<split off of the New Game Moderators Q&A thread>
You want a game were somebody can quote G'Kar with a straight face: "We were the good guys; they were the bad guys. And they made a most satisfying thump when they hit the floor."
And G'Kar said it to a guy busy LARPing (for certain very stretched definitions of LARPing) as King Arthur, no less.
I have no idea who G'Kar is.
Is this another thing where I have to turn in my nerd card? It's so hard to keep ahold of that thing.
G'Kar is from Babylon 5, IMHO a top contender for best scifi TV series ever made. It's a more literal space opera; as in, epic philosophical storytelling with larger than life characters that happens to be set in space.
I would much prefer to send you off to go watch it to earn your geek card than revoke it from you. :D
Not necessarily that bad, since the TV series in question is nearly 20 years old. It’s a reference to the episode “A Late Delivery from Avalon” of the TV show Babylon 5.
Oh man, B5 is 20 years old? [checks] Ugh, you're right. Now I feel old again, I first watched that series when I was a teenager...
Aside from being totally awesome, Babylon 5 is also notable for managing to have Bruce Boxleitner, Bill Mumy, and Walter Koenig all in the same cast. Boxleitner even gets to work again with Peter Jurasik, too.
It's not literal space opera unless it's entirely set to music. 
I don't need to tell you this, but Sir Michael York guest starred in the episode I was referring to.
Yep, be sure to warn anyone you send its way about how it went all-in on computer graphics WAY too early!
No, seriously, that show had a strong middle act and the alien ambassadors were a big part of that.
@Arcanist Lupus: I feel like JMS probably would have done that if he could pull it off. I mean, look at the ending of the episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place".
But now that I think about it, I think Babylon 5 went a long way towards solidifying my love of blending silliness with dead seriousness (hard to name a character in that show that wasn't eccentric in some way), and of interesting ethnical conundrums.
I mean let’s face it, that scene with G’Kar commenting about "We were the good guys; they were the bad guys. " is arguably the only time in the entire series you could say that with a straight face. And that entire episode is about someone going mad and thinking they’re King Arthur because (spoilers for B5 neophytes) they can’t cope with being the person who fired the shot that accidentally almost got his species wiped out. And in the end gets absolution from the “Lady of the Lake” in the form of one of the leaders of the former “enemy” side (who struggles with her own regretful decision in that war) choosing to forgive him. I mean, dang.
Babalon 5, Boldly Going, IN CIRCLES!
But in all seriousness it was a very good show.
I've had problems with the party not being on board with the campaign i was running, but not enough to speak up about it before we were hip deep into the campaign.
One time I was running a Deathwatch campaign &, Keeping in mind all these people are supposed to be Space Marines, Had one man who was eating people because of the gland that lets space marines learn things from eating("he wanted to learn more about the ship, it's totally reasonable to be eating human crew members, no one will catch me") one player who decided to try to smoke enough Ganja to get his Space Wolf high (they litterally drink beer laced with cyanide to get just a buzz) and one guy who became convinced that random tech priest npc #3 was evil, was plotting something, & that warented opening up with his Plasma Cannon in the engine room of a 40K space ship. Keeping in mind those ships are held together with religious rituals and hope.
Or the magical moment when during charactar creation as a gm you get to say, "You are the son of Loki!, why would your calling be 'space litch." it took 30 minutes of wheedling to remind everone that you're the children of GODS. This isn't D&D it's litterally starting in Truth or Consequenses you can look it up on a map, why would a Normal person go there. You don't have to figure out some rediculous thing. That campaign was already almost too much work & we hadn't even managed to get to session 0.
My apologies, Ehkrickor -- I didn't catch that you had an on-topic post when I split this off. We have no way in the current forum to avoid/correct this, unfortunately, and I wanted to ensure folks who wanted to go on about B5 had a place to do it without derailing the GM discussion.
I am glad that Russ split this off so that we can talk about B5 more! :)
I love space opera-y sci fi, and I enjoyed Babylon 5. In my opinion, the best things about it are:
- The overall plot arc.
- The world building.
