I genuinely had good intentions: with the day off work, and with LC being away all day, I was going to spend Monday working on Nutshell Fantasy, or "The Eberron Code", or something game-related.
Instead, I was so wiped out after the drives each way, the late nights and early mornings, the lack of adequate hydration, the stress of dealing with band, and the need to get up to get the car fixed so LC could use it without crashing, that I spent the day watching "Battlestar Galactica". I'm now almost to the end of the third season, and I'm remembering all-too-clearly why I came to dislike the show.
But that's not important right now.
What interests me about BSG, at least from an RPG perspective, is the way the ship, the characters, and the civilisation as a whole gradually fall apart as the show goes on. Everything starts out reasonably shiny and new (well, old and about to be retired; but working, at least), but gradually things start to fall apart. Characters go from being strong-willed and moral to gradually compromising their every principle, developing all manner of weaknesses, and generally degenerating. The society starts with noble intentions of maintaining the rule of law... but principles are gradually shredded as compromises are made and come back to haunt them. And, eventually, it all gets to be too much, and they just can't go on.
Various RPGs have tried to model this sort of gradual decay. "Call of Cthulhu" tracks the Sanity of investigators, causing them to gradually go mad as they learn things man is not meant to know. "Warhammer Fantasy" likewise tracks sanity, and allows for characters to get worse. And it's a staple of games in the Cyberpunk genre that characters gradually lose touch with their humanity as they go.
Truth be told, I've never been a huge fan of these mechanisms, at least as they stand. In my experience, players in WFRP spend most of the campaign actively trying to acquire Insanities, treating them almost as a badge of honour. Conversely, in Cyberpunk games, humanity seems to be treated as a balancing act - just how much cyberware can the character load up on while retaining the smallest fragment of humanity required by the rules?
Which, frankly, isn't terribly good.
Instead, I'm inclined to treat degeration as a common pool for all the PCs, and tying losing points from the pool to the occurance of strictly bad things: hit this threshold, and food starts to run low; hit that threshold, and you have a mutiny on your hands. And, to be especially cruel, have exactly one incident in the entire campaign that can significantly replenish the pool - and even then, only if the PCs score a massive success in that one adventure. Otherwise, all they can do is mitigate the loss.
(This in turn lets the GM introduce a whole bunch of trade-offs for the players to consider - basically, if they take on various character flaws then they gain succour from that and so mitigate degeneration for a time... but they run the risk of becoming addicted, of losing what they had, or whatever, and so suffering a much higher rate in future. And vice versa, of course - getting a cybernetic arm will make things easier going forward, but it will mean a significant hit to degeneration... and not just to you, but to the party as a whole.)
The major problem with this sort of a mechanic is, of course, that it's a built-in death spiral mechanic. As the group degenerates, bad things happen, and those bad things are likely to trigger yet more degeneration, or accelerate the rate of degeneration. Additionally, such a campaign is likely to be extremely grim, and to be fun only for a short period.
(I would recommend giving such a campaign a clear 'victory' condition from the outset. In BSG, the goal is very clearly "find Earth", and so the question is whether they can do that before humanity is wiped out. Similar premises could be developed for other campaigns, giving the PCs a clear goal to achieve, means to achieve it... but also a clearly ticking clock to indicate how they're going.)
One other thing I would consider: keeping the group's Degeneration score mostly secret, with the PCs being informed of the current total only at the start of each session, and with adjustments being applied by the GM based on secret die rolls (including automatic rolls at the start of each session). And so, players can't just make the calculation that they'll happily jump down 100ft because they have 200 hit points, because they can't accurately weigh either the short- or long-term consequences.
But it's all just an idea at the moment.
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