Mr. Welch's Mad Musings: The Star Trek RPG
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2024
- Come back to the early years of RPGs, when we couldn't get enough of phasers, Klingons and shirtless Canadians. FASA's Star Trek was the first of many games for that setting, and by many still considered the best. It used a generic percentile system, a fantastic ship combat mechanic and gave players more Star Trek lore in a few years than they had gotten in decades. Unfortunately it served as one of the first examples of why licensing RPGs is usually a bad idea.
Everyone else started with D&D but this was actually my first rpg. Fond memories.
For me, it depends...We made characters for Elfquest (a Prototype for some edition of Runequest and based off the Comic series), but the first I ever actually played was Traveller 4th edition.
MANY fond memories. Operation Grey Ghost will be remembered!
One night we made the DM mad in our weekly D&D game and we wound up in a series of white corridors with people shooting rays of disintegration at us. Only 1 member of the party made it out of the corridors and that by running for his life. In his flight, he grabbed a shiny plaque off the wall. When he got back to town and tried to sell it, he was told it was brass and even with funny engravings and odd pictures on it, it wasn't worth much. A wizard found it curious and bought it for 20 copper pennies. Said wizard translated the writing on it-
Plaque said 'NCC 1701 USS Enterprise'
yeah. We made that DM kinda mad... The Trekkie in me went 'NO!!! THEY BROKE STARFLEET REGULATIONS!' in shooting to kill without calling for surrender from a bunch of guys with swords and bows. Not that we would have understood them without translators of our own, but still...
@@dwrdwlsn5 was there an elf with a goatee? You might have landed on the wrong Enterprise.
@@Joshf4phan Honestly? I do not remember. Maybe.
He was VERY upset that we trashed his campaign that he worked so hard to make in the first hour of the session. It wasn't MY fault my dwarf rolled natural 20s with his throwing hammer and critically hit (and killed) the dragon we were supposed to lose to, be captured and have to escape from before being eaten. Not my fault at all! And no, said dwarf fighter did not make it out of those corridors.
What was the race that had the arm mounted on the front? I had one of those in the one session we did of the Star Trek roleplaying game before we tore it all apart by being utter nerds.
@@dwrdwlsn5 I know the species you're talking about but I can't remember the name either.
And really you're not running games until you've had the players completely derail your plans and had to make something entirely new up on the spot. That's on him.
The mid-2000s Trek RPG (can't remember specifics) had some fun. We drove the GM crazy by... basically pulling stuff that would not be out of place on The Orville or Lower Decks. He then tried to pull a Halloween episode by randomly having PCs replaced by Mirror versions. My tac officer and the engineer, both Romulans, were switched.
Chaos reigned.
Also, the ship combat bit reminds me of STO. Love the ship combat. Hate the ground combat...
I think my favorite supplement was the Ship Construction manual. I went hog wild, statting up all the other ships that weren't canon I could lay my hands on, like the Akyazi Perimeter Action Ship, the Belknap class battlecruiser, the K'Teremny class destroyer, the Franz Joseph designs from the original Star Trek Technical Manual, as well as a plethora of Star Fleet Battles ships. I still have all the ship record sheets I made, either on paper or on spreadsheets.
The last FASA ST game I played, one of my friend's PC failed the roll for graduating from SF Academy ten times in a row. We laughed out selves silly. That guy's a multi millionaire now.
FASA wasn't even the first game company that was licensed to create a Star Trek RPG. That would be Heritage models in the late seventies. I saw a copy of their Star Trek game in a comic book store and agonized over whether to spend a month's allowance on it, but in the end I just bought more miniatures. Heritage mostly was a miniatures company, and they mostly made Napoleonic war miniatures in 15mm and 25mm. But they made a huge variety of 25mm miniatures for Star Trek, John Carter of Mars, and Lord of the Rings. They had figures for the main cast of Star Trek, as well as multiple poses for every almost every alien that appeared in TOS and the Animated series.
Before that there was Lou Zocchi's Star Fleet Battle Manual, which was a tabletop wargame based on the Franz Joseph Star Trek technical manual. I don't think that one was approved by Paramount. But Zocchi made lead miniatures for all the ships in that book, as well as ships for the Tholians, Klingons and Romulans. I bought my first ever 20-sided die at a Star Trek convention just to play that game. This was before D&D caught on, and 20 sided dice were a novelty.
