Playground Determinator in… Star Trek?

[Quertus]

So, I was thinking about roleplaying, and the Playground Determinator, and I asked myself, “what’s the most suboptimal setting I know, the one that would send a true Determinator into fits?” And my answer was, Star Trek.

I figure that the best place to start is, what tools does Star Trek give our noble Determinator, that they can show the locals how to use?

So, Playgrounders, I ask you, what tools would the Determinator have to work with in Star Trek? And, for simplicity, let’s limit ourselves to just what the Federation, explorers and inventors that they are, are known to “possess” (regardless of whether they built it themselves).

Space ships
Artificial gravity
“Inertia Dampeners”
Transporters
Replicators
Holodecks
Holograms
AI
Androids
Exocomps
“Warp speed”
Deflectors
Force fields
Subspace communication
Phasers
Photon torpedoes
Genesis torpedoes / devices
Tractor beams
Antimatter
Cloaking devices Phasing
Empaths
Time travel (!!!)


I’m sure anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Star Trek could come up with a lot more.

But for that last one, Time Travel, I’m aware of 3 sources. And this is particularly interesting. Two of them (involving warping around a star, and whatever the Federation time cops possess) seem to be of the “inviolate timeline”, “A causes B causes C causes A” variety, but the third, involving a giant alien portal, can actually change history. Few settings actually possess multiple time travel mechanics canonically, making Star Trek quite the ripe grounds for our Determinator, I should think.

So, what other tools does Star Trek possess? And just how under-utilized are these tools? What would a Determinator do in such a setting?

[Satinavian]

But for that last one, Time Travel, I’m aware of 3 sources. And this is particularly interesting. Two of them (involving warping around a star, and whatever the Federation time cops possess) seem to be of the “inviolate timeline”, “A causes B causes C causes A” variety, but the third, involving a giant alien portal, can actually change history. Few settings actually possess multiple time travel mechanics canonically, making Star Trek quite the ripe grounds for our Determinator, I should think.
Star Trek time travel is generally utterly inconsistent nonsense that usually doesn't even work logically inside the single episode/film it pops up far less setting wide.

It is not a tool for some Determinator, because it is basically unpredictable and "the GM makes up whatever fits his plot best, logic is unnecessary". Star Trek time travel is something to avoid as player.



Also you might want to explain what you mean with Determinator. You tend to use a lot of slang that you seem to believe is common in the Playground but actually is anything but.

[Mastikator]

Tricorders either specialized like medical or general.
Super human ability (max one per character, and not intelligence) enabling prosthetics.
Telepaths, and races immune to telepathy/empathy.
Races with superhuman abilities.
Normal humans with superhuman versatility.
Environmental controls that can create almost any environment.
Sensors that can detect, analyze and track almost anything, even individual neutrinos.

Also I agree Satinavian, your best option to limit inconsistency is to pick only one of the shows, or better yet only one season and use only the things present. So for example holograms only exist within holodeck, and sentient AI depends on the show (yes if Next Gen, DS9 or Voyager, both androids and holo-characters).

[Rynjin]

Add me to the list of "what do you mean by Determinator in this context" because from context clues it sounds like you mean someone who determines the course of events through time travel but you're using the same name as one of the better known TvTropes pages (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Determinator) which means something completely different.

[Quertus]

Star Trek time travel is generally utterly inconsistent nonsense that usually doesn't even work logically inside the single episode/film it pops up far less setting wide.

It is not a tool for some Determinator, because it is basically unpredictable and "the GM makes up whatever fits his plot best, logic is unnecessary". Star Trek time travel is something to avoid as player.

Now, it’s been about a million years since I saw the episodes / movies in question, but I struggle to imagine that they themselves could lack internal consistency, given that each only has iirc 2-3 instances of time travel. The rules seem to be

The City on the Edge of Forever: ok, the full rules of this one are difficult to divine, but that doesn’t make them inherently inconsistent. One possible, consistent set of mechanics could be, Time is mutable. However, the Guardian of Forever sits outside Time; thus, those in its immediate vicinity are unaffected by changed timelines. Further, “butterfly effects” simply don’t exist - only major actions ripple out into actual changes.

(Unknown TNG episode): a Federation time cop tries to destroy (?) the Enterprise to prevent Time damage, inadvertently causing that demand. The time cop is convinced that A causes B causes C causes A; effectively, that his life is a lie, and that Destiny is immutable.

The Voyage Home: Unknown (presumably, like the modern Avengers movie, changing the past can’t change your past)

Infinity War (or whatever the Avengers movie was called): “the past” is mutable, but it is effectively “someone else’s past, not yours”. Time travel creates a branch Reality, and you change that, not your own past.



