anyway.

How would you define Humanity?

Or you could play the crew of the Battlestar Pegasus. Or some other bunch of characters in the fleet, with the main show characters just turning up sometimes as NPCs.

Or you could all play Cylons, but then the demons would have to be something else.

... and who's this "Mitch" who shows up in your examples?

Also, I kinda like the idea of saying, "I'm Commander Adama. I'm a woman who's grown in a world of privilege and find my cushy, non-combat commission suddenly turned into the last faint hope of humanity."

Avram, the issue is retaining protagonisthood.

So Meg, Emily and them are playing PTA Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They're playing a sequel set in Cleveland (there's some kind of a canon thing about a Cleveland Hellmouth, whatever). I was going to play but I'm kid care instead, which is fine. But as I was thinking about playing, I was like, y'know, if I were to play PTA Buffy, I'd want it to be about Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Sunnydale CA.

In that case she could have all new friends of our creation, instead of Willow, Xander, etc., but I'd absolutely want one of the PCs to be Buffy and I'd absolutely want it to start in her sophomore year in high school.

I'm inspired by BSG's treatment of its canon. I don't see any reason they can do that and we can't.

Mm. I see.

We actually kinda did that with PTA. We had a long-running (over a decade) pulp-fantasy campaign (homebrew rules) which ended a year or two back, and at some point we'd established that my character'd had an anime series made about him. When we found PTA, I suggested that we use it to run a few episodes of the anime show. So we got to re-imagine our own characters.

Yeah, but you've got a good group of players.  There's no shortage of players, though, who would be quick to play the "But Buffy wouldn't do that" card.  I think that's one of the things that drives people towards playing non-canonical characters.

That's the cool thing about BSG - you can go right away to the two series and put both of them up front in the material presented to the players. You can ask "See how they went with things differently? You can do that too!"

Though you probably have to make sure and define which elements work like what right in the begining; Something like Jihad's world building guidlines - Who/What are the Cylons? How does the Colonial Government/Military work? Is Earth just a myth? And so on...

And if you were playing it as PTA?  I'm assuming the same would be true—you'd propose reimaginings of the main characters, exactly as the series and your sorcerer example do.  The main difference between the systems would be in how the conflicts are handled, via their different die systems, right?

In that game?

I'm totally Boxer and my demon is Daggit.

Mwuh-hah-hah!
Tom

Not unlike the many "man, if I were to do the star wars prequels, I tell ya what I'd do" threads.

Lotta shows from the 80s could use that reimagining. Like maybe you could turn The Fall Guy into a kind of cool show. Or TJ Hooker. Can you imagine a good TJ Hooker? Wow. Or shit, Full House. I might pay to read an actual play account of reimagined Full House. But it'd have to be played with Sorcerer.

I find this a little bit odd.

Not reimagining a TV series in your own way. That's normal. NOT THINKING IT'S NORMAL, that's odd. Because greek playwrights did that with greek mythology, and every writer since then has done the same thing, retelling or recombining already existing stories in new ways.

And yet, there's a widespread assumption that a remake or an adaptation should be exactly the same as the original, but with updated techniques. I hear this not just from gamers, but from *everyone*. Some people sound resigned to it and quote the factoid that "there are only 24 stories" (Wrong, there are only 24 possible story shapes, using a specific analytic system.)

So yeah, I'm excited by the excitement over the new BSG, and posts like this one, because it's like everyone's waking up and realizing "YEAH. You can tell THE SAME STORY but in a DIFFERENT WAY. And it's all good!"

I wonder who the prince is who kissed the 21st century and woke it from the witch's spell?

And Helo's demon is totally (spoiler for season one, in marginalia).

The humanity question's easy. Two humanities. One: honor, in the military sense. Two: compassion.

I also realized that the new Athena is Zach Adama. How cold is that?

See, this is why I keep saying that the best system for Transhuman Space is Sorcerer.

Yeah, V. and I were discussing that a while back. We started playing Shock: instead, cuz, duh. Also, Shock: badly needed help.

You know what I think is cool?

Not only are there multiple systems that we could use the play this game, but they are all very different games.

Do we want a game about character drama?  PTA.
Do we want a game about fucked up, transgressive relations with technology?  Sorcerer.
Do we want a game about fucked up, transgressive... oh wait.  Damnit, Shock:

yrs—
—Ben