventure revolved around Vice President Jones — a player character — trying to get a decent census of the people in the fleet, and a sense of the conditions. Because the president and military are fixated on finding possible Cylon collaborators or agents in the fleet, they have stopped traffic between ships while the crews — tired, overworked, and grieving — try to figure out how many people they got and what their food/water/air situation is. There’s simply been no relief for people who are stunned by the Fall, and many can’t or won’t cope. When he arrives at the freighter Epheme, he finds the ship — which has pressurized container vessels packed with refugees — on the verge of mutiny. The people have been sealed inside the containers, because they have overloaded the ship’s water and waste systems. The ship has no water, and the sewage ship has yet to get to them. The place is an open sewer, and inside the containers, it’s worse. The characters have to avert a mutiny, convince the government to lift the no-fly order (and risk agents moving through the fleet), and then try to sort out how to move people.

The contrast between the lives of these people and the government types, sitting on Colonial One with only a small staff and press corps aboard, is marked, and made more obvious when the rump Quorum (only ten members chosen from the highest ranking officials from each Tribe they can find) votes to move from the small liner to Cloud 9 with its spacious staterooms, plentiful meeting spaces and convention halls, and amenities like dry cleaning service. Politicians, even in during the end of the world, still act like politicians.

It also gave us the chance to introduce a new PC, Quorum member from Aerilon who is a Cylon collaborator. His minder, a Cylon humanoid agent, got him from gang member and dock worker to community organizer, to politician in a few short years. He knows he was working for the enemy, but never expected them to actually attack. It should be an interesting tight-rope for the character to walk.

So what’s the point of all this? In your campaigns, it’s important to realize that — especially in fast moving, large events like battles, emergencies, etc. — the characters will never have full knowledge, or even accurate knowledge, of what’s going on around them. Think of the Boston Marathon bombings…even figuring out who the suspects were with mounds of photographic evidence took days, and over a week to start connecting them to those who aided them. In this game, after 3 days the Colonials still don’t have firm numbers on their survivors, don’t know how many lawyers to run courts, doctors to treat people, computer specialists, miners, and what have you they have in the fleet. To make these sorts of events real, you need to feed your players information. Then contradict it. Then do it again. Get them confused, worried, and make them act on imperfect knowledge. That’s how it really works, and when they screw up the consequences should lead to good drama and role play.

There are a few game systems that do a nice job of handling large scale battles, and the participation of characters in them, but not all RPGs — particularly those that focus more on character and story — deal with the different scales of a Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica-style capital ships, fighters, people running around shooting stuff all at the same time kind of action, especially when you have characters operating at all of these levels.

We’ll use the latest Battlestar Galactica session I ran last week as an example (with some augmentation here and there to illustrate some points…) We have finally reached the events of the miniseries in our campaign, and the characters have replaced those of the show for this iteration of the story (search this site for “after action report” and you should be able to find postings that will explain more on this.) Last night was the breakout from Ragnar Anchorage, which meant going toe-to-toe with the Cylons. As in the series, Galactica — this time with the aid of other surviving military units — have to scatter the Cylons and hold the line over the anchorage while the civilian vessels jump to safety. This means coordinated capital ship action (one of the PC, Commander Pindarus, running that), Viper on Raider action with PCs flying the vipers, and we would have had another character aiding in damage control in the fight, had they attended that evening.

Battles in BSG, Star Wars, and Star Trek often take hours, not minutes, or the seconds of personal combat in many games. To capture the difference in scales, I suggest that at the start of combat, the capital level stuff goes first — battlestar and basestar exchange their initial salvos, and any character involved in gunnery or command of the vessel, or electronic warfare gets to take their actions for the round. Next goes the fighter/vehicle-level action, then the personal-level stuff. Now to show longer time frames of battles for such a fight, I typically allow the personal and vehicle scale players to have another two or three rounds to show the speed with which their combat or actions take before returning to the capital-level attacks. (In the case of the damage control stuff, I would most likely call these extended tests and have them roll at the same time as the capital level actions.)

Here Galactica launched her fighters, set up her flak barrier with the point defense, but before she could start wailing on the nearest basestar, they were hit by a missile salvo from the same. (They lost initiative.) Galactica returned fire relatively ineffectually for the first round. Next, the CAG rolled for the fighter groups. Here I was assuming his pilot and initiative counted for the vipers vs. the Cylons. They won, he rolled brilliantly for the first round of engagement and they splash a bunch of toasters and only lose one guy. The other pilot character got to duke it out one on one with a raider — she’s a pilot, it’s her schtick — always let your players get a chance to strut their character’s stuff, if you can help it.  The viper squadrons rolled again, this time only a few toasters go down and no vipers. A third go-round for pilots and blasting Cylons.

Galactica got initiative on the next round and did well, pasting the basestar hard. However the viper squadronds do almost nothing and the Cylons damage 12 of the vipers in the round. They break through and start a run toward the EW raptors, to try and clear the jamming the Colonials are using to keep the missiles from damaging the battlestar and civilian ships. The next two rounds are viper squadrons and pilot characters dogfighting with raiders.

The next capital round, the Cylons are done playing. Galactica gets a radiological alarm and the Cylons fire a nuke. The EW raptors jam it and keep the ship safe. Finally the civilian ships are all out. The next two rounds are the pilots attempting their combat landings before the ship jumps to safety.

Now originally, I had planned for a Cylon agent to have been activated in Galactica during the breakout and there to have been a fight between a marine PC and the bad guy that would have been resolved like a normal fight at the same time as the viper combat — three rounds of action to every one for Galactica and other capital ships. It would have happened in the CIC and anything that distracted the command staff, or injured them, etc. would have had an effect on the way Galactica was fighting during her rounds.

You can experiment with the time between capital ship rounds, but I find three is enough to allow for fast paced action for the characters in teh thick of things, but not so long that the commander and/or other characters involved in shiphandling get bored.