Tricorders either specialized like medical or general.
Super human ability (max one per character, and not intelligence) enabling prosthetics.
Telepaths, and races immune to telepathy/empathy.
Races with superhuman abilities.
Normal humans with superhuman versatility.
Environmental controls that can create almost any environment.
Sensors that can detect, analyze and track almost anything, even individual neutrinos.

Ah, I had meant to include something about sensors capable of detecting FTL objects, but they do have more sensory abilities than just that.

I’m not sure what your “superhuman abilities / versatility” reference.


Also I agree Satinavian, your best option to limit inconsistency is to pick only one of the shows, or better yet only one season and use only the things present. So for example holograms only exist within holodeck, and sentient AI depends on the show (yes if Next Gen, DS9 or Voyager, both androids and holo-characters).

Fireball deals fire damage; lightning bolt deals electric damage. There’s no inconsistency inherent in different things working different ways.


Also you might want to explain what you mean with Determinator. You tend to use a lot of slang that you seem to believe is common in the Playground but actually is anything but.
Add me to the list of "what do you mean by Determinator in this context" because from context clues it sounds like you mean someone who determines the course of events through time travel but you're using the same name as one of the better known TvTropes pages (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Determinator) which means something completely different.

(Darth Sidious’ voice) “I will make it legal common!”

So, my understanding of the phrase “(Playground) Determinator” is a character who is utterly optimized, to the point of falling to seem like a real being. They share a lot in common with an MtG Spike, but would consider Spike suboptimal. They may manifest as a Schrödinger's Wizard, always having the best possible spell prepared for any situation, by sitting down to tea while polymorphed into a giant tortoise so as to be immune to surprise, or by elaborate 5d Wizard chess involving adventuring via Astral Protection while their Vecna-blooded body is on a custom Demiplane with no available space for others to plane shift in. A Determinator is generally so optimized as to be unrecognizable in the context of the setting that spawned them. Not to be mistaken for optimization for the sake of optimization, as many players who create a Determinator act as if they cannot imagine how anyone could ever be so stupid as to not act perfectly, regardless of whether they themselves have never employed such a strategy before.

[Satinavian]

Now, it’s been about a million years since I saw the episodes / movies in question, but I struggle to imagine that they themselves could lack internal consistency, given that each only has iirc 2-3 instances of time travel. The rules seem to beAside from the temporal cold war arc, most episodes with time travel work more as Groudhog Day loops with the plot being how to get out of this. There often are inconsistencies about what gets resetted and what not (naturally some things must differ for the plot to evolve) and the final resolution if often not a good fit for whatever technobable started the whole thing. Especially the resolution tends to leave some paradoxa unresolved.

The second most common plot is about "restoring the correct timeline". This tends to rely heavily on the butterfly effect to make an urgent need to intervene but then nearly all the actions of the "restorers" don't change much. Additionally the critical event, while restored, usually is heavily modified and totally not like the original and still works the same way. Also the protagonists tend to keep their knowledge from the unmodified timeline for some reason, usually without explanation (with the exception of the temporal shielding in the Year of Hell plot. But that had other wonky stuff).

We also do have more than a few predestination paradoxon based plots as well. Though in most cases that only gets resolved near conclusion. However there are episodes where the protagonists only start getting involved because they knew of their past involvement.

What is worst is if those get mixed and you have both predestination ( hinting at immutable past ) and "restoring timelines" (hinting at mutable ones) in the same story.

And sure, we do have an abundance of episodes doing the "branch reality" as well. Sometimes dozens in the same episode like the last one from TNG. But hier often the inconsistencies revolve about the utter impossibility of all the changes being reasonably linked to whatever the branching point actually was (most egregious in the Kelvin timeline)



And then there are episodes mixing time-travel and mirror universe.

And episodes where only some memories travel and people basically experience getting repeatedly into younger bodies traveling in direction of their birth.

And episodes where people meet themself all the time with timelags of a couple of second.

And that is all without superpowerful entities like the guardian or Q messing with things.





As for the original question, Star Trek canon, if taken at face value, has so many ways to utterly break the setting that there is not really a game for an optimizer to play. If you really want to play a Star Trek RPG youwould have to thoroughly cut stuff.

[Morgaln]

(Unknown TNG episode): a Federation time cop tries to destroy (?) the Enterprise to prevent Time damage, inadvertently causing that demand. The time cop is convinced that A causes B causes C causes A; effectively, that his life is a lie, and that Destiny is immutable.



