No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and equally no campaign design ever survives contact with the players. What I'd planned for was a scramble to board and then somehow keep control of a huge wallowing freighter making its way through a chokepoint of interstellar commerce. I'd written rules to cover boarding, and then I'd tried to cook up five mission profiles which would put the players at each others' throats for a couple of evenings.
I've always argued that you can tell a lot about how people really are by watching them do something with no real consequences. People will fake a lot if there's something at stake like money or sex, but give them a game with no money riding on it and all the extremes of their personalities will bubble to the surface, a process which is only very occasionally as pretty as it sounds.
The centrepiece of the whole mess was RMS McGuffin, which I had thoughtfully stuffed with 33 small warships before setting it on its way through pirate country. I armed the McGuffin in keeping with its size, and then added a detachment of marines and some close in weapons as insurance put in by the shippers.
The McGuffin was carrying a cargo of warships, so I could plausibly put in a force sent by the buyers to make sure they got their toys, and another one sent by their enemies to stop that. And then I added a group of pirates, out for the loot. What else might add to the fun? I needed to have enough stuff on table to keep five people busy. Well, you couldn't go wrong with MORE pirates, so I added another group. But just to keep it interesting, I made their objective slightly different - the second group was briefed to keep other pirates away. Finally, no conflict is ever complete without ineffectual bumblers.
I looked on it all, and found it good. The various forces should come in at different times and points, and all somewhat disorganised. Their objectives were at odds with each others, but not by so much that two or more players couldn't cooperate to clobber one of the others if he got too much of an advantage.
Just hold that contentment in your mind for a moment. That's long enough. That's about as long as mine lasted.
The well-meaning pirates started on table, lurking near the bottom of the map waiting for everyone else's plans to become apparent. The traditional pirates entered somewhat above them on the map and spread out to scout the area. The McGuffin plodded on, little knowing its fate. The Republic Navy beamed in from its home system well below the McGuffin and wondering why it never occurred to the high command to tell them where the McGuffin would be coming from. The Imperial Sudanese Navy came in behind the McGuffin moving at a well chosen pace that allowed them to catch up without overshooting. The UN came in between the Republicans and the Imperials moving flat out towards the McGuffin's entry point.
Well, it was already apparent that my cunning plan was showing leakage. The UN were in earlier than I expected them, and so were the Imperials. The two pirate players were well off the axis of the likely combat, and the Republic, which I'd hoped would be early, was in at exactly the same time as everyone else.
Most of the first evening was preliminary manoeuvre on the map. Some interesting lessons from that. For one thing, use the same scale on the map as you do on the table. For another, map movement actually works, but it's frustrating moving back and forth between the players looking at each map and trying to make sure no-one saw anything they shouldn't see. Next time I may print the map out on acetate so that I can just stack them all on top of each other and see what's on top of what. Finally, it may be pointless. Give the players a big enough area of operations and they'll use all, but as a corollary, they'll move fast on it so as to cover ground. And when they do that, they'll wind up moving too fast to engage each other.
So for the first evening, what happened was that the Republican Navy headed towards the McGuffin, the UN shot right past it at such a speed that the main force never really got back in the game, and the Imperial Navy closed with the McGuffin before opening fire and doing heavy damage from the outset. Meanwhile, the two pirate squadrons were off in the rough shaowing each other and trying to figure out where the action was. By the end of the second evening, the UN force had gotten off a couple of shots at the apparent aggressor (the Imperialists), the Imperialists had knocked a quarter of the McGuffin's hull boxes off while taking some punishment in turn from the concealed weaponry in Hold number 3 (I may have been over sporting in that regard - rather than shooting off all the ordnance as soon as the Imperialists closed, I elected to fire one system per arc per turn; if I'd fired everything at once, the Imperial commander would have got a very bloody nose, and the midgame might have been very different).
