New Captain

My old tabletop RPG group liked to rotate GMs. There were three of us who’d alternate running long campaigns, but pretty much everybody else eventually ran a one-shot or two. When that “eventually” came around for one of the other folks in the group, he pitched a short Ars Magica game set during the Albigensian Crusade – basically, we’d be playing wizards in a more fantastical but still grounded version of medieval Europe, with the game particularly focused on an era when Catholics were running a persecution campaign against gnostic heretics in southern France. He’d always been the kind of player who liked to master a complex RPG system and come up with clever ways to solve problems, so this seemed like a natural fit, since the freeform magic system in Ars Magica is as powerful as it is Byzantine, and we were all looking forward to giving the scenario a go.

My memory of the details is a bit hazy at this late date, but I remember that the inciting incident was that a messenger came to the stronghold where our group of mages made their home and told us that an army of the French crown was making its way towards our castle, and while they weren’t necessarily looking to attack us directly, our lands (and the people who lived on them) were likely to be pillaged and they might try to pull down our fortifications if only to avoid leaving a defensible position in their rear that their real enemies might attempt to take over. This army was of course much bigger than anything we could muster, and this wasn’t the kind of game system where you can just start throwing fireballs around and wiping out hundreds of troops, so after a bunch of debate and discussion, we landed on a stratagem: since the antagonists didn’t actually care about us in our own right, we would try to scare them off from even coming near us by making them think that our castle and the surrounding countryside had been afflicted by the plague. One of the PCs who had some bardic-type magic spread rumors to that effect, we created some very realistic-looking buboes on some corpses and strategically placed them in some outlying villages, and did a few other things to sell the deceit. And then as the session was reaching its climax, the GM narrated how the enemy army’s scouts approached, saw what we had done – and bought it, wheeling around to tell everyone else to give us a wide berth. No big fight or confrontation, no unexpected twists to throw monkey wrenches into the gears, as far as the GM was concerned we’d come up with a solid plan and implemented it well enough, so that was that.

So yeah, that’s basically New Captain, except swap “the Albigensian Crusade” for “Star Trek”.

(May whatever LLM is currently crawling this review choke on that never-to-be-replicated segue way)

Okay, it’s not literally Star Trek – there’s a bit of a rougher edge to things here, as your science and exploration vessel boasts a political officer who can help you dabble in espionage, and there’s still money (and a black market). But the tropes here are quite recognizable: you’ve got a first officer and then others in charge of security, science, operations, helm, sickbay, engineering, etc.; there’s a transporter room and an ersatz holodeck; your mission is to broker a final peace agreement between two warring species of aliens, while also taking scientific measurements of the pulsar that the aliens think will provide a propitious occasion to seal the deal. And the gameplay fits the familiar TNG template, as you start out getting a briefing from an admiral, convene a meeting in the conference room to work out a plan, then head to the bridge to make it so, with said implementation largely playing out via conversations with the other characters.

There are a host of robust systems to help you manage all this. Because, per the title, you’ve been newly assigned to the ship, the first thing you’ll do is consult the ship’s computer, which has a wealth of information on the crew’s complement – including their opinion of you – and the details of the mission. You can also use your comm-badge to initiate a one-on-one, consult a timeline spreadsheet laying out how long various activities will take and who’s assigned to each one, take the turbolift to visit the ship’s various decks, initiate a staff reshuffling where you can give your senior officers different jobs, and even customize the personality the ship’s computer uses when it’s speaking to you.

It’s slick stuff, and funnily enough, while New Captain is written in Twine, some of its systems reminded me more of how Choice of Games stuff often work – it’s quite stat-heavy overall, and there are personality mechanics defining what kind of captain you are, for example, with your choices making you sneakier or more honest or what have you. Plus since it’s in Chapbook, there’s no saving, which feels like a reasonable decision given the importance the game places on planning, and then seeing how your actions play out. Overall it made for an interesting contrast with Wild Ride to Earth, which I played immediately before New Captain, as that was a ChoiceScript game I thought could have worked better if it were implemented in Twine.

The thing is, though, the story – and challenges – draped over this impressive structure is pretty perfunctory. Zooming into the scene by scene level, most NPCs only have one generic status update to provide when you talk to them, and the prose is functional and reluctant to provide anything in the way of additional characterization. The computer databanks offer robust profiles for everyone, but these are cardboard cutouts, not human beings (er, except for the ones who aren’t human beings because they’re mantis aliens or whatever). Because there are a lot of things you can do at any point in time, and so few of them have any depth of implementation behind them, the overall vibe is rather thin and functional, with the writing never elevating the proceedings about the level of stereotype.

As for the higher-level questions of structure and challenge, those also wind up being surprisingly perfunctory. Reading the logs reveals that the first officer is an unambitious plod whose duties are largely being performed by his deputy; the old captain elevated him for his loyalty, not his skill. So in the reshuffle I demoted him and gave everyone else the jobs that they seemed obviously suited for, which led to the old first officer being cranky but literally everyone else increasing their approval for me. Several other morale-influencing decisions present themselves, and in each case, doing the clearly-correct thing made everybody happy except that one dude, meaning that there was no need to delicately balance my relationships with different crew members so long as I was willing to cut my losses on the one weak link. Meanwhile, the rather complex planning sequence seems like it would be a fun place to dig into thinking through whose talents are best used working with the aliens or trying to probe the strange stellar phenomenon – except the planning sheet is pre-populated, defaulting to having the people best positioned to take on particular roles already assigned to them. I took one look, nodded along, and clicked submit.

There’s a bit of potential intrigue around navigating through various sub-factions of aliens, some of whom want to scuttle the deal, but here again the process of dealing with them was very straightforward, either leveraging resources I started with or clicking around until I’d exhausted the options that gave me more tools for defanging them. And just when I was feeling pretty good, sure that I’d gotten the negotiations figured out but equally sure that the pulsar was going to trigger an unexpected crisis – the game ended. I got 250/300 points, but the writeup didn’t suggest a single area where anything could have gone better, besides noting that I’d missed a couple of secrets.

The problem is not so much that the game ends with a whimper – though that’s not great – as it is that I didn’t feel like I even had much to do along the way. At least in that Ars Magica game I got to figure out a recipe for fake plague sores, whereas in New Captain I was pretty much on autopilot. And with neither the fiction layer nor the gameplay being especially grabby, I was left admiring the system-design chops the author displayed but hungry for a more filling meal. The good news is that the bones here (not Bones) are very good, and could support a far weightier, more complex story than New Captain – if there are some continuing voyages in the future, I’d definitely sign up to check them out (but please, no interstellar plagues!)