That is actually an episode (or rather, two episodes) of Voyager,and the time cop is by no means convinced that destiny is immutable. In fact, it's his job to stop things that would change the timeline (which is why he tries to destroy the Voyager), since, apparently, in the 28th? century, the federation can sense these things before they happen.
In that particular episode, trying to prevent the change in the timeline in fact makes it happen and causes a temporal accident. However, the timeline Voyager is in actually does not change because the whole accident is what enabled that timeline in the first place, due to the 28th century time ship getting thrown into the 20th century and causing the whole computerization and other tech advancement we've seen over the last ~5 decades (yes, according to Voyager, we have computers because a ship from the future crashed on earth).
The whole episode is a mess and doesn't make much sense overall (why would they even sense a change in timelines if the whole event is what caused this timeline in the first place, for starters).

Voyager also has the "Year of Hell", which involves a ship that can eliminate whole planets from existence in past and present, thus changing timelines by wiping whole species from ever existing. In that episode, the past can very much be changed and will have major effects on the present.

And then there's the whole mess of the temporal cold war in "Enterprise," complete with obligatory Nazi episode. The past is very much mutable here (they even have a full reset on some disastrous events, probably to explain why a major disaster would never show up in the history of any of the previous shows).

The second season of Discovery, on the other hand, treats time travel more like A -> B -> C -> A, in that everything that happens will be explained by later actions of the crew, i. e. time is a stable loop.

I haven't seen "Picard" but I have heard that it also involves time travel.


I would definitely add travel between alternate worlds (i. e. the Mirror Universe) to OP's list

[Mastikator]

I’m not sure what your “superhuman abilities / versatility” reference.

Geordi La Forge, his visor gives him super human vision. He can see well beyond the human spectrum, he can see things like polarization, he can see particles that are invisible like neutrinos. If an object is radioactive or transmitting via photos he can see it. The visor can also transmit this visual information to a third receiver and it can be displayed on screen.

Seven of Nine has many borg implants that grant her super human strength, agility, memory, reasoning. Her senses are keen enough to pick up on micro expressions that let her all but read emotions like an empath. Also Hugh and other rescued borg.


Fireball deals fire damage; lightning bolt deals electric damage. There’s no inconsistency inherent in different things working different ways.Transwarp, lets you travel faster than warp 10, also lets you travel at infinite speed, also lets the borg travel much faster than warp 13 but not infinite. Changes from episode to episode. It's very inconsistent.

[Mechalich]

So, with regard to overly optimized characters in Star Trek, it should be noted that there is an extremely obvious example in canon: Wesley Crusher. A Gary Stu character who acted way over his head repeatedly and then, wait for it, evolved into a higher-dimensional being with power over space and time who apparently, as of events in Picard (which I have not seen), engaged in manipulating whole timelines or something.

[GloatingSwine]

Star Trek time travel is generally utterly inconsistent nonsense that usually doesn't even work logically inside the single episode/film it pops up far less setting wide.

It is not a tool for some Determinator, because it is basically unpredictable and "the GM makes up whatever fits his plot best, logic is unnecessary". Star Trek time travel is something to avoid as player.



Also you might want to explain what you mean with Determinator. You tend to use a lot of slang that you seem to believe is common in the Playground but actually is anything but.

If you can figure out which type of time travel produces what events and get one of the ones that rewrites the present (Borg time drives seem to do so), then you can do a Xeelee.

Time travel back to the beginning of the universe and refound your civilisation there, then every time you invent or discover something new send the information back to yourself at the beginning of the universe.

[Quertus]

What is worst is if those get mixed and you have both predestination ( hinting at immutable past ) and "restoring timelines" (hinting at mutable ones) in the same story.

As for the original question, Star Trek canon, if taken at face value, has so many ways to utterly break the setting that there is not really a game for an optimizer to play. If you really want to play a Star Trek RPG youwould have to thoroughly cut stuff.

D&D has its spamming Ice Assassins and whatnot that aren’t exactly conducive to “normal” play; I don’t expect a Star Trek Determinator to produce normal play, either.

But are there examples of internally-inconsistent Time travel that use both mutable and immutable timelines in the same mechanic? If so, that might be too high a hurdle for me, at least, to parse.


That is actually an episode (or rather, two episodes) of Voyager,

Was it? Huh. Darn senility.


Voyager also has the "Year of Hell", which involves a ship that can eliminate whole planets from existence in past and present, thus changing timelines by wiping whole species from ever existing. In that episode, the past can very much be changed and will have major effects on the present.

I should have remembered that one. Darn senility.

Anyway, I’m fine with different methods of manipulating time having different mechanics.


I would definitely add travel between alternate worlds (i. e. the Mirror Universe) to OP's list

Can the Federation access this “mirror universe”?