One of the few games I got started into back in the 80s, and mainly we played the Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, because it was so fun. We had to make up a couple of rules for it, and make the Romulans a bit more of a threat, because the Romulan Ship Recognition manual is the weakest of the three main books for starships, with only like two or three Romulan ships capable of possibly duking it out with the Klingons let alone the Federation ships. Whenever we did play the RPG and we had to face Romulans, the GM always put us up against a Winged Defender, because that meant business; that thing could take on an Enterprise-class (read Constitution-refit) and possibly win, and short of the stock Nova-class Battleship in the game, that was pretty much what the Romulans could field from the book.
The RPG had some issues, and one of them that we exploited was bows and arrows, which had better range and was a bit more deadly than phasers, so we might often beam down with those weapons than phasers.
We had the most fun playing as Klingons. In those days, the Klingons were not the quasi-samurai types we'd see in TNG yet; they were more like fascist-pirates, a la Kruge and Kor. The game even had two printed adventures for playing Klingons, and I remember having fun with those. It's nice when one of your options of dealing with a planet is to exterminate everything on the planet, though even the Klingon space fleet kind of frowned on that because they'd rather enslave rather than exterminate. I even got to challenge the captain of the ship, and win, and take over as captain.
One of the issues I had with the game, along with a lot of games of this era (with the exception of TMNT and Other Strangeness by Palladium Games) was that the hero-characters of the setting were unbelievably awesome in terms of stats. There was no way you could conceivably make anyone like Kirk, Spock, or even Bones, Scotty or Sulu with the rules as written. Kirk must've had an obscene amount of experience to draw from to make his stats as they were. That always takes me out of the game, because it felt like whenever we had to deal with Kirk and the Enterprise we were basically holding their luggage while they did all the important stuff.
All in all, it had its flaws, but we made it work.
FASA Star Trek and Star Fleet Battles, fun times.
FASA Star Trek was my first RPG. Played that many years!
At last! Someone did this excellent game some justice. FASA Trek was the first game I read and it made me fall in love with percentile dice.
I still have a ton of FASA Star Trek stuff from back in the day. I ran the RPG and the Starship Combat Simulator. I also have all but one of the starship miniatures. USS Northampton has to date eluded me. From my experience, you are definitely spot on about the supremacy of the INT and LUC skills.
We started off playing the FASA version of Trek, then ditched it later on for the LUG system and adopted a lot of the background stuff (including the Lyrians from SFC) in our game. Ship combat has always been a problem in all of the Trek games so we attempted to re-work the FASA system and simplified the larger combat by re-working the ship combat system from the B5 Babyon Project (the mass ship combat system is the real gem in that short lived game; the beginning scenario was also good but the game rules themselves... clunky at best). We even put together a freebie mini rule set that we ran at Cangames and is floating around the net in a corner or two
I Shatn't comment on the impersonation. LOL!
I love me some Star Trek but didn't let myself fall into the rabbit hole only to get burned by CBS/Para. Poor FASA.
Thanks for including some of the fan-fic scenes. STC caught my eye at the 9:18 mark and is a really good one.
I'm friends with one of the actresses from my journalism days. First time I interviewed Gigi I was all nerves. 7th time we were swapping kid pics. She was also a good interview, though she had a habit of redirecting all questions back to Jim Henson's Creature Shop.
I love my FASA Star Trek and it's accompanying starship combat. Played it a ton back in the day and we had massive fleet battles. I'm hoping to start a new game up soon focused more on the RPG and hot green aliens; and a little lighter on the pewpewpew. I'm fortunate enough to have a 3d printer and found an excellent source of free STLs so I've assembled quite an armada. They're made by someone who clearly is a fan of the FASA game as well, as many of those designs are available.
There is also another Trek-like game (read that as "serial numbers filed off of the phasers") called "Starships & Spacemen" that was originally published by Fantasy Games Unlimited which used OGL style rules and is still published (on DriveThru) along with material
I was waiting for you to mention the Star Trek Tricorder/Starship Sensors Interactive Display.
My "Trek RPG" story: During a '98/'99 GenCon, Pinnacle released Matt Forbeck's Brave New World. I was on the demo team and had to learn the system on the fly so I could run the games. I loaned out my services to demo for Last Unicorn Games, who had released their ST:TNG game. Also had to learn the game on the fly. They both had identical game mechanics.
The uss Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, captained by captain Welsh. That be a captains log worth reading.
