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SolkaTruesilver
2007-07-01, 09:31 PM
I was wondering how I could make a Star Trek game works, when I stopped for a second. How could any futuristic space-travelling game works?

I am not talking about land-based adventures, where the PCs are on foot (which would be pretty much the same than any fantastic-based RPG). But when in space, what is the fun of space combat if every player is on the same damn ship, and only 1 player is calling the decisions?

I would like to start a discussion about the dynamic of such futuristic-RPG compared to fantastic-RPGs. I eventually plan to start a discussion on how to make a good Star Trek game, but let's not go ahead of ourselves. I just wanna know : how to turn the whole game in order to make it funny???

Or did I had a misconception about the whole party's usefulness during a space battle? (because, after all, a player's only function is to roll the dice, and he doesn't have to make any decision at all, I wouldn't call it funny)

JellyPooga
2007-07-01, 09:52 PM
Well, trying to say how to make any space faring game work is a bit difficult, because the mechanics of space combat is different in different systems...for example, in Star Wars the pilot is generally more important than in Star Trek (think of the difference between Han Solo and 'Random Ensign on Helm' in regards to moving a ship from place to place).

Put simply, some systems have a more 'hands-on' approach and others are more 'push a button, the computer does it'.

In the more 'hands-on' games, each member of the party can have a role (pilot, gunner, engineering, etc.) that actually involves them doing something other than just following an order to push a button. In the more 'push a button' games, space combat becomes a little dull (because, as you say, one guy calls the shots and that's about it) and takes a back-burner to other aspects of the game (social, investigative, etc.). Having said that, character skill can come into 'push a button' space combat, but it depends on the specific system (I'm fairly sure that in Star Trek, skill will play little role when to comes to big ships like the Enterprise, but will be exptremely important for smaller ships like shuttles and run-abouts).

My advice for a Star Trek game would be not to focus too much on Space Combat...think of the series'; how many episodes actually have protracted space fights? Mostly it's just a warning shot or two and that's it. In Star Trek, it seems that starships are mostly just a way to get from place to place (unlike, for example, Star Wars where starships seem to have a greater importance in regards to military and civilian life).

Diggorian
2007-07-01, 09:52 PM
I recommend checking out this podcast (Episode 47 (http://feartheboot.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=202260)) from Fear the Boot along with any gems brought up here. Very helpful and funny.

Hard to decide where to start on such a broad topic.

Sci-fi can be run very much like fantasy by simply replacing props: Monsters for aliens, magic for super science, space for wilderness.

Each party member can serve similar roles to what we find in D&D: fighters are gunners, pilots, clerics could be medics or mechanics repairing ship and crew damage.

BlueWizard
2007-07-01, 10:15 PM
There are even d20 rules....

Jannex
2007-07-01, 10:33 PM
I'd say, focus more on away missions and less on space battles. If you're not near a planet, well, that's when you start having Fun With Transporters. Intruder alert!

Kizara
2007-07-01, 11:21 PM
Here's a question, how do you deal with it mechanically in D&D?

If I want to run a D&D game in space, in the future (say, Firefly style), I run into a few problems (as I have tried it):

1) Weaponry. But I can make up/houserule this. Guns aren't actually that much better then might bows, just don't use super-high-tech stuff like plasma guns.

2) Transportation and combat. How fast in feet/round is a car/plane/spaceship/hoverthing? How does it take damage? What about shields? And, as the OP asked, what do players do that aren't the pilot?

3) New skills needed. There's no PHB skill appropriate for operating a complex machine. Ride isnt even close. Nor is there one for repairing one (although craft comes close). How about engineering?

But yea, as for Star Trek. Think about it this way:
Picard: Fire!
Worf: *aggressively pushes the fire button*
*ship fires phasor*
This is a very dynamic combat system.

SolkaTruesilver
2007-07-01, 11:42 PM
But yea, as for Star Trek. Think about it this way:
Picard: Fire!
Worf: *aggressively pushes the fire button*
*ship fires phasor*
This is a very dynamic combat system.

You see it from the Federation's Flagship point of view. Now take it into a Klingon Bird of Prey, where the ship has to manoeuver a lot (do not forget that a BoP is still a very large, powerful war machine, with a crew of at least 20 - nothing like anything any PCs will ever get their hands on)

But, even as someone higher said, even if it's more of a "every person has their own sets of skills to run the ship", what is the purpose of.. let's say, the gunner?