Transwarp, lets you travel faster than warp 10, also lets you travel at infinite speed, also lets the borg travel much faster than warp 13 but not infinite. Changes from episode to episode. It's very inconsistent.

Huh. Can it be written off as “the characters’ understanding of it changes from episode to episode”, or “the implementation differs from episode to episode”, or is it truly incoherent?


If you can figure out which type of time travel produces what events and get one of the ones that rewrites the present (Borg time drives seem to do so), then you can do a Xeelee.

Time travel back to the beginning of the universe and refound your civilisation there, then every time you invent or discover something new send the information back to yourself at the beginning of the universe.

That sounds like a Determinator action, yes. Who/what is “Xeelee”?

[Satinavian]

If you can figure out which type of time travel produces what events and get one of the ones that rewrites the present (Borg time drives seem to do so), then you can do a Xeelee.

Time travel back to the beginning of the universe and refound your civilisation there, then every time you invent or discover something new send the information back to yourself at the beginning of the universe.Nah, beginning of the universe was established in Voyager as a favorite hiding spot for the Qs. You don't want to mess with them until you are stronger.

Generally, time travel would be quite powerful if you could make it reliable if not for all those other time travellers, many of whom have time-spanning perception and/or sensor and might mess with everything you do they don't like.

[GloatingSwine]

That sounds like a Determinator action, yes. Who/what is “Xeelee”?

The Xeelee are an alien species in a series of stories by Stephen Baxter, which largely concern them being annoyed by humanity as they attempt to fight a cosmic war with a personification of the heat death of the universe.

[Mastikator]

Huh. Can it be written off as “the characters’ understanding of it changes from episode to episode”, or “the implementation differs from episode to episode”, or is it truly incoherent?
The actual physics of transwarp changes dramatically. Paris literally exists everywhere all at once and turns into a reptile for doing it. In TNG there's a future episode where they travel at warp 13 (3 warps above infinite speed) and it just means they go faster. Meanwhile the borg can travel hundreds of thousands of lightyears in hours (AKA, giga ultra beyond super sayian fast) but still nothing compared infinity using transwarp tech. In TGN The Traveler enable the enterprise to not only travel to the andromeda galaxy (many millions of times faster than the borg!) and then to the edge of the universe where thought and spacetime literally literally meld into one another.

Each episode up to voyager is perfectly self consistent. Mostly entire seasons are self consistent. However there are many seasons and many show so inconsistencies are bound to happen.

Compared to other franchises I consider Star Trek to be a shining beacon on the hill, but time makes fools of everyone.

I think running a Star Trek TTRPG you would have to outline every gadget in the game, describe precisely what each one can do and come down like a ton of bricks on players that don't respect that. Because the base of star trek is so utterly campaign breaking, not even including player imagination.

[GloatingSwine]

The actual physics of transwarp changes dramatically. Paris literally exists everywhere all at once and turns into a reptile for doing it.

There's a reason the Infinite Improbability Drive runs on tea not coffee, but you try telling Captain Janeway that coffee isn't the right answer...

[Beleriphon]

So, with regard to overly optimized characters in Star Trek, it should be noted that there is an extremely obvious example in canon: Wesley Crusher. A Gary Stu character who acted way over his head repeatedly and then, wait for it, evolved into a higher-dimensional being with power over space and time who apparently, as of events in Picard (which I have not seen), engaged in manipulating whole timelines or something.

That was Q, and Wesley shows up at the very end and recruits a character. Basically, he links the Travellers with Gary Seven's Supervisors.


I think running a Star Trek TTRPG you would have to outline every gadget in the game, describe precisely what each one can do and come down like a ton of bricks on players that don't respect that. Because the base of star trek is so utterly campaign breaking, not even including player imagination.

I think Modiphious' 2d20 system for Star Trek Adventures does a great job. Wacky devices basically come down to determining how difficult a task is (GM job) and letting the players technobabble their justifications about what skills they want to use. Given that there are six super broad skills (defined as your department score) that combine with six super broad attributes it works shockingly well. If there's a focus (a freely defined area of expertise) the character get extra stuff when rolling.

[Morgaln]

Can the Federation access this “mirror universe”?



By the time of DS9, the Federation (and other factions) has the knowledge and technology to travel to the mirror universe, although they generally don't do it for security reasons.

[Khedrac]

Transwarp, lets you travel faster than warp 10, also lets you travel at infinite speed, also lets the borg travel much faster than warp 13 but not infinite. Changes from episode to episode. It's very inconsistent.

Err no - they are using different measuring systems for Warp Speed here.

