Lessons from TV: Impossible Odds

When running a Star Wars game, it can be very tempting to make the Empire a huge, monolithic power that can just steamroll over the PCs. This is usually a mistake. The end result tends to be that the campaign becomes too grim - the PCs are paralysed by the overwhelming odds, they can never really achieve anything, and so the game crumbles.

A model that is usually (though not always) better can be found in the TV series "Stargate SG-1" (and also "Stargate: Atlantis"), a show that actually contains a lot of good advice for GMs who want to look for it.

Anyway, in SG-1, our heroes are a crack team of soldiers and experts. However, when they go through the gate they're generally travelling into enemy-held territory, facing greater numbers of foes armed with better weapons. And they're constantly coming across alien technologies that, realistically, they should have no chance of understanding, never mind repairing or modifying.

However, what the show does is quite clever. Pretty quickly, it gives the heroes allies in the wider galaxy, allies who are technologically advanced but few in number - they are able to advise, but they can't really step in to save the heroes too often. And they very quickly get an understanding of the alien tech. Finally, the enemy is quickly revealed to be weaker than was initially thought, to be quite fractious, and generally to be vulnerable to carefully aimed attacks.

The net result of this is that as the series progresses, the SG-1 team gradually go from being the underdogs to being one of the major players in the galaxy. They adapt Asgard technology to get their own ships. They adapt the gates to defeat certain threats. Sure, they occasionally suffer setbacks (as allies die out or are defeated, team members are lost, or whatever), and they see the rise of new and more potent threats, but the overall trajectory (after a few scrabbling defeats and hard-won victories) is upwards.

A similar arc can also be seen in the new "Battlestar Galactica" - at the start of the show, the crew are a bunch of has-beens and misfits. However, after just a few episodes they quickly start to pull things together - they get proper deck rotations going, Starback steps up to become a flight instructor and mission planner, and so on.

(However, BSG is a much grimmer show. Here, although they have victories, these tend to be at significant cost. And although they do find breathing space, it's always limited and always ends with a worse situation arising. Here, the trajectory is generally down - both in the crucial population number, but also in terms of their supply situation, morale, and so forth. Essentially, BSG is the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to SG-1's D&D - superficially, they look the same, but one is shiny and happy, while the other leads to despair and madness.)