Actually playing the new one right now, and having an absolute blast with it!
Had a lot of fun with this one way back.
I do have copies of LUG's TNG game as well as Prime Directive (based on 3.5 rules).
I am very hyped for the next musing
I don't know if you can call Star Trek Adventures "recently released". It's been out for 6.5 years now putting it on par with FASA's lifespan. There's no telling how long it will last with Paramount holding the strings, but it is the RPG line that has come out with the current generation of Star Trek so it has been around for a bit.
3:31 Yeah that was Gene's weird idea apparently it wasn't till he was backseated or dead hat Obrien was suddenly an NCO and not an ensign.
Roddenberry gets points for inspiration and idealism, but practical thinking wasn't one of his skills. He figured that Star Fleet being exploratory would only have highly trained people running things and adding other ranks would only make it too militaristic ... so he saw officers much like pilots in commercial aircraft, not as a proper military.
@@rotwang2000 Even merchant ships and passenger liners have crew ratings and chiefs. Someone has to make sure everything is working while the officers get all the glory.
I found that attack wing minis work great for the new game, as you are tracking zones, not individual grids...might use some as stand ins during next Rogue trader game. Love my BFG minis, but they can be a bit fragile...sigh.
I really enjoyed the Fasa RPG. I also liked the combat game Star Fleet Battles. Thankfully it was before TNG as I think it would have cluttered up the game. The captaincy issue was a bit tricky at times. In my group the person who got the job was the most charismatic but was woefully morally compromised. As very odd situation. But that's not a problem of the game. The combat system for starship combat was great I even used magnets and metal panels to make the player panels. It worked perfectly. I also really liked the tricorder system...it was a great way to relay information in a fun way. NuTrek by the way is horrible for Trek lore and certainly too contradictory to be able to be included. I still have all my minatures and game books.
Whoooooo Delta Green!!!!
Hey Mr. Welch, this game looks pretty good. Definitely wouldn't mind giving it a try.
George Takei was my favorite on Star Trek. You showed everybody else with there shirt off, you should of showed Sulu with his shirt off and holding his sword, lol. Sounds worse than it is!
Thanks Mr. Welch you have a wonderful day!
Shirtless Sulu was one of the first images
@@Mr_Welch Damnit I missed it some how 😆. I noticed about two thirds the way through the video that everyone had their shirts off. Thanks again have a good one.
I have bin looking at the ship combat rules for my own system. There are few easer and yet as encompassing.
Unrelated: what system would you recommend for running an RPG in the Hellaverse (ie Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss). I'd considered using WoD rules, but I kinda realized that with a world built around damned souls and demons together in Hell, I'd have to jury-rig Wraith and Demon together, and then figure out how to fix the power imbalance since damned souls are way more powerful than native-born Demons in the Hellaverse.
I will be honest I haven't seen a second of those shows
When doubt, FATE
So did the FASA Trek ship rules have any relationship to the Aerotech rules from BattleTech?
No, but the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator was also a hex-based wargame. So a similar type of game.
What's your thoughts on Star Fleet Battles?
That game made Car Wars look rules light. The players here took it way too seriously
Is FASA Star Wars the best system to do a Klingon campaign?
Are you going to tackle the Dallas Roleplay game?
That would require me to find a copy.
@@Mr_Welch my Father had a copy at one point in time, but I’m not sure on its current status.
Wait, "Dallas" as in the primw time soap opera? That had an RPG?
@@rosskwolfe one of the first. According to my Dad it had a weird competitive system where each player takes a role of one of the major characters and each are given their own objectives. And it goes along with each character trying to work with or manipulate the others to complete their goals.
Huh this is good. I believe starfinder was probably inspired by the space ship rules as they use a similar system
Yes the old game by fasa is really good
I hate hearing about the ship combat rules because _the German translation I own doesn't have them for some reason_ , just some very vague suggestion to handle it with skill rolls. Very strange.
I guess they split stuff up into a dedicated ship sourcebook or something.
The Starship Tactical Combat Simulator was a separate boxed game from FASA. At least, that's how I got it back then. Great ship combat wargame.
The thing about Zefram Cochrane being from Alpha Centauri illustrates a basic difference between the worldbuilding philosophy of the FASA staff and that of all the producers and writers that have made Star Trek what it is today.
In the original episode, Zefram Cochrane was from Alpha Centauri. FASA was right, Paramount just didn't care.
