Boldly going where we maybe shouldn't

Good gravy, it's been forever since I made a blog post about gaming.

So, I'm currently playing in a Star Trek RPG using the Last Unicorn Games iteration (my friend Adam's favorite).  I'm not sure if the game has hit its stride yet, mostly because there are a whole slew of pitfalls, and we seem to be stumbling into a lot of them.



  • Complex narratives and sporadic attendance.  Sometimes OSR people have the right idea when it comes to dungeon crawling campaigns.  A complicated multi-session storyline is a bear to maintain when different people show up for each session.  I missed a big one and hadn't a clue what was going on the last time we played.
  • Psionics.  I seem to remember there being a TNG episode about the ethical murkiness of someone using a Betazed as an interrogator, but I could be wrong.  We have two Betazed PC's--mine and someone else's, and it is hard not to ask the GM if the NPC is lying or not every time we talk to someone.  I've yet to play an RPG where telepathy didn't ruin everything.
  • Superpseudoscience.  I will confess to this pitfall myself.  I nearly wrecked most of the plot by suggesting a ridiculous pseudoscience option.  We are trying to help negotiate a deal with a planetary authority to get dilithium for the Federation.  It wasn't going well, and I posed the question of whether a Galaxy-class starship could, using the ST:TNG-level technology, made the planet's supply of dilithium worthless.  The panicked look on the GM's face told me a lot.
In the meantime, I need to get serious about my own game, which mostly involves me picking something and making a commitment to it, which is always difficult for me.  I'm always looking for that perfect game that will suit me and my legion of players, be easy to learn but complex enough to keep intelligence people engaged, with just the right level of crunch and flexibility.  

Which is ridiculous, but it keeps me from making the decision between options like Dungeons & Dragons, Blood and Treasure, and Shadow of the Demon Lord, all of which offer essentially the same genre using different rules.

Comments

  1. I came to the conclusion long ago that epic, multi-part plots played out over a number of sessions is not the best way to run Star Trek.

    Much like the most popular of the Star Trek TV series, episodic, done-in-one adventures, with occasional plot threads carrying over, is the best format for Star Trek gaming in my opinion. There is a reason the original series, and TNG worked so much better than Enterprise, with it's numerous unsatisfactory story arcs. DS9 is the exception, yet beyond being a good show, it wasn't as commercially successful as many of the others.

    Orville works well for this same reason. Like an RPG, the characters are the constants, and they develop over time, but the episodes do not directly relate to each other beyond the ship and its crew.

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  2. Can you elaborate on the Superpseudoscience issue? I'm not sure I get the problem.

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