More Star Trek the Roleplaying Game

I did a few things that greatly enhanced the fun of my players.

Since my game was set during the Original Series, when I ran off the character sheet I made sure they were the correct color!



I had to try a couple different shades before I found the right red that was readable. The yellow was Goldenrod.

Most of my game was set in a Amundsen Class. It was about the size of the Reliant and used as a general purpose exploration ship. As a warship it could pack a hard hit as it was loaded with the best photon torpedoes that could fit on it's frame. A quirk of the Ship Construction System was that photons gave a lot of bad for the space. Probably a lot more than it should have been.

But the best part was that FASA's game system use quarter inch squares as it's full scale (15 mm for you grognards). This made mapping the ships very feasible. Also in these pre desktop publishing time we were lucky that FASA had the entire Enterprise laid out in the full 1/4 inch scale. So we could photocopy what we needed and make NEW deck place.

This is the deck just below the Bridge.



Half of the saucer section that shows the intregretion of pencil and paste ups we used.



These decks were a group effort with four of us working on them. The guy who did the pencils was really good and particularly proud of his work.

One thing that grated on me on GMing any sci-fi game is what I call the parrot problem. When the sensor, comm, computer, etc officer was dealing with something. I would say what they say and either they repeat what I said or just pretend I am putting words in their mouth.

Frankly it was not fun and took away from the immersion. FASA had a nifty solution to this in the form of the Tricorder/Sensors Interactive Display.

Basically they had four decoder wheels. The GM would give you the code for one or more the wheels and you would turn them to read the result. The GM had a table in front of him with the codes. You could tailor the results to give more or less information and you avoided the parrot effect. Plus it put some of the burden back on the player to use the display correct and intrepet the results.

Of course it was high geekiness.

Here some picture of it in Action. The player made a good success with his roll so I told him A21, B10 C11 D11. Read off #15 on Tricoder Strip B for further information.




So the player saw an Approaching Energy Source Solid Lifeform and Topaline was involved. The player was up on his Star Trek lore he would know that Topaline is used in life support system and interferes with sensor readings.

This is the starship sensor side.



The neat thing about using this that player remember certain codes so as they get more experienced they didn't need to fiddle with the dials and just gave the result. This also added to the immersion. Today I would probably just use a chart and the player can read off of it as the dials are fiddly to use.

Imagine what the sensor/hand scanner chart would look like for Encounter Critical!, Gamma World, or Mutant Future.

Star Trek

One of the reasons that FASA's Star Trek worked so well for me is that at the time all there was the original series, and a handful of movies. There was a sense of freedom and adventure in FASA's Star Trek that wasn't present for the Decipher and Last Unicorn version. The weight of Canon intimidates a lot of players and GMs. Perhaps unfairly.

It will say that both version has some pretty good writers creating their Narrator's guidebooks. Although the late John Ford did a kick ass job with FASA's Klingons. I was happy when Enterprise's solution to the differences between the TOS Klingons and the later Klingons was resolved using elements of Ford's solutions. (The TOS Klingons are the result of genetic manipulation of the Klingons by the Klingons themselves).

But since the positive reception of Abram's Star Trek now I see talk about refereeing Star Trek all over the place. Having seen the film a second time with my son, it is still a darn good film that was just as enjoyable to watch the second time as the first. It's most important aspect is that is restore the sense of adventure back to Star Trek and that anything can go. This make the setting a lot more appealing to referees and players.

Right now the only Star Trek RPG out there is Prime Directive by Amarillo Design Bureau. Which has it own unusual history. Luckily for fans of the new Star Trek it geared solely towards the Original Series. It comes in several flavors so you have your choice of system.

I think I will take mine in GURPS, loose leaf, three hole punched.

From the Attic: The Best Damn Game I ever ran

Even though it was designed by wargamers the fact it was Star Trek meant a lot of role-playing came along for the ride. Some of the best campaigns I ever refereed was using FASA's ST:RPG.

The best adventure I ever ran involved the players starting out on a milk run dropping navigation warning buoys around the time-space distortion that nailed the USS Defiant and nearly got the USS Enterprise. The ship, the USS Challenger, was refitted with a emergency anti-matter injector that could give a short burst of Warp 9. It was done in case there was a problem with the ship falling into the distortion.

I went all out for my Star Trek games. I used what computer tech I had at the time and creative photocopies to create orders, manifests, and other in-game documents for my players.