The second phase began with the Imperials coming under the guns of the Republicans, their natural enemies. The Imperialists displayed an admirable mission focus and kept firing on the McGuffin even while their ships took more and more fire from the Republicans. Slightly less admirable was the order to the fast picket which had used up its supply of missiles and was instructed to ram the McGuffin. The crew decided to seek paradise elsewhere and left the table rather than obey orders. While the Imperialists clobbered the McGuffin, and the Republicans shot all the light combatants off the squadron, the Imperialist commander had the brass balls to radio the UN commander and ask him to back off and not interfere with legitimate anti-smuggling operations. We may never know what happened in the rest of that conversation but for the remainder of the evening the UN player deployed an increasingly baroque splatter of explanations for why his vessels were never quite in position to engage.
It didn't take long for the McGuffin to be reduced to a drifting hulk; under the normal rules it would have just fallen apart once the Imperials shot off all its hull boxes, but there would have been no fun in that, so it was allowed to drift freely to see what the players might do to try to salvage it and nurse it to port. The Imperialists were effectively reduced to their main unit (the combo carrier/BDN Madinah) with the two cruisers and one destroyer still on table but effectively neutered. The Republican player kept firing steadily on the Imperials for as long as his guns would bear, but with diminishing effect as the one shot SMPs started to deplete (at this point, the inevitable complaints began that everyone else had been given better ships...). By this stage the two pirate squadrons had finally got into range of the furball and the roleplaying began in earnest.
At this point, I was laughing myself sick. The well meaning pirates made overtures to everyone but the UN, but somehow managed to emerge without a useful deal of any kind. The traditional pirates started trying to pick off the surviving Imperial cripples, while cheerfully making it clear that it was all about what they could salvage, not about a stand up fight. The well-meaning pirates checked the instructions from their shadowy backers, and made another attempt to make a deal. Then they squared their shoulders and to my astonishment opened up on the Republicans, the one group of people with whom they shared an objective. The Republican player rapidly discovered that there were plenty of players with problem ships, as the first serious exchange of fire knocked out two pirate ships. After another round of fire which saw the well-meaning pirates reduced to less than half their strength it was nearly midnight and I had to intervene, if only to find out what the well meaning pirates thought they'd just done. The expression of chagrin on the commander's face was worth the whole effort....
All in all, although nothing actually worked, I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out. People had things to do, and I have to say I always think the game has done SOMETHING right when we keep right on playing through the moment that we usually go to the pub.
The amazing thing was how little communication there was between the players. Nothing in the briefings had told anyone to maintain radio silence, and yet we were halfway through the second evening before anyone got serious about trying to negotiate or discover whether they had anything to negotiate about. The Republic and the well-meaning pirates were natural allies, and yet wound up hammering away at each other in the end game - simply because communication between them was sufficiently unclear that the well-meaning pirates didn't twig that the Republicans were the rightful owners of the cargo. That lack of communication was something I really hadn't counted on - I'd correlated the forces on the expectation that with one force on "exterminate" orders one on "pillage" and three on variations of "protect" there would always be a coalition available to prevent an unrelenting attack on the McGuffin to destroy it.
in fact, the one force that came closest to achieving its mission was the Imperials, who displayed alarming focus on mission. I'm still not sure whether the UN player was role-playing ineffectuality or just hamstrung by poor initial deployment, but the result was stereotypical UN - if we'd played a third night, the UN would have arrived just in time to write up the war crimes indictments and shake its head wearily at human folly. The traditional pirates were brilliant, although they didn't really achieve anything, they took no losses and might well have made a dollar on the scrap which was filling the system at the end. The Republicans were doggedly aggressive, and might well have been in a position to shepherd the McGuffin home depending on whether they could face down the pirates. Doomed, perhaps from the outset, by their determination to be reasonable, the well-meaning pirates are the force most to be pitied - they tried so hard to be reasonable, and then when it seemed that only desperate measures would let them achieve their objective (not getting killed by their backers for not trying hard enough) they got butchered through an easily avoidable misunderstanding.
Now, back to the drawing board.
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