My Life As A Gamer: You're Framing It Wrong, Bro

"But Walker," Anon asked, "what about campaigns built around clear Hero Figures like most Super Robot shows and Hero Ship stories like Space Battleship Yamato?

You're framing it wrong.

The villains in that source material routinely has backstabbing as a passtime, or they're fighting multiple enemies at once and the protagonist (and allies) are just one of them, or both.

The reframe is to make those faction leaders--including those backing the protagonist--into Patrons and what in a proper D&D campaign is Patron and Domain Play turns into letting players pursue their faction's objectives, which will influence what goes down at the table.

Now it's not capricious GM fuckery. Now you know that it's Bob over there, playing his Ace Pilot tonight, who's the real reason that Hero Ship Protagador faces off against The Barbary State Human Resources Acquisitions Squadron and not the Rainbow Empire's Inquisitorial Correction Fleet.

The campaign is structured so that the wargame aspect of Patrons and Domain Play are the primary drivers of what those table sessions deal with, and therefore influences who plays what characters and in what capacities.

With JeffroGygaxian Timekeeping and Always On play, the scheming and stabbing that goes on the in source material moves up to the fore where attention is plentiful and that Diplomacy influence makes itself felt. Logistics now becomes obvious; you can't make your move against that damned stubborn planet of Men because you just had your biggest shipyard crippled by sabotage and you realized that your intelligence was compromised so you have more pressing matters to deal with. Meanwhile Bob's clear to take his shot and if he succeeds then you're screwed so you have to weigh options against capacities.

This, I say, is a far more interesting, entertaining, and therefore fun RPG campaign structure than to blindly ape the structure of a wholly different form of entertainment from an entirely different medium.

Yes, even if you're playing the Super Robot or Hero Ship faction; those mid-season upgrades aren't just narrative conventions in real RPG play- they're necessary and vital downtime actions, just as vulnerable to disruption as anything else. Crew need to recover from injury, need their morale kept up, and resouces need to be sourced and acquired; this also means that, even for a Super Robot campaign, there will be--by entirely organic and emergent means--reasons to get out of the robot or play non-pilot characters.

Now we can square a lot of circles, so to speak, and yet I expect that there will be objections.

I don't care.

This is your solution. Implement it.