I had a daft idea. Pared down to the utter basics, it goes: how about Babylon 5 using the standard AW playbooks, minimally hacked?
You’ve got a space station controlled by the Earth Union, but paid for by the Negari. You’ve got the oppressed but recently expanding Garn, and the sophisticated but declining Senetari, and watching from the corner, the mysterious and terrifyingly advanced Xoren. Or whatever other mix you come up with, it’s your game.
Your playbooks define your various species. Maybe the Garn player chose Gunlugger? So the Garn have natural armour as a species trait. As to actual hacking, I’d knock the Harm clock down to three or four segments. Maybe Barter represents Credibility. Ignore your own government and their demands (not “paying” them the Credibility they require) and you’re at risk of being replaced.
My real question here is: can this kind of diplomatic game with everyone on different sides work as a game to play together?
I think if you want diplomacy then AW isn’t the right game. It has more “battle moves” than other things. Urban Shadows might be better.
I would change Harm into something like status or reputation.
Legacy might be worth a look. The game assumes characters hailing from Families who also get a playbook.
I like Legacies, but the timescale is a bit lengthy for the kind of thing I have in mind. I may rip the basic moves from Urban Shadows and do a “best fit at time” fix for the stats. Harm as rep directly made me consider Stress and Exposure ala Stress and Trauma in Blades in the Dark. Possibly overly complex to fit considering what BitD actually uses Stress for. Bear in mind that this is theoretically a minimum work hack-job, so the fewer changes the better. Things that flow from the fiction are best.
Example: so you’re the Chopper? You have a mobile gang that will do your will, usually. Maybe you have some kind of tribal setup, or you’re all nomadic since your planet blew up, or you form some kind of weird insectoid mini-hive where sometimes pheromones need reinforcing with a bite or two. You can use them to get stuff done. Maybe you send them out to help an ally hunt down space pirates. Maybe you have them make a ruckus to draw station security away from somewhere at the right time. No real changes at all, aside from bikes to ships.
Honestly, I do quite like the ideas of using the playbooks because so many seem so ludicrously unsuitable for actual diplomacy, and the central conceit is, “but thou must.” After all, you represent a whole people who are, by and large, quite like you, and you then have to find some common ground and agree terms with another people who could be entirely different. Also that there can be an entire planet of Gunluggers behind you, or an empire of Brainers or whatever. How would such a society work? I think it would be interesting to play and find out. Also I’ve been playing a bunch of Mass Effect recently, so that’s had an impact.
I am reminded of a book series, where each planet spawns a certain type of trained personnel, and the series was written from the point-of-view of the warriors. My brain isn’t producing the name right now…
Not Dorsai, is it? The Childe Cycle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Cycle
Dorsai. That’s it. 🙂
Someone should do a 1-2 page sheet mini-setting for B5, having everything essential for playing a game in that setting, for example using Simple World 🙂 ~10 archetypes with 4-6 descriptive things for each would help a lot putting a character together for SW. In fact I think every possible genre/world should have such a mini-setting-sheet 😀 I’ve been toying with idea of putting such together myself, but these days I never have time to do such things.
Time is a kicker, hence the minimal effort crow-bar-assisted hack job. Anyway, that’s one more idea out in the wild!
I always pondered running a B5 game where the adventure was something mentioned in an episode but never seen on screen. Then after the game we’d watch the episode and the players could see how they affected the story. Too easy for the players to go off the rails, though, and it would be impossible to structure in a PbtA game. Just a pipe dream of mine. 🙂 But I would love to see something B5-ish for PBTA.