Game Example:

DM: The Jem'Hadar patrol is scattering around, two of them are approaching your hiding position in the asteroit field
Pilot: I fire up the engines when they have past my position, and come about 2 squares behind the left one, to prevent to manoeuver me into their firing arc.
DM: All right, you'll have to make an opposed piloting skill check against the Jem'Hadar pilots, but since your ship is smaller, you'll get a bonus. Next?

Gunner: I fire. (roll dices)
DM: You damage their port nacelle. Next?
Engineer: I put more power into the weapons
DM: All right, Pilot, same tactic?
Pilot: yhea
DM: *roll dices* No luck, the undamaged fighter manage to outmanoeuver you and will be able to target you during the next round
gunner: Can I fire at him?
DM: No, the pilot hasn't put him into your firing arc
Gunner: Then I fire (roll dices)

(end of game example)

BORING to everybody except the pilot.

(And about Star Trek not about ship combat, I beg to differ. Please watch DS9, we have seen more minutes of ship combats there than in star wars movies)

So... I was thinking maybe of making all PCs having their ships to command. Something like battle drones like Andromeda had (or Fighters..?). They could customize them at their leisure, and one of the player could command the Big Ship.

Because, if the whole game is about playing on planets, and then traveling to another planet, I don'T see the difference between that, and a band of adventurers who just teleport between distant countries. Pretty much the same, so why bother playing futuristic?

Kizara
2007-07-01, 11:47 PM
Andromeda had slip fighters.

And these were only useful cause all of Andromeda's weapons >>> everyone else's.

So 1 Andromeda figher = like 4 other ones. That's how I saw it anyways.


PS: Trance in the later seasons is one of the coolest and hotest characters ever.

Xuincherguixe
2007-07-02, 12:04 AM
Probably not my place to say, but I don't see a Star Trek RPG working very well.

(And I kind of like Star Trek)

Then again makes for a good challenge, make Interactive Star Trek work!

HidaTsuzua
2007-07-02, 01:03 AM
I own a Star Trek: TNG RPG (by Last Unicorn). Basically the PCs would be an away team and the sample adventure has the PCs test out various systems of the ship they're on and check out an alien mining facility. And it worked okay. I mean most of the time ST:TNG episodes are either a problem or an encounter (or both). Good RPG fodder even if games will likely become "problem of the week". Star Trek:DS9 might be a good source for ideas as well. You won't get "kill Horta and take its stuff" gameplay though.

For the ship issue you have options if you want to avoid "pilot flies the ship and that's all he does" issue. One is make sure everyone has something to do in ship combat (one guy is head of weapons, another is defense, one is tactical), another is make ship combat simple, quick, and not skill dependent so no one has to invest in it. An option also could be to make sure everyone has to take some sort of field where they provide a skill needed for the party and have when they do that skill quick. So you're the pilot, you're the doctor, you're the mechanic, etc.

The issue Star Trek has is an issue many modern and future games have, technology. One is a weapon power. Guns hurt. Rocket launchers hurt worse. Phases hurt most. If you can't hit the board side of the barn, use area of effect weapons. So either you need some sort of mook rules or gangs of well armed mooks will always be a very deadly problem (my friends call this the "Mooks with Attitude Problem"). You can also keep the fun toys out of people's hands (COPS:the RPG) but it'll be hard to justify them in the PCs and not the mooks. Fantasy typically gets around this with skill and master swords men i.e. mook rules. Mook rules are typically less tolerated in mdoern games as it loses some free when the PC can take out the police squad easily.

Another is recording technology. Think about what a camera in a lich's lair could do for him. Imagine lots of them all over said lair. Now make them hard to see. Now make the microscopic. You can see the issue. Some of settings will have different tech issues (how often do the transports have to break in Star Trek?), but those are the biggest.

Dervag
2007-07-02, 01:30 AM
I was wondering how I could make a Star Trek game works, when I stopped for a second. How could any futuristic space-travelling game works?

I am not talking about land-based adventures, where the PCs are on foot (which would be pretty much the same than any fantastic-based RPG). But when in space, what is the fun of space combat if every player is on the same damn ship, and only 1 player is calling the decisions?One of the standard rules of D&D is to not place one player in command of the others to the point where that player is making all the decisions.

My solution has been to make the captain an NPC (or, in a pinch, a DMPC; I deliberately nerfed him somewhat to keep him from falling prey to classic NPC problems).


Or did I had a misconception about the whole party's usefulness during a space battle? (because, after all, a player's only function is to roll the dice, and he doesn't have to make any decision at all, I wouldn't call it funny)Players should have positions that are applicable during the battle. As long as everyone is running someone who has applicable combat skills, you'll probably be OK. Keep the combat fast-paced. If some of your players don't have skills useful for the space battle make it very fast paced. Ideally, use moments when the heroes' ship takes damage to involve those characters.