When they were halfway done, the distortion starting grew unexpectedly and caught the Challenger. The Engineer made his skill roll and injector worked pulling them out. When sensors came back on-line the Science Officer reported a Klingon D-7 bearing down on the Challenger with shields up. The players had a tough fight but the lone D-7 was no match for a Consitution Class Starship and it fled.

During the course of doing Damage Control after the battle, Comm Officer reported the Subspace Network was down. The Science Officer, Engineering and Comm Officer worked together to determine what was going on. The Challenger equipment was OK but the Subspace Network was simply gone. Even nodes near the Federation's Core were not on-line. However when they started searching for the other races they began to pick up a unknown network centered on Andoria. They found the nearest node and warped to it.

When they got there several weeks later they found a Starbase of unknown design. When they made first contact they discovered it was a Starbase on the frontier of the Andorian Star Empire! By now it was obvious they were thrown in some parallel timeline.

The players were able to find out that the Andorians had no record of Humans or Earth. The only record was that they found a dead world destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence the Federation never developed and the Andorian Star Empire now dominates this region of space contending with the Klingons and Romulans for power.

They were able to secure permission to proceed to Earth. When the players got there they beamed down and started combing through the ruins for any records of what happened. They were surprised by Klingons and a firefight ensued. Meanwhile in orbit the Challenger was attacked by a D7 hiding behind Earth's Moon. It was a tough fight but the players won both on the ground and on land. The D7 was destroyed in the aftermath.

The players were able to determine that the nuclear war occurred around October 1962. Apparently in this timeline the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded into World War III engulfing the entire planet in nuclear war leaving on the cockroach as the highest lifeform.

From the wreckage of the D7 they were able to find out that the D7 was sent to the time-space anomaly that the Challenger was mapping and was able to use it to go back into time. They launched a nuclear missile at the US Fleet blockading Cuba. Both sides blamed the other and the crisis spiraled out of control into full scale war.

A smart player checked and it turned out the Challenger had the data on-board to execute a time warp via a slingshot around the Sun. What followed was some of the best roleplaying I ever seen as the players debated among themselves whether it was ethical to go back and restore the time line. This debate elevated a pretty good session into a game that emulated it's source material perfectly. Both sides had strong points in favor of the arguments. Both arguing with the passion that only college age fans could bring. In the game billions of lives were at stake on the decision. The player of the Captain actually started sweating at having to make this decision.

In the end the decision was to restore the timeline. The Challenger slingshotted back to 1962 and hide behind Earth's Moon. When the Klingon D7 warped into Earth orbit the Challenger surprised it and was able to destroy it before it launched the missle the ignited World War III. Then it warped back to the 23rd Century back into a future where the Federation existed.

And that was the best damn game I ever ran.

From the Attic: Star Trek's the Roleplaying Game.

There has been a lot of talk on the various forums about roleplaying in the new Star Trek continuity. The sheer energy in the new film has invigorated interest in Star Trek Roleplaying. I refereed a lot of different RPGs but there are only a handful that I am good at. FASA's Star Trek the Roleplaying Game was one of them.

In the mid 80s FASA was one of the hot 2nd tier RPG companies by breaking away from it's Traveller roots and coming out with Battle Tech and Star Trek the Roleplaying Game. The initial version of the Game was strictly Original Series. It was very much a RPG put out by wargamers with a rules heavy combat system using action points. Character Generation echoed Traveller as you generated a history of your service in Star Fleet as well as your character.

The best part of the game was the Starship Combat System. It runs down a similar path to Star Fleet Battle in that you have damage tracks for various system and weapons do points of damage that have to wear down shields before hitting the vital stuff. Where it genius comes into to play is that unlike Star Fleet Battle is is deliberately designed so that multiple players perform vital ship functions.

For years I wondered how the simulations of space flight could be any good at various Space Camps as their computer hardware and props were often primitive to say the least. Then I was able to participate in one a few years back and found out why. The main issue isn't the tech, although it important, it is communications. Getting everybody working together to solve problems in real time. Being in mission control trying to get the guy on the other end of the line to take a reading on the meteorite detector while he too busy playing with the remote arm.

This what make the starship combat system of ST:RPG so golden. The captain players is giving orders, the enginneer is allocating chunks of power to each station, the individual players at the stations have to take these chunk and try to do what the captain is ordering. The actual rules of the combat system is far more basic than Star Fleet Battles and easily grasped by players of any skill level. Fun chaos erupt as Captain realizes that phasers aren't firing that should be firing and fine out it because the enginneer forgot to give the 1 extra point that was needed. When everybody clicks and start working together there is a real sense of accomplishment.