I know they've retconned this to try to turn First Contact into a movie that makes a lick of sense. But Brannon Braga, who co-wrote the movie, admitted they just didn't care about established canon.
When the writers at FASA created all this material, there was already a kind of shared universe in the minds of Star Trek fans. In fact, between the Animated Series and the first movie, that was the *only* place that Star Trek existed. FASA drew on that, and on private statements by the original writers (which is where stuff like Uhura's first name and the name for Lt. Arex's planet actually came from). And most of all they relied on TOS and the animated series. FASA respected all that, but in producing an RPG they also had one limitation that Paramount never had:
The setting had to make sense. When you're running a game, the players have to be able to make rational decisions, and if they make poor decisions, there are consequences. So, the setting has to be consistent and coherent.
All screenwriters care about is creating a successful story in that moment. Very, very few care about what effect their inventions have on the setting, and Paramount doesn't care about that at all. FASA had an explanation for why different groups of Klingons look different (based on a Star Trek novel called The Final Reflection by John M. Ford). And the Ford/FASA explanation- unlike the "canon" one- is *not* utterly ridiculous. And a universe in which humans settled nearby systems with slower than light ships and some generations later, Zefram Cochrane was born on one of those colonies and invented warp drives is just more complex and interesting than he was some jerk who made a spaceship in his backyard. Everyone gives TOS crap now for being campy, but it just *looked* campy. Now Star Trek is just silly. As a setting, it's just incoherent.
The only thing i didn't like with it was that most of your *other* skills that you didnt give attention to...would be so abyssmaly low they would be albiet useless :( i had a character who was a helmsmen...the ship got boarded...my skill in hand phaser was i think like 20...which meant he missed 4 times outta 5. :(
Where should i start with Star Trek? the original? DS9? TNG?
If you want to play FASA Trek, it's original or nothing
@@Mr_Welch I mean watching. Ive never actually gotten into Trek as a show.
@tacky4237 I would start with TOS though the trek universe doesn't get started until tng
I would go with broadcast order. Original series first, then the first six movies, then Next Generation and DS9. Etc., etc....
In the FASA rules, there is a supplement for TNG called the TNG Officer's Manual, and it has stats for the Galaxy-class, the D'Deridex, and other ships, some of which are FASA designed (and they look terrible). It was kind of controversial because they had to exceed the capabilities of the best of the Original Series/Movie ships, to the point where they had the mighty Excelsior-class Battleship be reduced for some reason to make it seem less capable as a combatant than the Galaxy, which makes sense, but there were no real rules for that as yet developed, and not long after they released that book Paramount yanked the licence for FASA. The Mark III Excelsior depicted in this book is actually weaker than the Mark I and II versions. Back during the main run of FASA Star Trek, the Excelsior was the Thug of Starfleet: Nothing short of the most powerful Klingon and Romulan ships stood a chance against the Excelsior, and even then they had to get a couple of lucky hits. The Excelsior was just that bad-ass in the game. But one of the great things about FASA's starships was that they deliberately went out of their way to make lemons, like the L-13 Fat Man Klingon Battleship; this ship was terrible, but it was fun to play because it forced you to think, because a Constitution-class (not the refit) could ruin your day.
There have been people out there constantly making new ships to coincide with TNG era ships, and make some new updates. One is Brad Torgensen, who has been doing this for quite some time, and has a website: www.ststcsolda.space/ He even includes rules for the Borg, Dominion ships, and others. He's even grabbed some fan-made ships made during the FASA run such as the Indomitable-class Battleship and updated them, and has made a few of his own in there.
If you want more ships, here ya go: fasaststcs.com/
In my opinion, starting out with the TOS Movie era is probably the way to go. You could start earlier, but I think you'll have the most fun with the Movie-era ships because they look cool, they're very capable, and if you're playing Starfleet you probably won't run into too many things that could give you a problem or two. A Reliant-class (Miranda-class) is a brute, and she can dish out the pain to anyone who is stupid enough to underestimate her.
Nice reminder on the Tattoo
Whearas the SW license has had three license holders, and a technical fourth only via buyout, and crashed and burned entirely because Asmodee are idiots. (And nobody really wanting to go all in on the very RPG unfriendly disneycanon with its complete abhorrence for coherent rules on things as setting inherent as hyperspace travel.