TOS and films Warp N was N^3 c
Next Gen had the method of producing warp speed have a very interesting power to speed equation which was weird and produced 8 or 9 optimum points where the drive was more efficient, these were labelled Warp 1 to Warp 9 (not sure if Warp 1 was still c or not) and above Warp 9 the scale used a log system where Warp 9.9 = 10 x Warp 9 and Warp 9.99 = 10 x Warp 9.9 etc. with Warp 10 defined as Infinity.

The Voyager writers not understanding infinity then wrote complete nonsense where the shuttle reached Warp 10 using their experimental drive. This is FASTER than any Transwarp drive. (Yes it probably would go through every point in the universe at once, it would also require infinite energy to get there - infinite speed isn't much use if the practical speed - where you can control your emergence - is no faster than other methods, Douglas Adams mad this point with the infinite improbability drive being a lot slower than the bistromathic drive despite also passing through every point in the universe at once).

Transwarp sits in an interesting place. The Federation were experimenting with it at the time of Star Trek Generations - the Excelsior had an experimental Transwarp drive.
By the time of NextGen the latest Enterprise (far faster than the Excelsior at top speed) did not have a Transwarp drive, presumably because the Federation could not make it work reliably.
This means "transwarp" isn't necessarily fast, it's more a different way of travelling.
Note: Lore and the Borg tended to use "Transwarp Conduits" rather than a pure "transwarp drive" suggesting that even they couldn't get it to work reliably.

I believe that at some point post-NextGen the Warp 10 = Infinity scale was abandoned in favour of a new uncapped scale and when speeds like "Warp 15" are banded about they come from this one but who knows how they translate to the two previous scales (except they will lie between Warp 9 and Warp 10 on the NextGen scale).

[Rakaydos]

Err no - they are using different measuring systems for Warp Speed here.

TOS and films Warp N was N^3 c
Next Gen had the method of producing warp speed have a very interesting power to speed equation which was weird and produced 8 or 9 optimum points where the drive was more efficient, these were labelled Warp 1 to Warp 9 (not sure if Warp 1 was still c or not) and above Warp 9 the...
(...)
I believe that at some point post-NextGen the Warp 10 = Infinity scale was abandoned in favour of a new uncapped scale and when speeds like "Warp 15" are banded about they come from this one but who knows how they translate to the two previous scales (except they will lie between Warp 9 and Warp 10 on the NextGen scale).

This actually sounds like a basic progression of tech, where additional optimal points beyond Warp 9 were discovered and added to the Warp 9 naming scheme.

[GloatingSwine]

Err no - they are using different measuring systems for Warp Speed here.

TOS and films Warp N was N^3 c
Next Gen had the method of producing warp speed have a very interesting power to speed equation which was weird and produced 8 or 9 optimum points where the drive was more efficient, these were labelled Warp 1 to Warp 9 (not sure if Warp 1 was still c or not) and above Warp 9 the scale used a log system where Warp 9.9 = 10 x Warp 9 and Warp 9.99 = 10 x Warp 9.9 etc. with Warp 10 defined as Infinity.


Warp always moved at the speed of plot, whatever era it was.

The actual series never tied themselves down to particular speeds or felt the need to be strict with themselves about them, other than big number go fast.

[Bohandas]

But for that last one, Time Travel, I’m aware of 3 sources. And this is particularly interesting. Two of them (involving warping around a star, and whatever the Federation time cops possess) seem to be of the “inviolate timeline”, “A causes B causes C causes A” variety, but the third, involving a giant alien portal, can actually change history. Few settings actually possess multiple time travel mechanics canonically, making Star Trek quite the ripe grounds for our Determinator, I should think.

There was also an episode of Voyager where the antagonists had a gun that erased things from history

[Rynjin]

There was also an episode of Voyager where the antagonists had a gun that erased things from history

Was that Voyager or Enterprise? I thought that was a Time Cop thing.

Edit: Oh, right. Are we talking about Year of Hell?

[Bohandas]

Was that Voyager or Enterprise? I thought that was a Time Cop thing.

Edit: Oh, right. Are we talking about Year of Hell?

Yes. The Year of Hell.

[Quertus]

There was also an episode of Voyager where the antagonists had a gun that erased things from history


Was that Voyager or Enterprise? I thought that was a Time Cop thing.

Edit: Oh, right. Are we talking about Year of Hell?


Yes. The Year of Hell.

Yes, that was definitely one of the most memorable time-manipulation abilities in Star Trek. It’s not technically time travel, so I can pretend I didn’t just forget it between thinking of this thread and posting it; I can pretend that my excluding that episode was intentional.

Of course, all those other episodes involving time travel, I either did forget, or lumped then under “must be the same as one of the ones I mentioned”.