- The dialogue of some of the alien characters, in particular G'Kar
My biggest issues with it are that:
- The plot is a bit rough in S4/S5 due to the network cancelling it, and then it getting picked up for a 5th season. It definitely hurts the pacing.
- Some of the dialogue, in particular for human characters, is absolutely atrocious. Like, "Makes Anakin's dialogue in Episode 2 Sound Good" bad.
Yeah, Season 1 in particular definitely had a lot of clunky dialogue as it was feeling its way. Though it still had gems like Born to the Purple and The Parliament of Dreams. Which not-coincidentally are Londo and G'Kar centric episodes.
The series was really Londo and G'Kar's story in a lot of ways, despite taking place on an Earth station.
Though on the flipside, when the dialogue was good, it was really good. Who didn't get a thrill every time Ivanova pulled out one of her Badass Boasts?
It also did a bunch of crazy experimental things some of which are commonplace now (the idea of a story arc for instance) but were new back then. Intersections in Real Time is one of my most favorite episodes in the series for doing a lot of crazy things with plotting, dialogue, visuals, and even technique (the episode being filmed entirely in real time takes other than the commercial "intersections").
Yeah, for my money, Babylon 5 is on the short list of most important sci-fi series efer made. But I 100% agree that season 1 is for the most part its price of admission. It definitely dragged for me, less so for my girlfriend. But it's also necessary to watch most, if not all, of it to enjoy the payoff in later seasons, which - make no mistake arrives in spades. It's also more than a little heartbreaking how star-crossed the cast was - even before the recent and too-soon deaths of Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi) and Stephen Furst (Vir), the B5 family lost at least 4-5 cast members.
I think "important" is a good word. Nowadays we take stuff like story arcs, heavy plotting, moral ambiguity, political exploration, foreshadowing, grounded science, lack of a reset button, character arcs, etc. for granted, but back then that stuff was still new. Babylon 5 was doing those things regularly when other series either hadn't done them or only did them sporadically.
I remember the episode that really made me fall in love with the series back as a teenager was In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum, specifically the stuff with Sheridan and Morden. Here you had someone previously established as a good, morally decent guy, doing incredibly unethical things to someone he had prisoner. And on the one hand you could understand it because the prisoner was clearly a bad guy who knew bad things about Sheridan's wife's death, but on the other hand it was still wrong and the show didn't shy away from any of that ambiguity.
Nowadays you'd be like "well yeah every series does that", but back then, they didn't do that. That sort of realistic morally ambiguous writing that never dictated how you feel or what side to take mostly wasn't a thing. Until it was because Babylon 5 was doing it.
Even when the series had issues, it was still busy trying to be new and explore previously uncharted storytelling angles, and a lot of those experiments ended up shaping scifi TV from then on out.
For what it's worth, I think that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which ran at almost the same time as B5, was an even better execution of the same kind of idea.
Also, B5 is *absolutely* the Londo + G'Kar story - they are definitely the best characters :)
I've argued that B5, combined with Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, made what I tend to describe as "modern" genre TV possible. In addition to the things about extended story arcs, heavy plotting, and moral ambiguity, it also was an effects-heavy show that delivered episodes on time and at/under budget, getting decent ratings for a show that was "straight to syndication." As I recall it after the fact, the network issues that resulted in the original cancellation had as much to do with the dissolution of the PTEN as a failed experiment as anything else.
I tend to think of them as being the "If you build it, they will watch."
DS9 - B5 are remarkable, how they changed sci-fi together while fighting to stay on air is a cool story.
DS9 has held up better visually, but B5 is by far the #1 show that makes me want to play an RPG. I think the cheesiness is a main cause there, as amateur storyteller collaborations drift into cheesiness almost inevitably. And yet the stories are heartfelt and good, you just have to embrace the flaws.
I am just happy to see a B5 thread. It is one of the best underappreciated gems out there.
Did anyone here ever play the card game? My brothers and I played it, and it was actually pretty good. It got silly with some of the expansions, playing the Psi Corp could just be cheating given the right circumstances, but it was a solid diplomacy game with opportunities for action.