The Campaign Builder's Guild

There are a lot of games out there.  Some of these I actually play; GURPS, No Quarter and Fast and Dirty are the current ones, with the first and last being the ones I work with most often.  My brother, a friend and I were talking about getting into Starship wargaming as well, and I was in the CBG IRC at the time talking to FREAKINGAWESOMEHORSE about a sci-fi campaign world.  Then I got thinking.

I've got this unspecific sci fi world, and there's a lot going on in it.  It's often not easy to represent large battles in an RPG as the mechanics tend to be relatively "slow" if they have any kind of detail.  This is true for pretty much all games, but RPGs are the subject right now.  But, RPG's allow you to do a lot of nifty story telling stuff, especially odd encounters and "combing through" details.  Wargames allow you to simulate a different scale of things, from ground, to sea, to air, to space combat.  So what about an inclusive campaign that combines more than one game?

Let's take StarTrek for example, since I want to use something most of you (ok all of you) have seen before and has room for at least 2 games.  All the Trek shows I've seen pretty much revolve around the ship captain.  What's he do?  Well most of his day is making sure the crew isn't doing it wrong and probably filling out reports and paperwork.  In some episodes there's bridge drama or ship drama, where he's running around the ship trying to do X.  Other episodes place him on the ground in Character situations or combat situations.  All three (preferably the latter two) are do-able with whatever RPG system that has the tools you need (GURPS in my case).  Some episodes have the ship under attack or performing some kind of mission, which is also well served by GURPS/RPG systems.  But what about large scale space battles, like against the Borg or Romulans?  That'd be a pain to do with any appreciable detail I'd think, so naturally my instinct would be to take something like No Frontiers, stat up ships (though the basic set stats up most things from TV/Movies already) and turn it over to the "Captain" player vs me as the GM playing the enemy.  Resolution kicks back over to GURPS/RPG, probably with a lump sum of XP, prestige or applicable character points for pulling through.  You can substitute StarTrek with any similar show - Stargate Universe, Battlestar Galactica, etc.

Of course, if your characters are a bunch of UNSC Marines or the Chief, you could just pass the space battle part onto a wargaming buddy who doesn't do table top role play games (of which I have a few, I am fortunate), or something like that; not really important.

Anyways I know someone here mentioned using actual games of poker/baccarat/dice inside their RPG sessions to represent the games their characters are playing (though how one plays like their character in terms of skill is a bit out for me), so I thought I'd see who runs multi-game campaigns in the other direction.

Also in other news, fast food and alcohol do not mix, kids.  

M.

That's pretty awesome as an idea. Though you may want to give the player's ship some extra abilities and such (maybe special "powers") or more health and power. Wargames are pretty unforgiving with the chance of winning being about 50/50 all other things equal. That differing from the RPG model where, while not unstoppable the players are generally more powerful than the average person (in this case the average ship).

Yeah, more than likely they'd have something like a "luck bonus".  Gotta die sometime, though.  Though, as far as my sessions would go, I think most of the "pitched battle" style games would end up not having the players directly involved most of the time.  They'd be in the troop ships and the like, probably.

M.