Shirtless Kirk, ya just have to click
I can say a lot of bad things about Modiphius Star Trek game . . ., but mostly the way they mishandled it. It's a rules-light game with a medium-crunch rules set. Dune, Homeworld and Star Trek deserve better than their horrible mishandling.
Why it's so hard to make a succesful Space Opera game?!
Voyager was the last Trek series, I don't know about any Retconprises, ST:Ds, Fauxcards, or Lower Drecks.
Your lost
Actually Lower Decks is worth it--lots of refs to the classic Trek stuff and actually funny to boot. The crossover with SNW is a all time top 10 ST episode
Wanted to play this one like I've wanted to play a lot.
Hah, trusting Paramount. Trusting Star Trek in general is likely to get one screwed. Just look how money grubbing Star Trek Online is.
Great irony that Star Trek, a setting where money has no value, is owned by one of the greediest companies on the planet.
Regarding modern Trek shows, I like the ship designs and the pewpew at least. Saru was the best part of Discovery.
Aside from that, Modern Trek is..... Just watch Prodigy. At least that one is fun. And maybe Lower Decks..
I honestly think the Kurtzman haters are nearly as annoying as Disney haters. They seem bound and determined to make everyone who enjoys anything they dislike as miserable as possible.
God forbid you don't like something. Especially when it's a lesser version of what came before and the creators are openly hostile. Just consume more product.
@@DoctorEviloply Never said you had to like everything. Is it really necessary to go into comments sections full of fans and go on long rants about why their taste in media sucks? That's what annoys me.
I've seriously had a Kurtzman hater spend an entire day ranting at me about why the Spore Drive is silly. I KNOW IT'S SILLY! I DON'T CARE!
Also, I think Enterprise sucks in ways Discovery never dreamed of, but I'm glad Enterprise fans enjoy it.
Well, to be fair, Kurtzman didn't do Star Trek any favors. This is what you get when you have someone who doesn't love the material and doesn't understand it run a franchise. Whatever he's making it isn't Star Trek, and the disaster that was STD even forced him to do something. Look how he handled Picard; whoever that is, that's not Jean-Luc Picard. It took him two seasons to put someone in there to make Season 3 that loved TNG to give the fans of TNG what they've been after all this time: We wanted to see the crew back together, and they did it with the Enterprise-D at the end. That's the only outing I liked from them, and even then it has issues. I hated the camera-work on that show, like on every show they've done (except Lower Decks, of course). They can't just keep the camera still for one damn shot! Doing that annoys me to no end, because it's like he's distracting you from all the flaws. Don't get me started on the flagrant continuity violations, and the bad plots all over the place.
The only good show coming out of Kurtzman's Trek is Lower Decks, but that's not really Star Trek either: That's Rick and Morty.
If we're going to lambaste Disney for what they did to Star Wars, what makes you think anyone would give Kurtzman any passes here? Bad writing, bad characters, and poor execution of pretty much everything does not do this IP any favors here.
Star Trek Online has done more to give fans a Star Trek experience they've been craving, and anyone who's ever played that game knows how bat-shit crazy it is (fighting the Borg, the Elachi, the Iconians, and the Tzenkethi, not to mention a Mirror Universe of V'Ger with Emperor Wesley Crusher merged with it, among other things).
@@Mikethemerciless11 Thank you for the fine example of exactly what I was talking about!
Also, have you watched Lower Decks beyond the first few episodes? The tone shifts quite dramatically.
@@SerpenThrope And you can't stand it if what you like sucks. It's okay to like bad stuff, so long as you admit it's bad. I love Ice Pirates and Battle Beyond the Stars, but I'll gladly go over why they're bad movies.
Yes, I have watched Rick and Morty Trek, and it's still Rick and Morty Trek. It's not Star Trek. To be fair, it isn't trying to be, but none of what Kurtzman or Abrams have done IS Star Trek.
Consider ANY of the Starfleet characters. ALL of them are terrible. None of them are likeable, and all of them have no business being officers of anything short of a carnival. They are not professionals, they are whiny, angsty stooges, and they're only there to fill a diversity quota. None of them are credible both as people or as competent officers. Most especially that glorious goddess Mary Sue, Michael Burnham!
If you like it, fine. But, it sucks. Does that make you a bad person? Maybe.
First
No. Just... no.
So they missed all those times some guy was addressed by Kirk as crewman? Or you know Chief Kyle?