The GM announces that his next campaign will be about slow-moving space politics between aliens who all have valid...

>GM wants you to sit through a reading of his boring ass scifi novella after unsuccessfully trying to sell it on Amazon

FTFY

Gotta admit, I don't have much interest in that. Have fun though.

>then the first ones show up

>GM runs a game focused around a tavern in a city

Possibly awesome, possibly horrible. You're going to have to not allow the GM too much control over this, but try to go along with it in spirit.

That sounds fucking awesome.

So Dune, but with aliens?

Sign me the fuck up.

I'm 100% behind slow moving space politics, but war is war. You can find a way to make a good combat sequence every other session at least. The whole assassination angle makes me think that he's taking too much inspiration from Game of Thrones style politics.

Sign me up captain

Especially if the GM is an old British guy

That depends. What roles will we be playing during this game?
Are we going to be the Alien Ambassadors guiding our worlds? Are we going to be the Ambassadors' aides, playing dirty political tricks in the background? Are we going to be the neutral security forces trying like hell to stop these Ambassadors killing each other and starting intergalactic wars?

Or are we going to be the poor saps stuck taking notes for the archives, in which case fuck that noise.

I GM'ed a game like this. I gave them a sandbox and they decided to run a tavern. I hated it, they loved the fuck out of it. I kept making it more complicated in the hopes of turning them off but it backfired and they liked it more. By the end, they may as well have been running a real business with the level of business accounting and customer bullshit I was throwing at them.

I'm okay with this, but only if there are some cool aliens I can play.

No one said they were at war. It actually makes a lot of sense that space civilizations would be extremely reluctant to go to war with each other. For the same reason nuclear powers on earth don't want war with each other. Anyone advanced enough to travel between stars should also be capable of easily wiping out entire planetary populations.

If there's no threat of war, I don't think the story of passive aggressive space UN sounds interesting at all. I guess as another user pointed out, most of this comes down to the players role in the story. Space politics are great, but you can't just have the players discuss trade policies, and there's PLENTY of ways to reason with the minimizing of damage war can do.

>combat will be rare and consist almost entirely of assassins
Shh!
We're not telling the Rangers, yet!

Rifts has you covered.

>roll a Narn
>play as former collaberationist exile on Centauri Prime

The threat of war would be looming over anything. It's the reason your political maneuvering is so important. Because if you can't resolve conflicts by other means, there could be a war, and it would be horrific.

I was going to make fun of libertarians and furfags but then I saw your trips. Carry on.

>GM runs a mini-campaign based around being bootcamp instructors.

It was pretty frustrating at times, but in a fun way.

That's great! I already started an hour ago.

Someone needs to shop that with Vir.

Yes, but it's not a lose condition to say a battle happens, at all. Something needs to happen in your story, and you can't say it's going to be 30 assassination attempts to endless discussions of trade goods.

>space politics between aliens who all have valid reasons for hating each other

sorry i'm gonna have to sit this one out. last time played an RPG with this i doomed all of galactic civilization and didn't feel bad about it one bit because they were all assholes that deserved each other

i was paragon

The only thing i didn't like about the show was this: Minbari act retarded on first contact. Human captian opens fire,destroys the ship and kills someimportant minbari dude. Minbari decide to completely fucking genocide the entire human race because of MUH FEELINGS. Eradicate multiple colonies and assault earth. Refuse to stop, refuse to have peace talks, refuse ANY communication at all, refuse humans trying to explain the situation through other race's diplomats.

And then they only stop their genocide because appearantly minbari souls are reeincarnated in human bodies.

And now all humans are all a-okay with the minbari. All humans who stilll hate them, or want revenge, or just critisize that bullshit behaviour, are shown to be ass-backwards, reactionary rascist murderous douchebag terrorist chads. Literally.

And then SInclaire (who fought in earth's last stand as a fighter pilot) goes all "No you guys have to let go of your hatred and accept the Minbari and be peacefull and, like, you're so racist, guys!"

---

The ONLY thing i hated about that show. The rest was pretty good.

...

From the Minbari perspective, they were making peaceful, friendly contact and humans opened up on them for no reason.

Probably at some point someone did some minor fact-checking and discovered that about a decade or two previously, the Dilgar attacked some Earth ships, and then a few years later there were no more Dilgar, the entire species having been wiped out.

So the Minbari thought that they were up against aggressive, psychopathic barbarians.

>And now all humans are all a-okay with the minbari. All humans who stilll hate them, or want revenge, or just critisize that bullshit behaviour, are shown to be ass-backwards, reactionary rascist murderous douchebag terrorist chads. Literally.
This is the part that bugged me. The Minbari nearly genocided humanity in response to one unjustified attack by one ship. This happened recently enough that all adult characters lived through that war. Yet no character who's suppose to be even slightly sympathetic has any animosity towards Minbari.

Then there's the Minbari whining about how Sheridan is a no good cheater, for daring to use tactics to destroy an enemy warship.

Just rewatched the series it seems like you're forgetting some bits.