It will be harder to keep everyone involved simultaneously in a space battle than in a land battle. But if you keep things moving, you'll be able to keep everyone involved sequentially.

All of this will only work if space battles are a small proportion of the total action. If most of your battles are fought in space, you need a different solution. The best solution I can think of is to give the players a squadron of fighters.

I've never done that. It won't work in Star Trek, because Star Trek battles involve capital ships almost exclusively. If you do use a fighter squadron, you have to answer the question of how some fighters are significantly different from others. Otherwise, everyone in the party is doing the same thing, which is no fun. However, you have a guide in real life, because real-life fighters tend to come equipped with a variety of different weapon systems for different missions. Of course, in real life an entire squadron will be outfitted with ground-attack bombs or long-range air-to-air missiles and all be doing the same job, but you don't have to follow that rule.

Different party members will shine at different tasks if you're using the right system and applying it creatively.

SpiderBrigade
2007-07-02, 01:31 AM
Come up with a way to make the various aspects of ship combat (for instance piloting, weapons, defense, engineering) into minigames. As others have said, simply having the player responsible for each make a skill check when appropriate isn't really...fun.

Piloting is pretty obvious. But for the others, just off the top of my head:

Gunnery/defense would be opposed by their opposite on the other ship. It might be something like the old 3.0 psionic combat rules, with characters choosing an attack and a defense mode each round, and those modes interacting in various ways. Spice this up with some technobabble about shield frequency modulation and you're good to go. And of course the gunner still has to make attacks. The defense guy would also make decisions about which firing arc/facing to defend against, and possibly use a skill to quickly react to unexpected moves by the attacker.

Engineering, meanwhile, would probably be about energy allocation for the various other functions. The pilot wants more speed/maneuverability, the gunner wants power for phasers, the defense guy wants to reinforce his shields. The engineer would be making checks to determine just how much juice he can squeeze out of the old antimatter coils this round, and assigning that energy to the various functions. He'd probably also have the option to try various special maneuvers like overloading or temporarily draining power for life support or what have you.

Finally, there might be room for an additional member of the bridge crew, who would handle things like specialized scanning, unusual tactics with the transporters, etc. This would be the hardest to turn into a minigame, as it would be extremely situational. A more generic approach might be make this position responsible for ELINT and jamming, basically giving you the chance to mess with the enemy's functions in various ways (and stop him from doing the same to you, obviously).

So yeah, that's five things the party members could be doing. If you have a bigger party than that, you can double up on some of the roles (especially gunner) or simply have some members of the team who aren't vital to space combat but rather excel at ground missions or diplomacy or whatever. With a party of 6 or more, it's almost inevitable that not every encounter is going to use everybody's skills.

Xuincherguixe
2007-07-02, 01:41 AM
Ooo! Make sure the Captain is like Zapp Branigan from Futurama :P

(Futurama RPG could almost work actually...)


I guess though that since it sounds like this is Next Generation, you can't have gags about Red Shirts.

kpenguin
2007-07-02, 01:42 AM
Make sure that the enemy has a chance to board and have some PCs have a shoot-out while the others pilot the ship.

TheRiov
2007-07-02, 07:05 AM
I ran a Star Trek LARP at a convention. I dodged a lot of the problems mentioned by doing the following:
A) It took place on a space station. No starship combat took place.
B) Weapons were forbidden to the general public by station rules. Security had them. The Jem'hadar soldier had one. That was about it.


I chose to make phasers 'realistic':more than about 1/4th power resulted in an instant kill. more than 1/2 power didnt even leave a corpse.

The fact that combat is so lethal tends to encourage players to not WANT to get into firefights and to come up with RP solutions to their problems.
(the Jem'Hadar drew a weapon, security dropped him. that was it. no recourse. My players were all new to the rules I was using (my own homebrew variant of WW's Mind's Eye Theatre rules) but were totally shocked that death was that easy. I didn't have any more 'lets shoot 'em up' people after that.



Starship combat is indeed more than a little boring to non pilots. One can get around it in the Star Wars universe by throwing a few fighters into the mix and allowing some people to fly alongside the big ship.

There ARE other tasks you can give people:
Damage Control
Astrogation
Gunnery (Star Wars usually had several turret mounted cannons which helps--star trek weaponry doesnt)
Medical --treating injuries
Security--brig forcefields go out, someone has to contain the prisoners or deal with the Tarkathian Wasps that broke out of the cargo container.