Also known as STTNGRPG or LUG Trek
My continuing mission, to seek out new games, and new RPG systems! This game was published in 1998, which is very apparent. It definitely has some interseting points that make it a good game to play, but there are a few quirks or drawbacks that the game suffers from. I ran a single session with a group of four players, playing a scenario I created that involved a little bit of combat, exploration, and skill tests. The PC’s were beamed down to a jungle planet with a paleological dig happening around a newly discovered temple of a pre-warp civilization that had died out.
##Best Parts:
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Character Creation: Creating characters with the lifepath system was a lot of fun, and really helps you to get into the history and background of the character immediately. I went through and made up all of the characters for this session in order to familiarize myself with the skill, advantages, and disadvantages. Unfortunately, that meant the players did not get to experience this part, which was a bit of a regret, but would have been a large time sink rather spent on playing the game.
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Setting: The Core Rulebook does a wonderful job of telling you everything you need to know about Starfleet, the Federation, and everything else that happened in all of TNG. It does take up a large chunk of the book, but I enjoy setting fluff. This book would have been very useful in a time when the internet was still fresh, as it collects all the information that would fill a Wiki nowadays. This very well may have been one of the best Trek resources at the time for general info.
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Specializations of skills: Specializations on their own are cool! Being able to say your character is good at Basketball or Novel Writing helps give backstory to the characters. However… (see my further points below)
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The Drama Die: A very fun way to handle critical success. This die is meant to be a different color than the rest, and if it rolls a 6, your die result “explodes”, meaning you add both the 6 and the next highest die result before adding your Skill value. This usually (but not always) results in a success.
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Multiple Actions in a round, at a cost: You can declare to try and taker multiple actions, such as shooting a phaser multiple times, but by doing so you increase the Difficulty of every action in that round for your character. Great way to handle this, letting you attempt extra things without letting it be a simple default decision. The math of this game makes even a +1 Difficulty could sway your chances of success by a wide margin.
##Meh Parts:
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The Core Mechanic: For STTNGRPG, a Skill Test is comprised of two parts: the relevant Attribute and the relevant Skill. You create a dice pool made up of a number of d6s equal to your Attribute and roll. The highest individual die result is then added to your Skill value to get your total result, which is compared to a Difficulty Number set by the Narrator. The increasing die pool is a unique way to model the general reliability of a character. While each extra die obviously increases the chance of getting a 6, it also makes it nearly impossible to get a lower value result. 3d6 virtually eliminates max results of 1, and 5d6 does the same to max results of 2. Typical rolls in our game were 2 to 4 dice, with skills ranging from 1-4.
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Setting up a Skill Test: This has a few roadbumps that slow the game down a bit. I mention below that there are too many skills; scanning through the list for an appropriate skill to test is really hard, especially when a specialization could mean that you might not consider “Physical Science” an appropriate skill to test even though a player has “(Chemistry)” as a specialization. Then, you must consider which edges apply to the test. The player must be aware of any possible Advantages or Disadvantages that might apply here too, all of which combines into a period of the Narrator and player looking through their papers, trying to find what applies.
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Rules layout: While the actual game rules take up a minority of the book, they are still written in a verbose way that makes it hard to get a quick read of anything. Rules are buried inside of paragraphs inside of columns. It was difficult to understand the rules without multiple read-throughs and lots of page-flipping. I didnt fully grasp it all until I made a two-page cheatsheet to share with my players.
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Courage Points: A familiar fiat mechanic, didnt get used a ton by the players. Players have a pool of Courage Points they can spend to give themselves a +1 to their result total. I was probably setting difficulties a bit too low, resulting in less need to spend them. More concrete ways to receive or refresh these points is needed. Maybe rewarding a point on a Drama Die result of 1?
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Combat initiative: This game uses a per-round initiative, so for each combat everyone makes a Skill Test at the top of every round and then resolves actions in order. This is a little unwieldy for a typical melee combat, in which case I would just use this roll result for the entire combat. For a battle with ranged phasers, in which a single hit could very likely down an opponent, I think the per-round system works. You are always trying to get a shot off against an opponent before they do the same to you, and the extra time added by rolling each round balances out with the quickness of the encounter.
##Worst Parts:
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Charater Creation: Didn’t I say character creation was one of the best parts??? The lifepath and background history was awesome and lots of fun, but the actual crafting of the character was kind of a drag. It involves selecting different sets of skills and specializations, many of them coming from your background “package” chosen at each stage of the lifepath. These packages are cool ways of giving you ideas for what your character experienced, but almost all of them give you skills like “Any Science (choose two Specializations) 2 (3)". This means you need to go through the skills page, find your skill, and pick a relevant specialization, but you also need to keep in mind how other skils and specializations stack when you receive multiple of the same thing. It just becomes a bit of a bookkeeping nightmare. I wound up writing down all the skills I received, leaving “?” where I could pick a specific skill or specialization, then filling them all in later. A character builder app would be a wonderful modern addition to this game.
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Too many skills: 90’s RPGs suffer from this in bounds. Everyone was racing to make things more realistic and to try to represent every possible skill your character could have. The Core Rulebook has fifty-two (!!!) skills, not including the 7 additional skills only for use if you have Psi. Most of those skills have more than two specializations, with some going as high as eight specializations, and with the rules specifying that infinite specilizations are possible in order to customize your character. Fifty-two skills is too many to be able to remember or even keep on a reference sheet. Many of them seem to be a little redundant, too. Why have Computers (Programming), Physical Science (Computer Science), AND Systems Engineering (Computers)? Obviously, infinite specializations means there will be inevitable overlap, but having these as the recommended specializations is a bit too much. It makes the friction of Skill Tests unnesecarily higher.
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Rules unclear about matching Skill and Skill Specialization Levels: Some characters ended up with skills like “Shipboard Systems (Sensors) 2 (2)". In this case, the Core Rulebook only states something like “the generalized skill knowledge now matches the specialized skill knowledge”. To me, this feels like a sudden waste of a Speclization. This might be cleared up by the Tweaks I mention below.
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No clear rules for the Drama Die rolling a 1. The book mentions that “a drama die of 1 and all other dice at a 1 would ceratinly be a Dramatic Failure”, which is just plain obvious. It implies something else is supposed to happen on a roll of 1, but nothing is mentioned.
##Didnt Try:
- Ship-to-ship combat: Truthfully, I didn’t even look over the rules for it.
##Tweaks I would make for future plays:
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Merge many skills. Less is more, combining skills into broad areas works better for an RPG in play, rather than trying to simulate the specific knowledge of a fictional character. I might consider keeping the skills as written only for doing the lifepath process, as that tends to give a very good idea of the character personality and interests.
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Modify Skill Specializations. The “Player’s Guide” book includes a variant rule that removes Skill Specializations for almost all skills except a few that dont make sense as general skills.
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Use the modified Cadet Cruise background rules from the “Player’s Guide”. This changes the amount of Development Points you get at this stage from a measly single point to four. It makes this stage actually have meaning, and the extra detail on packages is very nice.
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Use static initiaitve for melee fights, only use per-round initiative for “one-hit-kill” fights.
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On a Drama Die roll of 1, it affects your outcome of the Test in a negative way. If you would have succeeded on the Test, the Narrator descibes a “success, at a cost” type of resolution. Maybe you fixed the warp core, but you’ve accidentally modified the warp signature to make it easier for enemies to track you. If you would fail on the Test, you always get a Dramatic Failure, making whatever situation you were in a whole lot more dramatic.
##Summary I enjoyed playing the game, but there are better ways to handle the quick and heroic roleplaying of a Star Trek game. Simulationist playing is not a necessity!