They killed The Most Important Minbari in 1000 years, while being offered the highest honour from him. The order to kill all humans came from the dead minbari's best friend, pupil, etc. in her darkest moment of rage.

All humans are not okay with minbari. The show makes a point of repeatedly demonstrating that there are large, powerful and influential groups of humans who hate them, and all aliens. These groups are powerful enough to take over the entire Earth Alliance Government for several years.

Sinclaire had ptsd, only way to get over it was to accept the minbari and try to let go of his hate. Also in B5 universe there are souls, he has/is the soul of the greatest minbari ever. He was basically a saint.

Sheridan demonstrated strong animosity towards minbari several times. The 2nd season oppener, the attempt at framing him for murder. He has a monologue about not feeling bad about killing a bunch of them. He gets over it sort of with some half-space-elf sexings.

>He has a monologue about not feeling bad about killing a bunch of them.
It wasn't "I'm glad I killed all those Minibari." It was "I'm not going to apologize for the one win we got in an otherwise hopeless war."

I think you're forgetting about all the "wanderer shows up on station and starts killing people because reasons" episodes.

Fading Suns is the obvious choice.

Doing fading suns with kingdom or reign would maybe be the best thing ever.

What is kingdom? And yes! to Reign.

Its by the guy who did microscope. Kingdom focuses more on specific power players in an area and their interplay. It could work pretty well for sci-fi space opera politics and intrigue.

Please tell your tale, user

I am COMPLETELY for everything about this as long as the aliens are cool and not just blue humans.

>not choosing destroy
>letting a reaper AI manipulate you into integrating with them and perpetuating the cycle
>fulfilling Sovereign's prophecy, "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."

Should've left Jenkins in command.

Let me just say that Babylon 5 has not aged well. I made the mistake of rewatching it recently, and by the time it had become all about new age nonsense order vs chaos bullshit I was just about ready to get rid of the entire series.

It started out decently when it seemed to be mostly space politics, but that part never went anywhere interesting.

I choose the green ending, thought having everyone living and cyborg would be a better alternative, everything turned good for the world

That sounds fucking hilariously ironic.

At least the players had a good time not killing shit for once.

Truely the best ending.

I hope to players refuse to play ball and start killing shit immediately.

The only way the ending makes any sense is if the fan theory is indeed correct and the whole thing is a giant Reaper hallucination, which would mean that the only correct option is to destroy them and that all other alternatives just means that Shepard was succesfully indoctrinated.

And fuck you for making me think of that mess again.

>the only way the ending makes any sense is if the final act was rushed to completion to meet production deadlines and incorporated an asspull ending, penned on a napkin between Mac Walters and Casey Hudson, trying for a "too deep 4 u" finish that none of the other writing staff was aware of.

FTFY

I like to think ME 2 and 3 were the final dying delusions of Shepard after he was spaced.

So literally a game that nobody is ever capable of successfully running barring savant-level roleplay? Good luck. I'm gonna go kill some baddies, earn some money, and spend it on wine and women.

It's cool, man. Just try to keep your head under pressure.

it's like you actually love playing shitty games

Not everyone is an expert roleplayer and I'm not afraid to admit that I'm pretty average. I do voices and I stick to what my character knows, but this doesn't mean the rest of the party does, nor does it mean the GM knows how to convey all the NPCs, nor does it mean everyone at the table even likes politics. Every group I've ever played in that has ever tried an "intrigue" or "political" campaign has gotten tremendously bored because the GMs simply weren't good enough to reveal the necessary subtle hints without either forcing them or having them be completely invisible.

I used to want to play political intrigue but it's gone shitty so many times it's simply not worth it.

>doing anything than dungeon crawls
>staying in character
>taking the game seriously to any degree
>savant-level roleplay
ok

So, what? Are we playing as politicians/diplomats? People who actually have cause to care about the politics of this setting on a regular basis?

No? We're playing as street-level nobodies? Okay then, we immediately seek out employment as mercenaries/assassins working for one of the major galactic players. Failing that, we pool our resources, buy a spaceship, and go sailing off to the outer rim territories, seeking adventure.

The guys in suits can keep their summits and their treaties. We're gonna go loot precursor ruins and fight pirates.

I made a damn fine attempt at this, and I managed to get the players to play along, up until about session 6 when they decided (Honestly I had considered this guy's goals kinda neutral in the broader scheme of things) that their current patron (Which they had expended considerable political effort to sign up with in session 1) was going to break the deadlocked war if his efforts met fruition, in a BAD way.

So they spent another session manipulating him to give them a mission that he would have to turn up to see to the clean up phase of personally. They then turned on the guy and tried to assassinate him, but underestimated the tenacity of his personal guard and failed, only for his escape shuttle to be interdicted out of warp by a privateer fleet hired by a player several sessions earlier that was originally going to be used to kill off the guy's nephew in a freak fleet maneuvers training accident.

Most of them then handed themselves in for court martial, satisfied that thwarting this guy's plans was enough justice for one lifetime. They wouldn't be set free until another campaign in a different system 15 years later.