Star Trek Games

spiriferida

Having played in a game in the past that probably could have been reskinned into a star trek game with a very small amount of effort, it worked best when it was a relatively small group, rank wasn’t several degrees of stratification (basically a few department heads and everyone else was about the same level, where most of the department heads traded off being STs) and players basically had free rein to propose a plot planet and put characters through hell on it.

We did some degree of bureaucratic rp, but there were enough interpersonal tensions due to factions present on the crew that there were reasons for conflict and consequences to that tension. The game runners occasionally threatened the ship itself, but some of my favorite plots there could start from a supply run gone wrong, or a investigation of a derelict station that was full of horrible monsters, surprise.

If a game is set in a tense environment where every PC is expected to have a competency or two that they bring to the table, then everyone has a good reason to go on away missions that put their life at risk. In fact, if part of the job of PCs is to go on those away missions, that solves half of the problem.

Warma Sheen

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

The default Trek would play like a FC-driven game, with the department heads as coveted positions and everyone else feeling like second fiddle. That was also how the old-school Trek games I tried felt, and why I believe they were never as popular as some of the other genres.

I feel compelled to point out that while this is a problem in many games, I can only imagine that on a Star Trek game this would only be amplified considering the series has a very popular similarly themed meme about being a red-shirt.

So even if your character was not actually wearing a red shirt, it would feel like you were - much faster, given the setting.

Jennkryst

The return of Strange New Worlds means we are primed for Trek, go go go go go!

Raistlin

@Jennkryst LOL As an aside, I thought the first two episodes of season 3 were really good.

Gashlycrumb

I love Trek and played Trek MUs, and I would again.

The first one I tried was not playable for me. It had multiple planets and ships and space code. It seemed to be the sort of deal where you’d do a group app as bridge crew of your ship and go around exploring and having ship vs ship battles.

The second one was Anomaly TrekMUX, which was pretty great. It didn’t have a pervasive bridge-crew/redshirt problem like people are predicting. At least, not in the sense of higher-ranking officers doing everything. At one point certain GMs were awfully keen on “this looks like a job for my alt!” plots, but that was Spider, and it did suffer Spidered-game problems of that era of MUdom. Really its major problem was that the really important plot was pre-written to end with the game runner’s PC saving the universe as part of a secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos, which is kinda lousy game for those who ICly didn’t groove on time-travelling fascist murder hobos, and having them the heroes a betrayal of Star Trek-ness. (And not in a cool, fun, Lower Decks kinda way.)

There was a spin-off one, Gamma One, which was also a bit of alright, especially considering that it too was Spidered.  Those games had space-station settings and meant to be like Deep Space Nine. DS9 didn’t have redshirts and was about the biggest ensemble cast on, outside of afternoon soaps. It’s a pretty good model of alternating and overlapping running plots for different playgroups.

I certainly didn’t get to do all The Things when I had a department head PC. But I did also acted as if it was my role as a department head to assign The Things to my IC subordinates.

There were also a couple of Trek MUs around that time that were each set on a single large ship, Enterprise-D like. This cut out the possibility of civilian characters, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.

Jennkryst

@Gashlycrumb said in Star Trek Games:

secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos

Section 31 is only fun when it is a dude who thinks it’s real, but it isn’t. Or a try-hard who thinks it’s really cool, Starfleet definitely needs a second, soopar seekrit intelligence arm, and just constantly fails because everyone else makes fun of this dumb thought.

… ahem.

So the ‘when’ is as important as the ‘where’. If you set it after Romulus blows up, and Romulans are kind of migratory, then options open a bit. If you set it after Picard, literally everyone in Starfleet has PTSD for Picard S3 reasons. Picard also feels like it plays things fast and loose with Stardates, so ???

Not terribly important.

(I do realize for the Romulus Nova to be a plot point, the game would be set a decade after the TNG/DS9 crossover bubble, which is more important than Picard fast/loose timey wimey)

Fun dates/basic timeline

2365 - Q Who, Borg meet cute
2369 - Deep Space 9 S1
2370 - TNG finale during December, leads directly into…
2371 - Voyager MIA
2375 - Odo asks Kyra if she would still love him after he becomes an ocean of goo
2379 - Star Trek: Nemesis
2380 - Lower Decks S1
2385 - Martian Shipyards go boom
2387 - Romulus Supernova

Anyway, Deep Space 69 (pun intended, what with all the TS) can be a joint mission base for exploring… somewhere. It could be Romulans just found out about the Supernova, and DS:69 is stationed in a system where another K-type Dwarf Star looked like it was going to Supernova in the past, but abruptly stabilized, and we are here to find out why/if that can save Romulus. Or it could be a hub where people are looking for nearby worlds that could serve as a colony for relocation, with multiple plots around making sure things won’t violate the Prime Directive, sticking it near a modern day Shackleton Expanse, or maybe even near the edge of Klingon space, which gives them a reason to be involved.

Or both! Alternatively, something else. Whomst can say?

Obviously have your different class ships for different missions. Alts are cool, just don’t let one person be the chief engineer on every ship. Maybe even say they can’t have a second engineer unless they have command and science alts, also? Now we’re in the weeds and need more feedback from other players.

Gashlycrumb

@Jennkryst Yeah – those games were all before Nemesis was released, and chose to ignore it and part ways with the canon timeline.

There was one good thing about the time-travelling murder hobos, which is that everyone OOCly knew their secret, since logs of their actions were shared on the game wiki. Contrary to the arguments of OOC masq proponents about how impossible this is, the players kept it OOC knowledge. Some managed to figure it out IC in purely IC ways. Many players thought it was pretty shite game-writing to restrict knowledge of and action regarding a universal threat to a small group of PCs, and had no desire to support or cooperate with that element of the plot, but still I have no recollection of cheating being a problem.