Suddenly very glad there's never been a Honor Harrington RPG, as the ship combat would have been a dry tedious exercise in tech wank and interminable die rolling, rather than a narratively driven system of stakes bidding and special story moves.

There's a Honor Harrington ship to ship wargame, and bless its 3D heart.

But an RPG? It should start with something like Glitch, where the question isn't "can you win" but "how much damage are you willing to take to win?".

"But Alex, you're always banging on about Star Fleet Battles? Isn't tech wank and interminable die rolling, like, your thing??"

Yes: when it fits the experience at hand. Detailed Trek ship-to-sip combat wargame? Fuck yeah 8 pages of tractor beam rules and run that DAC.

But an RPG where the focus should be capturing the *feel* of the source material, where it's about spending the finite resources one has against unknown and/or more powerful foes? Make it about managing that both in-character and as a meta mechanic.

It shouldn't be trying to cram a wargame into an RPG, but like the player's deciding to just take X amount of damage (some random, some GM selected) to gain Y advantage or progress towards the win threshold.

And they can modulate that with both entertaining play and the use of character abilities and bennies ("I use my Reveal A Technological Advantage (Minor) for this story!")

Voiddamn I wish I had the chops to make this case the more I think about it the more awesome I realize it could be. Especially if you take a page from Ars Magica for troupe style play and everyone has a bridge officer and a secondary character.

Fuck, and PC death itself is a resource. PCs don’t die to random die rolls, but because the player chooses for a character to die for either directly advancing to a win threshold or to seize a significant portion of narrative control from the events around the death.

Cause if you just want to play randos tooling around the Honorverse getting up to whatever, there’s whatever generic RPG that has provisions for hard-ish sci-fi that you can grab and use pretty much off the shelf.

But an Honor Harrington RPG should be about sessions and stories that end up feeling like the books, and that means going “OK, how do we make that happen as the intended and focused result of this game.”

Which, as long time followers know, is something I bang on about with RPGs and how the vast majority never ask that.

And I realized that the HH books and a putative RPG are like the perfect example of this, as the first thought everyone would have about a HH RPG *is* the unsatisfying ship wargame crammed into some pedestrian traditional “character stats and task resolution” RPG.